Edumacation

For the moment, I'm making a little cash babysitting for some friends. Their eldest just turned three, and they've got him going to a preschool. But school days are coming, and they're wondering ... what to do?

Meanwhile, some other friends of mine, who home-school according to what is billed as a "classical" education, suddenly became concerned when the stumbled upon this article on a site which advertises a really truly purely "classical" education. It blasts home-school curricula that are based on an article Dorothy Sayers wrote sometime in the last millennium.

I wasn't aware of Sayers' influence on home-schooling curricula, or on the idea of "classical" education generally. I suspect that she would have been more exacting had she been writing an actual curriculum, rather than an op-ed article. At the very least, it's clear that her critic has not learned the art of humor.

Anyway, the value of a "classical" education is not in its age or pedigree, but in its ability to teach the art of thinking clearly. Better, an education should form a child to use his/her gifts and skills as an adult. Doesn't matter if you use a brand spanking new method or the same method that frustrated Socrates -- the goal is for the child to learn. What the "classical" method has to recommend it is simply that it has been tested through time. But it suffers from the drawback of not actually being a "method."

See, "method" itself is a recent concept, being invented in the so-called Enlightenment and associated with the moniker "scientific" in order to denigrate the forms and arts of medieval and ancient learning. Medievals and ancients didn't have a "method of education." They had a way of life, and their kids grew up into that way of life and learned what they needed to fit in there. And Rome had a different way of life (and therefore what we'd call "pedagogy" or "method of education") than Athens did, and different again from what Jerusalem had, and from Beijing, etc.

My take on the whole dilemma is that the biggest problem with education today is that we've focused so much on "method" that we've forgotten the two most important parts of education: the person who is learning, and the world that person is learning about. This is one big benefit of home-schooling, I think: it pays a great deal of attention to the individual student and to his/her particular gifts and needs. It also has the potential to introduce the student to the actual world that he/she will be living and working and making a life in as an adult.

I don't want to bash "method" altogether, or basic curriculum or pedagogy. I simply want to put it in its proper place: at the service of the actual student, not as a mold to fit students into whether they fit nicely or not. No unique individual fits any mold very well, and molds (or models) only really work to give general outlines or ideals to aim for. They aren't suited to actual concrete situations.

Okay, I'm off the soapbox ... for now.