As I was sitting in my English Education Class, my professor told me her wonderful experiences with head start, a kindergarten/preschool age tutoring service. She told us the games they played, every day objects they talked about, how to properly form lines, and how they taught social etiquette. Then, she concluded, they spent a special time so a councilor could come to each class and have all the children take turns hugging a teddy bear. Woa, woa, woa! Rewind. We are teaching kindergarten and preschool aged children that love and affection can come from an inanimate object by the hands of a psychologist? Wait, it becomes much, much better.
We followed up with reading standards for first through third grade students. My professor thumbed through books such as 'Brown Bear, Brown Bear' and some other book about letters climbing trees. I apologize, but for those parents who are reading this post, have children in first through third grade, and have seen these books as school assignments should not be content with their child's grades. There should not be an echo of happiness. Your children are failing; Your children are being robbed of an education; and your local district councilor who was just hired sees nothing wrong with this.
G.K. Chesterton once said, "Any responsible man will teach his own child." I'm saying this not because I've been homeschooled, but because parents, by and large, will expect greater things from their children, will push their children farther beyond their perceived capacities, and will dedicate more time, money, and love than any teacher with thirty children or any psychologists who has written the lesson plans that are in my hands. I will use college as a case study.
It is widely known that the highest test scores, on average, come from college graduates with physics or philosophy degrees. Why? How is it that a humanities major, philosophy, competes with one of the most prestigious and most rigorous of the natural sciences? How is it that they often share the same seat at a college table? The reason is because of the material philosophy students are expected to understand. When we learn about Aristotle, we read his books (English Translations, of course). When we learn about Plato, we read his books. When we go over Kant, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, or any other philosopher we are required to go beyond our mental capacity and learn from some of the greatest minds. We do not read someone's summary or another "professor's feelings" upon the matter. I am yet to take an economics class that requires us to understand "Individualism and Economic Order" (A series of essays) by Friedrich Hayek or John Keynes "The General Theory Of Employment Interest And Money". I am yet to take a political science class that requires us to understand Tocqueville, Rousseau, Locke, Marx (We may have read a paragraph about him somewhere in a remote article), or Hobbes. And I'm yet to take a psychology class that requires us to touch a book by Sigmund Freud. If we don't stretch our minds, they'll simply retract into imbecility.
But some will still ask, "What have we lost?" We have lost everything. We've lost the vigor of Marx when he writes, "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." We've lost the curiosity and obligation of Rousseau when he says, "As I was born a citizen of a free State, and a member of the Sovereign, I feel that, however feeble the influence my voice can have on public affairs, the right of voting on them makes it my duty to study them: and I am happy, when I reflect upon governments, to find my inquiries always furnish me with new reasons for loving that of my own country." And we have even forget Kant and his conclusion, "Thus pure reason presents us with the idea of a transcendental doctrine of the soul (psychologia rationalis), of a transcendental science of the world (cosmologia rationalis), and finally of a transcendental doctrine of God (theologia transcendentalis)." As Ray Bradbury once said, there's more than one way to burn a book; and our English education is doing a wonderful job.
In looking over our study programs, from childhood to college, from professor to student, from parent to parent, I have come to a single conclusion: We are no longer required to understand, we are simply required to repeat - and that alone should scare us.
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