School
I always liked school. I was the sort of kid who was all ears to the teacher. I was also a critical listener and was good at raising my hand and asking a sharp question. Most of my teachers loved it.
In the early years my schooling was pretty boring. It takes a lot of practice to know the alphabet by heart. It's not exactly intuitive. And then there was the matter of stringing letters into words and sentences.
We had a reader that featured 2 kids, Dick and Jane and their dog Spot. I still remember the flash of insight when I got what the words "See Spot run Jane" meant.
Learning to write with cursive script was less interesting.
I learned arithmetic too. That involved a lot of memorizing things like addition tables and multiplication tables. Boring, until one day I used my skills to calculate how far light travelled in a year - my result agreed with the length of a light year in Funk and Wagnalls. I was hooked.
When I was in school my teachers taught me lots of things without obviously teaching. Consider learning to write. There were cards on the wall above the blackboard showing the form of the letters - but the class was never about how good you were at drawing them - the class was about expressing yourself using them about some other topic.
I spent a couple of decades in the printing industry. Looking back, a junior high project about Brazil taught me a lot of the basics of the skills I used all the time. For the Brazil i was clipping pictures and text from magazines and gluing them into a book to make a satisfying presentation. Who imagined that that was a lesson in pre-press ?
I think that one of the social purposes of school is to give all citizens in a society a body of commonly accepted information. All citizens need skills like literacy and numeracy. They all need to know the history of their society.
Dan Dennett was pretty scathing about religion and he was a strong supporter of teaching religion in schools. He was sneaky. He advocated teaching all children about all the religions in the world. Home schoolers didn't want that. They don't want their kids exposed to ideas from outside their own silo.
And Dennett knew - if one is exposed to all the stuff that cults teach then one is bound to ask - does any of this make sense?
When I was in art school I was what was called a mature student - I was 35. I had about 20 years experience in photography. In Foundation I took the first course in photography I ever had. John, the teacher, was struggling to explain the basics of exposure. I asked if I could give a presentation. He exclaimed with a grin 'a revolt!' and turned over the next class to me. I used my own darkroom to make illustrations using greyscales to show how to think about exposure and contrast. He was pleased. Many classmates complimented me.
For me, school was a place where I could learn. Learning is broad and open ended. My observation of homeschoolers is that they aren'[t interested in that sort of learning. What they want is to indoctrinate their kids into their cult.
They take the old Jesuit saying seriously - give me a boy until they are 10 and I'll give you the man.
But we should take the saying seriously too. It's why all kids should go to public school.
What do you think?
|I open the floor.
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.