Turning Corners

Well the education essay is up over on the Educore blog. I posted it here first and it just seemed too cumbersome. Besides, it reads better on the white background.

Once I got a manageable outline going that wasn't getting itself tied up in metaphysical knots, the essay came together without too much trouble. It was a good experience, but all the same I'm glad to be finished. Time to move on - after catching my breath, of course.

There's a lot happening. I don't have nearly enough time at present for all the writing I want to do. For now, I'll leave you with some lyrics I wrote some time ago about pressing on through rough seas. Once again, it's time to trust.

Bracing for the windstorm
Huddled in the prow
Looking for the eye of the hurricane

The times I've felt afraid -
Made a golden cow
I wish that there was someone else to blame

But the truth remains
The voyage must go on
Come sun or come rain
The voyage must go on
Calm or distressed
The voyage must go on
Broken or blessed
The voyage must go on

Life is turning corners
Keeping up is hard
And freedom gnaws at my security

Walking on the water
Walking on the shore
It's all the same when you are serving me

And the truth remains
The voyage must go on
Glory or shame
The voyage must go on
Calm or distressed
The voyage must go on
Broken or blessed
The voyage must go on

Can you still a raging sea?
Can your peace reign over me?
Can I put my fingers into the holes in your hands?

'Cause the truth remains
The voyage must go on
Beauty or pain
The voyage must go on
Calm or distressed
The voyage must go on
Broken or blessed
The voyage must go on

Image courtesy of gac.culture.gov.uk

The EduCore Project (4)

I am currently in the process of writing my essay for Trinity Foundation. It is proving difficult work - definitely a different kind of writing than I am used to. (You thought Sojourner's Song was formal? Ha!) For me, writing formally is like playing classical piano - I'll get through it eventually, but it's a stretch.

I've read a lot about education in the last few months. (Along the way, I got to read Plato and Aristotle for the first time, which is a rather embarrassing confession for someone who claims to take a serious interest in philosophy.) There is, it seems to me, intrinsic value in familiarizing yourself with your subject's significant historic writings. I do not quite agree with Rousseau when he wrote that "All minds start from the same point, and the time spent in learning what others think is so much time lost for learning to think for ourselves." This idea has a certain ring of nobility to it, but is it not at heart the classic mistake of reinventing the wheel? Are we to deny ourselves the advantage of building on the previous work of those who have gone before? I think not, as this would tend to undermine the very idea of education itself. As Aristotle said, "If anything has been said well in detail by earlier thinkers, let us try to review it." John Stuart Mill further embellishes this thought: "These great thinkers are not read passively, as masters to be followed, but actively, as supplying materials and incentives to thought." It is quite reasonable to say that we think for ourselves about what others think, and that in doing so our thought processes are developed faster and more efficiently.

My knowledge of Latin is poorer than my knowledge of spider species or Russian Czars, and this has proven to be a considerable handicap. Many authors will enthusiastically launch into a lengthy Latin quotation, which no doubt contributes profound depth to the current topic, but which for me is of course completely unintelligible. It seems at least a rudimentary course in Latin may be in order sometime in the future.

So far, my favorite educational writer is easily Alfred North Whitehead. His ideas are brilliant and his writing is like deep breaths of clean air. I also enjoyed reading John Locke, John Holt, and Aristotle, and, to a lesser degree, John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. (It almost seems that having the name John is a requirement if you want to write about education.) Some of the other authors have been - shall we say - less than enjoyable.

Transitioning from studying to writing was a challenge. Any serious research not only involves organizing an unwieldy mass of material, it also involves coming up with something to say about it. It is an ongoing process of categorization, contemplation, and review. As John Dewey wrote: "Keeping track is a matter of reflective review and summarizing, in which there is both discrimination and record of the significant features of a developing experience. To reflect is to look back over what has been done so as to extract the net meanings which are the capital stock for intelligent dealing with further experiences. It is the heart of intellectual organization and of the disciplined mind." (- John Dewey, Experience and Education)

This brings up something else I have been thinking about - an idea which I am calling "the connectedness of knowing." It is one thing to cram your mind full of information, it is something else to map out its relationships. I believe this is an important skill to develop if one wants to reliably recall ideas, discussions, and specific quotes that are relevant to the subject at hand, whatever that subject may happen to be. The reason this is important relates to how the mind works. Mental organization is categorical, like a kitchen, not alphabetical, like a filing cabinet. Information that is effectively retained, then, is information that is stored in the right place and attached to something else.

