Edutheria

A child is a potential man. Man is characterized by the fact that he acts and that he has morality. To act is to behave with purpose: using reason to willfully choose between alternative means toward ends. Morality is a set of feelings which constrain action. Newborn infants do not act; their behaviors are involuntary responses to internal urges and external stimuli. And since they do not act, they cannot have moral constraints on action. The maturation of the soul is the gradual actualization of the child’s potential to be a man: that is, the gradual development of purpose, will, reason, and morality. In the later stages of childhood, the child has imperfect purpose (his ends will tend to be capricious), imperfect will (he will tend to be diverted from his ends by his innate urges), imperfect reason (he will tend to choose less than optimal, or even ineffective means to his ends), and imperfect morality (his urges will tend to override his moral feelings). Manhood is more of a continuum than a discrete state. The more developed is one’s purpose, will, reason, and morality, the more one is a man. Learning is the part of maturation which is fostered by sensory input and the processing of sensory input. Parenting is the involvement of others in the process of general maturation. Education is the involvement of others in the process of learning. The state tries to parent and educate the children of its citizens. It does so for its own ends. Therefore, it tries to make its own ends the ends of the child, and tries to inculcate a false morality conducive to its own ends. The state is inherently incompetent and indolent, so it does an ineffective job at fostering the faculties of will and reason in the child. The best educators of a child are his biological parents or those who have wholly taken on the responsibilities of parenthood. Such parents have an overwhelming Darwinian imperative to foster the success of the child for ITS OWN sake. The next best educators of a child are professional educators who, in addition to having certain fields of expertise, have an overwhelming market imperative to satisfy the parents as customers.

An essential characteristic of man is that he acts. Action is purposeful behavior, that is the behavior of rationally utilizing means for an ends. We call means that have material embodiment “technology.” We call means that do not have material embodiment “techniques”. Mankind has always been a rational animal, therefore he has always used technology and/or techniques.

When a bee constructs a beehive, the method of construction is not a technique. Nor is the beehive itself technology. This is because the bee itself does not “act”, strictly speaking. It exhibits behavior, but the “purpose” in the behavior is that of its genes, and not of its mind. Only mental purpose (rationality) makes a behavior an action. Most animal behavior is irrational.

Much human behavior is irrational too. When a human unthinkingly blinks, he does not “act”. The behavior has purpose (to clear out particles), but the purpose is that of his genes, not of his mind. Moderns tend to call what we consider ill-decided action “irrational”. For example, we often would call rain dances irrational. This is not so. Rain dances (as strange as it is to say) are rational. They are behavior with mental purpose. The rain dancer is utilizing means (the dance) for an end (rain). Of course it erroneous rationality, but it is rationality nonetheless.

Rational animals are always choosing between means to their various ends: “Do I fight, or do I run?”. The means of fighting and and the means of running are themselves mostly instinctual. But the choice between the two is rational. Rational animals are often choosing between means/techniques which they already know. But some rational animals can also invent new means/techniques.

For example, chimpanzees are known to strip branches of their leaves, and lower them into logs to harvest termites. They do not instinctively know how to do this. Therefore, some chimpanzee long ago must have figured it out, and other chimpanzees learned from observing him. That means the behavior is mentally purposive, and the stripping of the leaves qualifies as technique, and the stripped stick itself qualifies as technology.

While the non-rational behavior of instinct is passed on through heredity, technique is passed on through learning. Though it may dismay educationalists to hear this, learning doesn’t necessitate teaching. It only necessitates observation and reason. The learning chimpanzee sees (observation) the inventive chimpanzee utilize his new technique, and through his rationality becomes aware that the new technique could be a means to his end of eating termites.

Thus throughout the history of rationality in animals, technique was passed from one individual to another, and from one generation to the next, solely through observation until the development of spoken language. Spoken language enables the human animal to express his own ratiocinations to other humans using only sounds. This widened the range of techniques which could be passed on. Through speech, humans could pass on techniques such as “how to get a wife”, which they couldn’t pass on through observation. Through speech, techniques could be passed across great distances, especially in the memorable form of song (as in the agricultural poetry of Hesiod).

