Status Updates From Passing the Torch: An Apolo...

Neil Postman’s The End of Education emphasizes teaching historical narrative over simply learning “the facts of cultural legacy.”

Without "a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose.” (Emergency of historical alienation, see Bulwarks of Unbelief)

5 narratives: “spaceship earth, fallen angel, American experiment, law of diversity, and word weavers/world makers.”

Hirsch
“Those who attack cultural literacy as elitist… do not understand how national cultures are formed or the role that cultural literacy plays in bringing unity and allowing marginal groups to succeed within the native or dominant culture.”

If we lose cultural literacy, we’ll lose effective “crosscultural dialogue.”

E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, similar to Adler.

Both wanted all U. S. citizens to receive the same education with little or no variation and no socialization through classes like driver’s ed, sex ed, and hygiene.

“The goal is not conformity but the possession of a common cultural language.” (194)

Adler’s suggested three-part education
1) lectures and textbooks
2) coaching in 3 Rs
3) Socratic discussion of the Great Books and the various arts

Mortimer Adler's Paideia Proposal, a plan for public school reform, “mingles American pragmatism with a firm commitment to the classical tradition, liberal political concerns with a conservative pedagogical vision.” He had a “populist-egalitarian” goal.

Sayers seems better for classroom, Mason for small homeschool.

Though Mason leaned Romantic, she critiqued Rousseau’s “self-sufficient person who should know nothing of the past, should see no visions, allow no authority. But human nature in children is stronger than the eighteenth century philosopher and the theories which he continues to inform.” (Likely regarding Montessori)

Main distinction of Mason: synthesis vs analysis.
“Whereas our scientific, technological, utilitarian age puts all its focus on analysis, breaking down knowledge so that it can be memorized for standardized exams,” Maso sought a “holistic grasp of God, man, and the natural world” through quality books which are to be “taken in as close friends.”

"Children have a right to the best we possess.” -CM

Dorothy Sayers and Charlotte Mason “honored the traditional Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian paideia” but Mason had “a more Romantic, Wordsworthian view of children and nature.”

CM:
“children are born persons… equally capable of good and evil. Our job as educators is not to herd or manage or manipulate them… but to guide them into a love of learning that will help order their affections…” (183)

“Cynicism and skepticism tear down without building up... They are substitutes for rather than supporters of critical thinking.” (175)

C. S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man

"For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique…” (A o M, p. 88)

Accessible explanation of Heidegger’s “challenging-forth”.

Dewey on moral education in school

“Lessons ‘about morals’ signify as matter of course lessons in what other people think about virtues and duties. It amounts to something only in the degree in which pupils happen to be already animated by a sympathetic and dignified regard for the sentiments of others...”

Wow, fully detached from objective moral standards.

Dewey pt 2

Regarding school’s "problem of discipline"
“A premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest.”

Helpful. The goal for any teaching moment should be true interest, not just the appearance of it.

Dewey’s Democracy and Education

Progressivism- “move forward by means of aggressive social change.”
Positivism- “reason and science, rather than faith and religion.”
Meliorism- “society naturally improves and that man can… accelerate [it].”
Utopianism- “man, through advances in science and technology and through social and moral improvement, can construct an ideal commonwealth.” (157)

Rousseau’s Emile pt 2

"Do not teach him science: let him discover it.”

“If instead of keeping a child at his books I keep him busy in a workshop, his hands labour to the labor benefit of his mind. He becomes a man of science, but thinks himself only a workman." (155)

(Do we simply need synthesis of experience and habit?)

Rousseau’s Emile
1) denied original sin
2) child-centered education
3) experience over habit (hmm… CM?)

"Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man."

The work of childhood is to play. Don’t steal this innocent Eden from them.

(So much fishy motherhood philosophy has come from this!)

Augustine
De Doctrina, Book 4

“Therefore, since infants are not taught to speak except by learning the expressions of speakers, why can men not be made eloquent, not by teaching them the rules of eloquence, but by having them read and hear the expressions of the eloquent and imitate them in so far as they are able to follow them?"

Inspired to find eloquent read-alouds

Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria
(Skills without truth)

“For cunning masquerades as prudence, boorish contempt for pleasure as temperance, … audacity as bravery, savage hardness as endurance, harshness as justice, … softness as gentleness, timidity as modesty, verbal controversy and logic-chopping on the one hand as skilfulness in argument, and an empty flux of talk on the other as oratorical power.” (143)

Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine

Plunder the Egyptians and strain everything good and true from the pagans’ writings. All truth belongs to God.


“All students of all ages naturally take the path of least resistance” and need “teachers who will hold them accountable and exercise their mental muscles.” (140)
“Students must be taught to think rightly before they can think for themselves.” (141)