At this point, my capacity for retention is still rather limited. The best strategy for developing reliable powers of recollection is to establish topical mental outlines and then fill in the details incrementally. I have been trying to swallow both the outline and the details whole, as a single mass. I suppose it should come as no surprise then that I am unable to keep it all down.

It feels good to be rounding the final lap. "Better is the end of a thing than its beginning," for sure.

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
-T.S. Eliot

Learning All The Time

Out of all the titles in the original Educore list, I was particularly looking forward to one: Learning All The Time, by John Holt. This book simply exuded accessibility, which I correctly anticipated would be in short supply. I wasn't disappointed. Short, colorful, and to the point - Learning All The Time was engaging, informative, and a welcome reprieve amidst the heavier reading.

Holt analyzes education primarily from the learner's perspective rather than the teacher's, which seems sensible. He takes for his premise children's natural curiosity about things and seeks to find ways to encourage this interest and give it places to go. This approach tends to shy away from memorization and other such didactic forms of teaching, favoring instead more organic methods, in the Socratic style. "In short, all the [...] facts that children are now given, and then asked to memorize, they could discover and write down for themselves. The advantage of the latter is that our minds are much more powerful when discovering than memorizing, not least of all because discovering is more fun." (-Chapter 2, At Home With Numbers, emphasis in original)

Sometimes we fall under the impression that we are teaching the wrong way, when in actuality we are simply teaching too much. Holt observes: "We have a tendency, when a child asks us a question, to answer far too much. 'Aha,' we think, 'now I have an opportunity to do some teaching,' and so we deliver a fifteen-minute thesis for an answer." He follows with an anecdote: "I heard a [...] story about a child who asked her mother some question and the mother was busy or distracted, or perhaps didn't feel she knew enough, and said, 'Why don't you ask your father?' The child replied, 'Well, I don't want to know that much about it.'" (-Chapter 5, What Parents Can Do)

This is certainly not a book about "classical education," and one could argue that Holt gives kids too much credit. Either way, the ideas presented are worthy of thought. There is much to be said for discipline, but sometimes in our zeal for discipline we forget that the real goal is self-discipline, which is a jolly sight harder.

I found myself agreeing with Holt more often than not, and was pleased to find some corroboration regarding my views on spelling: "The best way to spell better is to read a lot and write a lot. This will fill your eye with the look of words and your fingers with the feel of them... In all my work as a teacher, nothing I ever did to help bad spellers was as effective as not doing anything, except telling them to stop worrying about it, and to get on with their reading and writing." (-Chapter 1, Reading and Writing, emphasis in original)

This book was published posthumously, but still contains the contagious enthusiasm of a man who loved kids and loved helping them learn stuff. For anyone interested in training children, homeschoolers in particular, this is 3/8" of shelf space well spent.

The Future Of Christian Higher Education

There are a number of thorny problems that must be resolved if we are going to move forward in the area of Christian higher education. I'm going to highlight a few.

There is in the church today a kind of unspoken fear of "thinking too much" and a tendency to brand intellectualism as unspiritual. The roots of this uneasiness are for the most part honest, seeing it is quite true that intellectualism, in and of itself, is insufficient. ("The Christian faith's contention with rationalism is not that it has too much reason in it, but that it has very little else." - Os Guinness)

However, it is leapfrog logic to say that intellectualism is consequently bad. The fact that you are only partly dressed wearing only a shirt is no reason to not wear a shirt at all. We are called to love God with - among other things - our mind. As Augustine said, Christians ought to "think in believing, and believe in thinking." (See also James Sire and Harry Blamires on this subject.)

It follows that a primary task of any educational institution ought to be stimulating critical thinking in students. Historically, this has proven a difficult assignment, as Christianity very easily tends towards dogmatism and the concentration of "truth" among the reigning elite. While it is true that "the faculty members of an institution carry the intellectual freight," they must make a conscious effort to use their knowledge as an locomotive engine to pull the other students along, not as a juggernaut to run them over.