The development of the written language widened the possibilities yet further for the propagation of techniques. It made the verbal transmission of techniques more exact and less prone to loss. Writing also enabled people to invent techniques which required the use of arithmetic and geometry. In ancient Phoenicia, merchants used written arithmetic to improve their business practices. In ancient Mesopotamia, priest-bureaucrats used written algebra to improve their grain management techniques. And in ancient Egypt, priest-bureaucrats used written geometry to improve their land-surveying techniques.

Technique is a sub-class of means, and it is also a sub-class of knowledge. All new knowledge is attained in one of the following ways:

1. Instinct: Instinctive knowledge is knowledge that arises within the mind without any observation or ratiocination.
2. Authority: Belief in accounts told by other humans
3. Observation or Empirical Knowledge: Belief in sensory impressions
4. Induction: Finding patterns in facts and anticipating that that pattern will continue
5. Deduction: Finding necessary implications of certain facts

Techniques, by definition, are not instinctive (see above). Techniques also cannot be considered solely observational knowledge. Thinking, “That chimpanzee is getting termites with that stick” is observational knowledge. But thinking, “Perhaps I could get termites with a similar stick as well” is induction. Thinking, “When I planted seed this time last year I got a huge harvest” is observational knowledge. Thinking, “Perhaps if I do so again, I will get another big harvest” is induction.

What is the point of all this formal learning we expect schoolchildren to do: the endless assignments and tests?

One stock answer to this question is that it teaches them how to get things done. That would obviously be learned better in the real world than in school.

The somewhat more plausible answer generally given is that schools are “teaching students how to learn and how to think.” Those skills are also better learned in the real world.

The only thing that formal schooling is good for is learning an academic topic itself. But why must every student learn Algebra through Calculus? Why must every student learn how to deconstruct Catcher in the Rye? If a student finds in learning basic math that he would be interested in pursuing it further, then it would make sense for that student to learn higher math in order to possibly use it in his career. The same goes for literary studies. But this would not be the case for everybody.

Intellectuals who consider educational goals are too enamored with their own interests. And those interests generally do not include producing something the market, when left to itself, highly values. (That’s why they’re always lobbying for policies which create artificial markets for their services.) So educationalists are none too interested in business savvy. But business skill and knowledge are the most productive sets of skills and knowledge in the world. The most important information are (as Friedrich Hayek showed) profit-loss facts on the ground that inform the billions of price decisions that make an economy maximally prosperous. So real-world outside-of-school education is not only much better for a young person’s character; it makes the young person smarter in ways that are actually beneficial to the student (and to others in society).

Rich, rewarding, prosperous lives need not (and should not) start in one’s mid-20s. Education and productivity should be intertwined and mutually reinforcing strands that run throughout a person’s entire life. They should not be compartmentalized the way they are now.

We as a society have abdicated parenthood. We have handed parenthood over to the state. The prime responsibility of raising children to become decent, humane, and successful adults has been given over to state schools.

Kids’ lives are dominated by school. They spend about 6 hours a day at school, and then about 1 hour on homework. The parent’s daily role has been relegated to hectoring their child into meeting the demands of the school: to “wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and brush your teeth so you can get to school on time“; and to “get all your homework done, and study for that test, so you can get good grades at school.” The only daily meaningful interaction between parent and child is relegated to dinner: a tiny sliver of time in the day in which parents are enjoined to ask their kids, “How was your day at school.”

This grip that the state has over the lives of kids not only strangles the parent-child relationship, it heavily proscribes nearly any other non-school-related fruitful relationship the child can have. The state, through laws and the overwhelming demands of the school, does not allow the child to work or to freely pursue extra-curricular passions.

And what is the effect on our children of the state’s utter domination over their lives? In short, in makes our children improvident, shallow, incurious, and often immoral.

