When will we advance to the point of realizing we have done a seriously bad thing in educating our children?…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 2:29 PM Permalink

…This is another area in which I lack any formal training or experience at training students and I am therefore just as qualified to speak on this matter as anyone else. My opinion of how we broke our education requires a step back in time, not too far back, and I think could produce superior students to the majority today (an easy statement to make as we have an over 50% dropout rate). My solution?

Little schools on the prairie. That's right, when Americans were among the best educated people on earth it was back 100-200 years ago when schools did not seek to segregate classrooms with b.s. reasons like age, level of education, a severe shortage of teachers, leading to the morass we have today that serves our children and country so ill.

Think about it: a teacher might have thirty students in his/her one room school. The teacher taught the elder students and then those elder students were responsible for helping pass that education down to the youngest of students, facilitating overall education. They all received a "classical" education as the elder students read aloud the classic literature, debated openly with younger students lacking the skills to understand with the older student learning the material better thru the teaching of it. (I long ago forgot who told me or where I read that the fastest way to learn a subject is to teach it, but I believe it is true.) Math, science, the Arts, great literature, history, music, and many, many other subjects could be covered in day's school drills.

What do we do now? We pigeonhole, divide, separate by educational level, and tell "elementary" students that they cannot keep up with "Middle" and "high" school and the colleges and Universities that follow.

Back then the curriculum had but a single purpose: providing the finest education by maximizing the teaching of the available curriculum without the teacher alone carrying the whole burden as they do today. A burden obviously too heavy to carry as they must "teach to the test" instead of providing that classical education with the help of older students teaching the young, fostering amity, interest in learning, and with the certain knowledge that it will soon be their turn to aid in educating their fellow students.

Another thing about which I have adamantly averred (I just love adamantly averring!) is that discrimination of any type will never cease as long as as the government oversees the gathering of information with which to discriminate. I believe this holds true for education.

Instead of applying labels to separate and seemingly diminish the worth of individual students they should be educated in this "Little (School) House on the Prairie," style that would instead have each student actively involved in teaching each subject, the level of their active schooling of others determined only upon their understanding of the subject and their communication skills constantly monitored by their elders and not any other factor like age, race, creed, sexual preferences and any other form of bias, discrimination, and hatred taught actively or subliminally.

Why must we teach discrimination, bigotry, hatred, segregation, lower, upper and middle classes, and use religion as a psychological weapon against each other when we so easily could revert to those types of schools that insured a classical education? Don't we have more of that than we ever needed?

Ciao, bella ami.

Labels: activism, disclosure, discourse, Education, schools