NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Sun, 26 Aug 2007
On The Philosophy Of Education
I've been exchanging mail with a friend lately, a schoolteacher,
who knows that Ryan is a pretty sharp kid who needs to be in a sharp
educational environment. It being a Sunday morning, my traditional day
of free-form cogitating, I'm going to put down some thoughts on the
subject. Serendipitously, it is the eve of the first day of the
'07-'08 school year. Okay, then. Good timing.
Yeah, I've looked around pretty extensively at the available
options out there. KIPP, Kealing, magnet schools, Breakthrough, Duke
project, UT pre-prep services, augmentative education, private
schools, co-ops, boarding schools. I find (to varying degree) that all
of these programs are geared towards making him an attractive and
productive cog in the machinery of our particular (and in my opinion,
skewed) economic system.
I have yet to find an educational program that is designed to
assist a child in discovering their hidden interests and talents. We
emphasize getting good grades in a standardized curriculum, getting
good scores on standardized testing; getting accepted to a good
college so you can get a standardized degree and spend your life doing
a good standardized "career" definition for some company and have nice
things and raise up another generation to do the same thing. The whole
of it reflects why we are going nuts as a society. At its worst,
organized education can be an assembly line for robots, and I wouldn't
sentence a dog to such a pointless existence.
My son's potential far exceeds a life goal as silly and
monotonous as that. He and his type can change the world, and there's
a hell of a lot out there that needs to be changed.
I'm not worried about his academic education—he knows how to
educate himself, because I've raised him to know how and taught him
how to do it. His vocabulary already far exceeds the average high
school graduate. He has an in-depth and matter-of-fact knowledge of
disciplines that would've been considered graduate studies in my
time. (I know that I certainly couldn't explain general relativity or
discuss speculative Mayan cultural minutiae at the age of thirteen...)
He knows of geography, social studies, multidimensional mathematics,
history, cultural anthropology, political theories and histories,
paleontology, quantum physics. He is already better educated than
probably 98% of the population of this planet, right here and now,
before his voice has even started changing.
Is it because I am such a great parent? Nope. I am simply the
caretaker that points his hungry brain in the right direction. He asks
"Why is the sky blue?" and I answer "Let's find out." After 30 minutes
of research, we both know that molecules interact with photons in the
frequencies of the visible light spectrum in interesting ways, tending
to scatter blue-frequency photons more efficiently than the rest. It's
known as the Tyndall effect, or Rayleigh scattering. We know that it
has to do with the relative kinetic energy of a photon as a derivative
of its oscillation frequency, and we know about John Tyndall and Lord
Rayleigh, and the status of cutting-edge physics in the mid-nineteenth
century. And we know why the sky is such a beautiful color of blue, too.
You see, there is a critically important thing to remember
here: Ryan is a member of the first Internet Generation.
Ryan is among the first of our species—quite
literally—to grow up with the totality of the accumulated
knowledge of the human race at his fingertips. Everything about
education has now changed, and there aren't many who see the magnitude
of that change. Yet.
The old-as-the-human-race question of educational access is
answered. Over. It's done. We have the contents of every textbook
ever written; the mind of every artist and genius and businessman; the
thoughts of every philosopher and saint and sinner; the information on
the techniques of every craft; the cast of similar minds, sometimes as
fresh as this morning's coffee. They're all available via the machine
that you're using to read these words. To you. At this instant.
How cool is that? Think about it. You can type in "Quantum
Chromodynamics" or "Knitting", sitting in your home, right now,
and get virtually everything that is known on the subject,
instantaneously.
There's now a new operational imperative regarding the
education of our children, and we'll realize it soon. A new question
that never had real meaning before. If everyone can now access every
bit of knowledge effortlessly, then there is a profound moral and ethical
issue that has to be addressed. We must deal with the no-longer
hypothetical question: "What if Beethoven had never been exposed to
music?"
It is a wholly new question of philosophy.
Ryan will excel at anything that interests him. Of that, I have no
doubt. What he needs here and now is a full illumination of what is
available out there to potentially engage his interest. I'd like my
son to get a good Human Cultural Overview and, quite simply, to
be exposed to every unsolved idea available. Whether he chooses to be
a medical doctor or filmmaker or a truck driver or a designer of
toilets doesn't matter to me. He will pursue and excel at anything
that he feels is worthy of his talents. What matters to me is that he
is made aware of as much of
every branch of the tree of human knowledge as possible, so
that his latent creative talents can be kindled, illuminated and
developed. He'll pursue his personal predilections; we all do. And if
I have taught him anything, I have taught him how to efficiently
research an interest. He's learned how to learn at this point. What he
needs to know is the variety and the extent of the playground, the
gameboard. Ryan might be an expert at weaving Tartan plaids for
all I know.
I believe that we as a people have an ethical duty to make sure
that the hypothetical "Tartan plaid weaving geniuses" of the world
have a chance to find out who they are. Whether they live on a sheep
farm in Scotland or next to a crackhouse on 160th street is
immaterial. For the first time in the history of our existence, we can
find everyone's genius. And we have a duty to do so.
Given that contextual milieu, I have been looking for a kind of
"philosophical survey of the disciplines of the human race" curriculum
that probably doesn't yet exist—but one that in my opinion is
desperately needed. Soon, every young mind on the the planet will have
instant access to this
Encyclopedae Humanae that we call the Internet. What we have to
do now is to find a way to help our children to discover their
interests and their talents. They'll do the rest. I am here to tell
you that I watch it every day.
So. Education and what it should do. In my opinion, the organized
primary education that I see out there is currently failing to provide
the breadth of information that will prepare my son for the world in
which he will be living his life. But it's not catastrophic; it's not
doing any particular damage either. There are certainly social and
cultural benefits to being in school, and the failure is ultimately
marginal in our household. We pick up the slack in our own way.
That having been said, the cat is already out of the bag; The
Internet is here. The magnitude of what it represents is only now
beginning to dawn on us. Primary school is going to have to become
primary meta-school. We are going to have to teach our children
how to educate themselves, and we are going to have to give them what
used to be called a world-class liberal arts education, straight out of
the crib.
When I was his age, we took something odius called the
"Differential Aptitude Test." It helped the administrative staff to
determine who took algebra and who took shop class, and it labeled us
and threw expectations upon us—long before we knew ourselves
well enough to have any opinion about it. That mindset will soon be a
goner. We are approaching a day when the average third-grader will be
more intellectually sophisticated than the average twelfth-grader was
in those days.
I'd like to see something along the lines of grades 1-3 teaching
basic reading, writing, math, and small-group social skills. Grades
4-6 could be devoted to discovering the
individual talents and interests of the child—musical,
arithmetic, artistic, rhetorical, cognative, administrative, athletic,
scientific, social, whatever.
Any human interest or talent; there is dormant genius in
everyone. Some folks will formulate theories in cosmology. Other folks
will be fascinated and fulfilled operating a precision machine
tool. We have a duty to ourselves to help those people to find out
their interests and expose them to the myriad possibilities.
So the rest of the 7-12 school experience could expose the student
to every human discipline related to their talents and interests,
teach them large-group citizenship skills and responsibilities (read:
civics), and expose them to the concept of community service. By the
time of high school graduation, students would most certainly have
a clue of who they were and what to pursue, and be fired from within,
having the interest and intention to pursue truly meaningful higher
education.
In the meantime, Ryan and I will keep doing our own little
exercises in research, and I'll keep looking for the upcoming and
inevitable crack in the monolith that we call public education.
To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "Something is going to happen. Something
Wonderful."
To quote Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'."
And, to quote Steve Earle, "The Revolution Starts Now."
Posted at 13:16 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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