And it’s no wonder. Instead of the vibrant, multi-layered, rich and loving relationships that a child would have if he were enmeshed in the world of his parents, relatives, friends-of-family, and business-parters-of-family, the child is stuck in the pernicious modern-day relationship of schoolteacher-and-student. This relationship is characterized by indolence, apathy, and impotence. The indolence and apathy comes from the fact that teachers tend to have the mentality of the bureaucratic sinecure-holder. They don’t have the overwhelming Darwinian drive to improve the lot of their students that family members naturally have. And, in their padded and privileged role, neither do they have any entrepreneurial or competitive drive to maximally satisfy their customers. The impotence comes from the very format of the formal school. For the bulk of every day, each child gets 1/20th - 1/30th of the attention of one adult. No matter how “innovatively” you reform it, such a format is pure pedagogical poverty. And the rest of the day (recess, after-school hanging out, etc) is a “Lord of the Flies”-type scene of unguided, poorly-raised children reinforcing the worst aspects of each other’s character.

Life in such a dysfunctional camp is an unnatural life of no meaningful consequences. The real-world realm of helping out parents, friends of parents, and other employers with work and home affairs gives a child a true sense of accomplishment (”look at how awesome this room looks now”; “alright, son, business is booming!”) and a true sense of consequences (”Sorry, kid, if you don’t do the work, I can’t keep you on”). The artificial, unnatural realm of the school only has faux-accomplishments and faux-consequences. And kids (especially as they get older) see right through them. That is why they become apathetic about accomplishment and responsibilities, and completely shallow regarding the real world, caring only for friends and play.

In his highly important monograph Education: Free and Compulsory, Murray Rothbard tells the history of how (and why) the state progressively weaned us off parenthood: through compulsory schooling laws and an intra-school movement toward “educating the whole child”. As should be entirely manifest to anyone with a shred of skepticism regarding pro-state-schooling propaganda and an open eye to local and world news, the state has made for a wretched parent. It is time we take our children back.

I believe all children who could possibly be home schooled should be home schooled. Any literate parent, by using books, workbooks, the internet, software, and their community can do an excellent job teaching their kids literacy skills and basic numeracy. And through their love, and the diligence, thoughtfulness and attention engendered by that love, they can instill good character in their children FAR better than schools can.

What about going beyond literacy, numeracy, and character? Home schooled children with a rich, communicative relationship with their parents will be much more likely to become thoughtful and curious. Such children will, with some encouragement, but largely on their own, apply their literacy and numeracy to pursuing other topics that interest them: literature, history, science, etc. But self-teaching with non-basic subjects can only go so far. You can’t ask a book questions. And parents can’t suggest readings in fields outside of their knowledge. Therefore it would make sense for parents to hire tutors to guide children in their non-basic studies. Tutors for home schooled children ought to be dramatically different from the typical tutor. The object of a tutor of a formally schooled child is to help them succeed in the paradigm of tests, completion of formal “levels” of study, and grades. The object of a tutor of a home schooled child should be to help the child become an insightful and enthusiastic scholar in the given subject. To do that, the tutor must be an insightful and enthusiastic scholar himself.

There was once a movement of professional tutors who were exactly that. They were called the sophists, and they flourished in Greece in the 5th century BC. Though slandered by the aristocratic Plato, who despised anyone who offered services for payment, the sophists were brilliant educators AND scholars. It was the sophist Protagoras who invented the “Socratic” method of teaching by questioning. And sophists made brilliant and original contributions in metaphysics, anthropology, ethics, and political theory.

In my life as a scholar and teacher, I try to live up to the example of the sophists. I am constantly pursuing my own studies in epistemology, logic, moral philosophy, political philosophy, history, economics, math, science, and literature (the ongoing fruits of which can be found on my blogs No Fed No War; The Sword and the Lie, and The Sensible Synthesis). And I funnel that enthusiasm for the world of ideas into my teaching.

In our society, the conjunction of teaching and scholarship is generally only found in the college level with professors; and the average public school teacher is no more erudite than any other kind of worker. We need more scholar-teachers to inspire the kind of free-thinking, bright kids that home schooling can produce. We need more sophists.

I recently taught a workshop about brains for a group of 24 5th graders. First I wrote on the board, “What does the brain do?” The students dutifully enumerated the standard list: controls your movements, thinks, feels emotion, controls your heartbeat, controls your body temperature; obviously they’d been studying this. Then I wrote on the board, “How do you know that?”

