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.