Why educate at all?
Is our goal to create the most compliant adults or should we aim for something a little more rewarding?
The recent and surprising news that Ontario would update its curriculum for kindergarten so as to bring more academic rigour and discipline to the lives of four-year-olds is not just wrong from a pedagogical point of view, it’s also stupid from the point of view of trying to turn little kids into well-adjusted, productive and healthy adults.
The question you have to ask yourself is: Why do we bother educating those kids at all? Humans are wired for learning, and they did so before the establishment of state-run universal school systems. Ah, yes. But they did so unevenly; some people with money and connections got a fantastic education while most people only learned enough to survive. Ish.
A public education system ensures everyone at least has a certain level of education. We can disagree on what should be included, and that’s fine. We’re all broadly in agreement about what should be at the core; literacy, math (I have yet to delight in the relevance of algebra to my everyday life but whatever), enough civics to vote more or less intelligently, some history and basic science.
How to be an obedient, unquestioning worker and a great consumer is not on most people’s list, yet that is what, in North America, most school systems emphasize. The incomparable Seth Godin makes a powerful case, here, of how school is geared towards teaching compliance.
Removing “play-based” learning in favour of “academic rigour” for every kid starting at age four, like the Ontario government is doing, will not do very much to encourage children to be imaginative and independent-minded. But it will do wonders to create adults who are easier to manage.
If that’s what you send your kids to school for, then I guess you’re happy.
“Their heads are so flattened between boards of Army discipline,” Florence Nightingale once marveled as she battled layers of bureaucracy, “that they remain children all their lives.”
Me, I prefer to encourage my kids to learn how to think, not what to think. I chose to homeschool them for that reason. It was a lot of work— 12 of what should have been my best professional years. But now I have teens who think for themselves and know how to find information and can ask critical questions about the quality of said information. They spot bullshit from a nautical mile, too.
It was the most precious gift I could give them. Now they’re in school and getting degrees and credentials they believe will help them be happy and successful in their own lives. They are still learning and practicing those critical thinking skills every day.
Not everyone can do what I did, but we can all campaign for an education system that serves the purpose of helping us raise humans who are not just literate but imaginative, creative, knowledgeable, competent and — ideally — pleasant to be around and enjoy lively conversations with. Below is one slightly dusty and old-fashioned model that I used when I was developing my own curriculum for my three kids. I’m not saying it needs to be adopted as-is, but… well, there’s a lot to be said for an education system that teaches kids how to learn, how to think and how to express themselves with a minimum of elegance and style (also Latin), instead of just ramming disconnected facts and figures in their heads as they fight both boredom and bad posture on hard chairs.
There are different ways of accomplishing this goal, and I’m not an expert on those. I only know what worked with my own kids. But I do know this: Holding kids’ interest, keeping them engaged, making them feel like they matter and that how they prefer to learn is valid, hell, playing with them in order to learn memorable lessons — that’s all part of it and that leading with rigour over pleasure is the exact wrong thing to do.
Learning should feel good.
The last part of this post is for the hard-core classicists among you. Proceed at your own risks…
In 1947 the great Dorothy Sayers wrote an unforgettable essay on the “lost tools of learning” in which she discussed, at length, the difference between how to learn (what she referred to as the “Trivium” of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric), which students need to master before various subjects like history or science or gender or sociology. The excerpt below is what she thought middle schoolers should master. Compare and contrast with your own experience…
The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to "subjects" at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of language—a language, and hence of language itself—what it was, how it was put together and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language: how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument (his own arguments and other people’s). Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language; how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively. At this point, any tendency to express himself windily or to use his eloquence so as to make the worse appear the better reason would, no doubt, be restrained by his previous teaching in Dialectic. If not, his teacher and his fellow-pupils, trained along the same lines, would be quick to point out where he was wrong; for it was they whom he had to seek to persuade. At the end of his course, he was required to compose a thesis upon some theme set by his masters or chosen by himself, and afterwards to defend his thesis against the criticism of the faculty. By this time he would have learned—or woe betide him—not merely to write an essay on paper, but to speak audibly and intelligibly from a platform, and to use his wits quickly when heckled.
If you like this excerpt, you’ll love the entire piece, including her characterization of heckling that’s not at all what we’re used to these days. Oh, and since you made it this far, if you have kids in primary grades and want to give them the gift of understanding their world and its history without boring them, I heartily recommend Susan Wise Bauer’s four-volume “Story of the World” series.