An awkward silence followed.

Finally a student hesitantly ventured, “Because school told us.”

“What if school is wrong?,” I asked. “Can school ever be wrong?”

I heard an indistinct rumble of “yeah” and “I guess.”

One student tried to resolve her cognitive dissonance by saying that we know because scientists have studied it.

I asked, “What if the scientists are wrong? Let me tell you a secret: scientists have been wrong about tons of stuff throughout the years. They were proved wrong by later scientists. How do you know that today’s scientists aren’t wrong about this? How can YOU know, from your own thinking and your own experience, that the brain does all these things: think, feel, move the body?”

“There was a smart guy a long time ago named Hippocrates who believed, like today’s scientists do, that thinking and emotion come from the brain. But there was another smart guy named Aristotle who said, ‘you know what, I believe thinking and emotion comes from the heart. What does the brain do: it sits there! It never budges an inch! How can all these amazing abilities come from something that doesn’t do anything? The heart is where all the action is: it’s constantly beating, boom-boom, boom-boom. That’s where you’re going to get exciting stuff like thoughts and feelings!’ So how do YOU know Aristotle is wrong, and that school and today’s scientists and Hippocrates are right?”

That’s when the students, one by one, stopped reciting, and started thinking. One student said that when he concentrates on his thinking, it feels like it’s happening in his head, and not in his chest. Another noted that when a person’s brain is damaged, their thinking and emotions are often changed. A third offered an argument-for-argument’s sake for Aristotle’s side saying that the heart is indeed involved in movement. A fourth countered with the example of paralysis from brain injury as proof that the brain is key to movement. For the rest of the intro, the students contributed evidence and arguments instead of memorized facts: except, that is, whenever their teacher interjected. Although she was basically pleased with the class, throughout the session I could tell she was perturbed by my approach. And every time she chimed in, she conducted little call-and-response exercises, pressing them to vocalize the various lobes and bulbs they had memorized, warning them, “this will important later in school!” She was my customer, so I could only sigh inside.

The role of teachers is to encourage students to reason for themselves and to question pedagogic authority. Memorizing facts may help children “perform” according the meaningless standards of formal schooling, but it will not make them true students of the world around and inside them.

Formal schooling, especially as dominated by the state, has served to cripple the intellectual lives of every generation since its inception.

In schools, children are herded and harrangued into completing academic chores.  These chores are usually utterly mindless, pointless, forgettable, boring, harrowing, or some combination of the above.  Some students never get the hang of it.  Some put their heads down and plow through it, because they know how important it is to their future.  Some have been conditioned so well by their Pavlov-like teachers that they come to enjoy the work for the sake of the expected reward.  And a few of them manage to find interest in the world of thoughtfulness despite all the schools do.  The kids in the last group (and a few in the second-to-last) end up as thoughtful adults.  A smaller subset of them become true philosophers, in the broadest sense of the term, with an insatiable curiosity and a lust for the truth.  But the majority of people end up as one in the burgeoning mass of the shallow and the frivolous.  Even those who manage to succeed in school, college, and even graduate school generally end up never reading a book from cover-to-cover again: let alone explore a school of thought, question long-held beliefes, or debate another person intelligently about politics, religion, or ethics.

That is why on the television show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”, the answer to the show’s fundamental, eponymous question is so often, “No.”  Many people peak intellectually in the fifth grade, or soon thereafter.  They cram their brain with as many facts and algorithms as they need to in order to succeed while in school, but then intellectually check out for the rest of their lives.

From Psychology Today (emphases mine):

In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring “children” well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isnt an adult until age 26. The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways. Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives. The factory system doesnt work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

From News from the Front:

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? Were talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record thats largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

This is only the most extreme kind of example of the pernicious effects of indoctrination in education:

SAIMA KHAN wants to die a martyr. Life is transient, she told her father in a telephone call last week, and the real glory is to sacrifice it for Allah. Her statement would be alarming at any age, but Saima is only 10.