In Luke 16, Christ is teaching about handling money. Now we know that money is the source of much confusion and sin in the world - "the root of all sorts of evil," as Paul writes to Timothy - and it must be handled carefully. It is dangerous.

However, we must be clear about this one thing: just because something has the capacity - or even tendency - to be corrupted, it does not follow that it must be intrinsically bad. Consider erotic love, or technology, or wine. We could multiply examples ad infinitum - the point is that too often we trade a hot potato for no potato and wind up going hungry.

I include intellectualism in this category - along with money and everything else. It's quite useful - and quite dangerous. (Most useful things are dangerous: think about it. We are constantly tasked with finding this balance, in everything from knives to nuclear power.)

Towards the end of the passage, Christ makes a curious statement; commenting on the actions of the Unjust Steward, He says "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light."

The world is sinful. This is plain spiritual fact. For some reason, we Christians also seem to think of the world as stupid. This is not the case. The world is not stupid! On the contrary: if we are to take the verse above at face value, they tend to be smarter than we are.

What does this mean? Christ seems to be saying that in this area of money - (and similar areas, by extrapolation) - we can actually learn from the world. Not spiritual matters, mind you. Of course not. "The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned." - 1 Cor. 2:14 But perhaps, as the Israelites plundered the Egyptians and went to the Philistines to sharpen their weapons, we can derive practical benefit from a pagan culture.

This in turn gives us opportunity to engage the world as salt and light. Christianity has never been - at least not substantially - an isolationist religion. Christianity is the story of real people meeting real needs with real love. Even among the most contemplative monastic orders there is this unmistakable emphasis on doing good as a necessary aspect of being good.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Christian Higher Education is how to institutionalize the thing and keep it from shriveling up. I don't say that because I'm fatalistic, I say it because it's history. These things (institutions) have a life-expectancy, and it's not lengthy.

As Chesterton said, in Manalive: "It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions." He is right. But there is a subtle qualification that remains to be made: it is not that institutions are "cold and cramping things," but rather that they become "cold and cramping things." They age. They break down. They die. Sometimes, they betray themselves before they die.

It is not necessary that we abandon institutions altogether, but only that we recognize when they have served their purpose, become dead weight, and need to be heaved overboard. There comes a point when the burning ferment of the new wine is too much for the old wineskins. If we want to go on with God, we must make new ones.

Yet another danger is pursuing education to the point of distraction. It is a valuable tool for building the house, but it is not the house. Or, to borrow a well-worded metaphor from C. S. Lewis, "[Education] is a weapon; and a weapon is essentially a thing we lay aside as soon as we safely can." (- Christian Reflections: Christianity and Culture) A weapon may be indispensable for carrying out the battle, but it is not the end we are fighting for.

Seek first the kingdom. All these things will be added.

Image courtesy of uu.edu

The EduCore Project (3)

"For each succeeding generation, the problem of Education is new."
- Alfred North Whitehead

I completed the School & Society textbook in early May, far ahead of schedule. (I tend to get through things quicker than planned not because I'm an especially high acheiver, but simply because I have trouble multitasking.) I closed out the Educore blog for now with Rich Mullins' Higher Education And The Book Of Love - (hat tip to Max for the inspiration.)

I've also finished (with the exception of the "Appendices",) Gordon Clark's A Christian Philosophy Of Education, which as you remember is the subject of the essay. It's quite a strict book: he's not joking about the "philosophy" bit.

Aside from his erratic flares of idiosyncratic dogmatism and his ever-present Calvinism, Clark seems to be a man of sense and conviction. However, you get the sense that as an author he was more prolific than poignant, and unfortunately these types of books tend to fill more shelves than they do minds.

Now, I've started into The Future Of Christian Higher Education, a collection of essays and addresses on the subject from around the turn of the millennium. The book has its full share of the kind of vague, circular stuff that characterizes scholarly writing, but there are also some strong meaty sections that may earn this title a dedicated post.

