Edutheria

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The factory system doesnt work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date.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.

Schools these days are designed to make obedient, task-oriented company men who do what they’re supposed to. The quick-changing economy demands entrepreneurs: people who follow their dreams and start new things.

More along these lines from Gary North:

Higher education
serves the business world as a screening system. They can hire people
knowing that these people have displayed these valuable traits:
(1) an unwillingness to assess the long-term alternative economic
returns from their use of time; (2) their psychological ability
to spend many hours a week listening to economically useless lectures;
(3) their willingness to leap through a series of bureaucratic hoops
that have no justification other than maintaining the existing bureaucracy’s
authority. These are the traits desired by businesses in a world
where the government regulates the marketplace. They are the traits
of bureaucrats. This is the world aimed at by government regulators.
It is a world remade in their image.

Wacked Econ asks the intriguing question:

Given most families cannot afford to send their children first to a $30,000 a year high school and then to a $30,000 a year college… which one should they choose?

Most people lucky enough to have the choice choose the latter. But when even public schools in posh areas underperform so egregiously, might it not be better to make a scholar of your son or daughter at an early age with prep school? Such students, it would seem, would be more likely to qualify for scholarships. More importantly, they would have a lifelong love of learning which provides innumerable internal benefits to the soul of a person.

More evidence that state schooling and official national standards eventually lead to lower standards: A physics teacher begs for his
subject back.

The effects of too-easy curriculum on bright kids, from Scientific Americans:

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

My writing for my various blogs will follow various study projects I will be pursuing.

Western Letters from Homer
I will study the archaic poets Homer and Hesiod, the great Greek dramatists (Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides), the early historians (Herodotus, Xenophon and Thucydides), and continue on to Hellenistic, Roman, medieval, early modern, and recent authors.

These readings will inform posts on The Sword and the Lie.

Western Philosophy from Plato
I will study western philosophy, starting with the Greeks. I will read all of Plato’s major works, starting with Ion. Then I’ll work through Aristotle, and then the “pre-Socratics” through references within the works Plato and Aristotle, and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies. I’ll then study Hellenistic philosophy via the works of Cicero and others.

These readings will inform posts on Sensible Synthesis, insofar as they discuss epistemology and ethics, and Starving Edge, insofar as they discuss humanitarian ethics.

Economics from the physiocrats
I will study economics, starting with the 18th century French proto-economists the physiocrats (as well as their mercantalist opponents like Jean Babtiste Colbert.) I’ll then move on to Adam Smith and the classical economics he founded, as well as its opponents.

This line of study will support posts in Starving Edge and The Sword and the Lie.

Mathematics from properties of equality
For Delphi, the blog for my education company The Sopheum (and to some degree for Sensible Synthesis), I shall discuss and explore mathematics from its most basic elements.

Antiquity from Sumer
From the first glimmers of history in Sumer, I shall explore the history of the state and religion (for The Sword and the Lie and of education (for Edutheria).

Educational Philosophy from Plato
For Delphi and Edutheria, I shall reflect on pedagogy and education systems.

And finally…
History of Science from Copernicus (for Delphi and Sensible Synthesis).

History of Technology from hand axes (for Delphi).

The most important lesson for young people shoud be to make their own lessons. The only dogma that should be stomached in education is to question all dogmas. The most tempting dogma a person will face in her life will be that of salvation through religion. Most people are completely unarmed in the face of such a powerful lie, because they are not allowed to much discuss religion in their state-run schools for fear of a political backlash. Contrary to the beliefs of those who think state schooling is the only way to promote and protect secularism, the only way students can get the intellectual training they need to stay intellectually honest in the face of heavenly promises is through private schooling, like that on offer at the budding ‘Sunday schools for atheists’ covered recently by Time Magazine. Here’s a sample of the kind of open, frank discussion of faith and beliefs that you’ll never find in a state-run school:

Down the hall in the kitchen, older kids engaged in a Socratic conversation with class leader Bishop about the role persuasion plays in decision-making. He tried to get them to see that people who are coerced into renouncing their beliefs might not actually change their minds but could be acting out of self-preservation–an important lesson for young atheists who may feel pressure to say they believe in God.

(Cross-posted at The Sword and the Lie.)

What makes the present-day negligence of Greco-Roman classics in education particularly sad is how fun it can be to young people. The natural starting point to understanding the classical world is by reading Homer. And Homer, if explained properly, can be like comedy-filled super-hero stories. Right now, I’m working through the Iliad with 4 different students: not a “kid-friendly” paraphrase of the epic, but the epic itself in all its glory. When others hear of my program, they either think it must either be ridiculously ambitious or terribly boring. But if they were to walk in on one of the sessions, they would find 11 and 12 year olds laughing riotously at a 2,600 year-old narrative. I read the text aloud, while the students follow along with their own copies of the same edition. I’m good with voices, so I read it with various English accents, which the kids always find compelling. And I take frequent pauses to explain what particurly difficult passages mean. Most importantly, I take a pause to explain funny and ridiculous situations in the story. The kids always pick up this ball and run with it, with their own spins on the absurdities at hand. As we progress, the florid language of the text becomes ever less difficult, and the students are able to understand ever more passages without any help. As they become immersed in the universe of the story (of ancient Greek mythology), innumerable questions come to mind, which I can readily answer, because of my being so well-read in the classics myself. The net result of all this is that exploring what is idiotically considered a dry text to be unwillingly endured in a university class is, for 5th, 6th and 7th graders, a read as enjoyable as a Harry Potter book: but which also provides a basis for a budding classical education.