Edutheria

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.