Edutheria

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.

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