I haven't been keeping score as far as the page count is concerned, but I'm feeling generally optimistic. There may be one title that gets cut from the initial list, due to lack of time or lack of patience or both, but overall the study is progressing nicely.

Of course, integrating all the information is a challenge, and I have yet to see some clear themes emerge that I can begin to work with and address. I expect they won't crystallize fully until these keys start clattering out the essay.

"We must leave behind the notion that Christian scholarship is the same as any scholarship, except that it adds a little something of Christian history or values on top. No, Christian scholarship - authentic, honest, truth-seeking scholarship - is fundamentally different and cannot be faked." - Robert C. Andringa, The Future Of Christian Higher Education, Foreword, pg. xvii

"Even in the teaching of arithmetic a pessimistic education will be distinguishable from a theistic and optimistic education, at least on rainy days." - Gordon H. Clark, A Christian Philosophy Of Education, Chapter 3: The Alternative To Christian Theism, pg. 45

The EduCore Project (2)

Amidst my many and varied duties, I have managed to continue plodding along on my self-inflicted journey through the high mountains and deep valleys of educational psychology. I have completed five chapters of School & Society, which, although it is not itself the subject of the essay, is proving useful as a road map, mainly because it contains study questions.

The subjects covered so far, following a historical progression, include Liberty and Literacy: The Jeffersonian Era; School as a Public Institution: The Common-School Era; Social Diversity and Differentiated Schooling: The Progressive Era; and Diversity and Equity: Schooling, Girls, and Women. It is all the sort of thing which is interesting once you get into it, though on the surface it seems an unbearable bore. (Rather like a jelly donut, come to think of it.)

School & Society is a dense and not altogether lively text, but there are some redeeming insights. Hopefully the verbosity is not viral; if my writing starts to seem like a wiffle ball in a north wind, someone please let me know.

I also checked off John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, and found it engaging and on target. Gatto, though a teacher himself, gives no quarter to the institution and passionately decries the wreckage his profession has made of the human spirit. He quotes other social thinkers - from Aristotle to Wendell Berry - and presents a clear, if controversial, case for de-centralized, organic schooling.

"Whatever an education means, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges..." -Ch. 4, We Need Less School, Not More

Images courtesy of thejoyofshards.co.uk and skylarksings.com

The EduCore Project

For some time, I have been fascinated by the methods and mechanics of education and learning. I have collected a number of titles along these lines, looking to do some concentrated study, work out a few brain kinks, and find some answers.

I noticed the perfect opportunity when I saw this essay contest from The Trinity Foundation, an organization I mentioned last month. I intend to study the subject and distill the results into a submission for the contest.

I have drawn books from numerous sources: four from Amazon, two from library sales, one from Berean, and one from TF (Gordon Clark's, A Christian Philosophy of Education, which is the specific subject of the essay).

The syllabus:

Writing to Learn, which I reviewed last month;
Another Sort of Learning, which I read during the pre-Sojourner's-Song ice age;
Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education, a compilation that examines both classical theories and contemporary issues;
The Future of Christian Higher Education, exploring a Christian answer to an increasingly secularized and materialistic system;
School and Society, another compilation, looking at education in social perspective;
Dumbing Us Down, exposing the failures of compulsory schooling;
Learning All The Time, on handling the primary years, an area I am especially interested in;
and, finally, A Christian Philosophy of Education, Gordon Clark, The Trinity Foundation.

2,210 pages. 510 down, 1,700 to go.

I'm not citing the statistics to impress you - I'm citing them because I'm scared. I've done plenty of snorkeling along the shores, but I've never really donned the scuba gear and headed for the deeps. I really don't know what to expect from the subject, or from myself for that matter.

I do expect this to consume a healthy chunk of my time and energy, and (oh no!) potentially cut into blogging. I toyed with the idea of creating a separate blog for the study, but I'm not sure that would be the best thing. If my readers, as the fellow-students who make up my virtual classroom, have any ideas on logistics and formatting, please share them. This is new territory.

For now, EduCore will be a new label, allowing me to keep track of the pertinent book reviews and other related musings. Look for the apple.






Images courtesy of health.state.nm.us and thejoyofshards.co.uk