Over at ScribbleBibble, Abecedarius choses his words well. He said:
As I walked out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the school this afternoon, the warm southern breeze blew a scent from the south that was instantly recognizable.
S.E. Hinton said in her "Outsiders":
When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house
And other than a point of departure (it was too good to resist) I want to wipe Mr. Rex clear from this whole discussion. These are my views, and as his occupation is "education of youngsters" I don't want to criticize his chosen profession and more importantly the way he goes about it, but rather the way that educators as a stereotypical group go about it. I'm going to speak of educators as homogeneous individuals but everybody has that favorite English teacher, or horrible science teacher that makes the stereotype a stereotype.
With these disclaimers in place (I feel as if I need to end with my approval of this message) I'll take my first jabs. American education seems a lot like a movie. Only a movie with a test at the end of it. The dark movie theater provides a great piece of art, but as time passes unless the movie is re-watched frequently, the viewer is left with a vague plot line, not a great piece of art. The education system of today is no different. When your average kid studies trigonometry he is going to learn the formulas by making flashcards, remembering it all for the test and in a year they couldn't recall it. I don't think we can blame the student for this. The cram and flush mentality is almost forced on a student. They learn those trig formulas in a 2 week long unit, and don't see them again for another year. Their education isn't nailing them into their brains. But shouldn't the student take charge of his education! Absolutly! But how can they? New material is flooded over them. It's only trig for 2 weeks and then it's conic sections. Not to mention that we expect students to excel in reading, righting and rhythmatic!
The next generation isn't going to be able to tell you who the founding fathers were and what they were about but they will have a vague understanding of what they did. They won't remember geometry or Euclid, but they might keep some of the logic skills they gained. They won't know the facts, just the outline. Which is unfortunate. In essence the education system gives individuals great ideas but allows them to forget the facts that prove to those ideas. Kids are sitting in a movie theater, grabbing the general premise of the plot, but forgetting all the intricacies that make a character, or the lighting that makes the scene, and for that I'm deeply troubled. While I'm never a fan of presenting a problem without a solution I need to sleep otherwise I might fall asleep for the movie entirely.
It'd be difficult to make a convincing case that money is at the root of any schooling woes we are experiencing. There is a philosophical problem with the education system. Teachers can denounce the cram and forget mentality all they want, but until they allow the student the ability to do otherwise their exhortations are shallow to say the least. And lest it be thought that this philosophical problem only concerns students remember that students cease to attend school and begin to attend office buildings and voting booths.
6 comments:
I think one of the big problems teachers have to face is WHAT to teach. There are endless amounts of things to learn and we have to pick and choose the MOST important things since it is impossible to teach it all.
Being a teacher (a student teacher I guess) myself this is a really hard problem to solve. the cram and forget comes with wanting to teach too much content. The inch deep and a mile wide kind of learning. But what do you drop? Do you want kids to know who the founding fathers were and what they did or do you want them to discuss issues that are going on today? Both are valid and important but it's really hard to smoosh everything together. People have tried to remedy this by creating standards (state/federal) for what kids should learn and know. Well, it doesn't solve the problem- what if you don't like the standards? Do we care about fact recitation or do we care about deep, crititcal thinking? I dunno- I have so much to say about education- but I also feel like it's so simple.
I think the educational system is meant to be a base; you must take responsibility if there is something you wish to pursue. You can't learn it all in school--you have to be motivated enough to do something. After all, each subject is like an art form; it mirrors an aspect of life. If you want to be an impressionist, you can't just learn about the impressionists in school. You have to go practice impressionism, look at good and bad impressionism, and develop an appreciation. Education allows you to do that; e duco = 'lead away from', or 'lead out of'. The most important job for a teacher is to promote the pursuit of a certain subject if a student becomes interested in it, because that's what school is all about. So teachers should teach subjects with a depth that allows the students to see into that subject and give an idea of the subject, but should also cover a wide range of subjects.
The problem then becomes- how do I study by myself when I have so much else to study? I'm going to school for music right now but can only practice my instrument an hour a day. I have a secondary instrument also but hardly every get to practice it. How can I specialize in something that I care about in a reasonable amount of time? It seems one must study for years after one is out of primary, secondary, and undergraduate school to really "specialize" in something. I couldn't imagine trying to learn an instrument while still in highschool- let alone study a language or literature on my own without letting the rest of my studies suffer. The problem is we want to do it all and we can't. Earth is not our home! I guess I'm a little bit of a cynic about this subject. Education DOES lead us out of darkness and thats why the best education helps a person to see THE TRUTH.
As much as I hate it I think you struck on the only real solution: Earth is not our home. I never thought of the pursuit of knowledge as a worldly desire, but maybe that is one of the truly deceptive tools of the devil. The sins most basic to human nature are the sins that are most difficult to identify. The desire to know on some level is extremely basic: you'd be hard pressed to say that it was not necessary for life. Of course drawing the lines between laziness in learning and a gluttonous type of learning would be hard to draw. God is our guide.
can that be? firstly, I never thought of gluttony as applying to anything other than food, which is stupid, I realize now. But isn't knowledge a direct pathway to God because our purpose is to be happy, and to be truly happy is to achieve the greatest good possible, and knowledge gives us the ability to look upwards, beyond where we are at, for the greatest good we can attain? I understand that the desire to learn everything is gluttonous, but is the desire to know as much as you can understand wrong? or are the two synonymous?
The desire to know everything would be hubristic: your plainly not capable of it. The desire to know as much as you can know is what were after here. The vice of curiosity is at work here. Gossip leads to a sort of knowledge which we identify as wrong. So then what you distinguish between is what you are meant to know, and what you are not meant to know. But then how do you draw that line?
And that still doesn't really solve the problem of being attached to this world through a desire for knowledge, because you can spend a whole life time learning everything you are meant to know.
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