Edutheria

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.

Albert Jay Nock on why abandoning classical education was a bad idea:

The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity — every department, I think, except one: music. This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind — a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations.

These words are just as true in 2007 as they were in 1931 when Nock spoke them. The perspective given by a classical education is just as important now as it was then. No young person should profess a religion without being first challenged by Lucretius; espouse a political ideology without considering Plato; or accept a scientific claim without reflecting on the epistemology of Aristotle.

Dear reader, I am a 29 year old educator based in the San Francisco Bay area. I have a great many ideas: about education, politics, economics, history and philosophy. In order to communicate and refine my ideas, today I am launching four blogs. The blogs will each have a central thesis, around which most of the posts will center. My intention is for each blog to be like a book, ever in progress: what I term a “perpetual book.” The perpetual books and their respective theses are the following: The Sword and the Lie That the state and religion are chiefly vehicles for aggrandizement through violence and deceit. The Starving Edge That liberty provides prosperity for all, particularly the poorest among us, and coercion engenders suffering. Edutheria That we as a society and as individuals could achieve so much more if education were not strangled by the state. The Sensible Synthesis This blog is intended to provide a philosophical underpinning for the other three. It will largely be about epistemology and ethics. Best Regards, Daniel Sanchez