RedStateEclectic

Allgemeinbildung

There is a monstrosity of a term in German: Allgemeinbildung - general education or educational background. What turns the German term - for me - into a monstrosity is its historical and institutional background. For Lincoln's dictum certainly holds true in the case of Germany, where homeschooling is a crime and institutions of private education are strictly content-controlled by the state:

“The philosophy of the classroom will be the philosophy of the government in the next generation.”

Nothing could be more antithetic to the idea of genuine education than a monopoly on asserting what it is.

Education is the ability to acquire, handle and advance human knowledge. For these purposes, freedom and competition are of the essence.

Instead those who ought to be protected against any kind of conscription are being conscripted into a behemoth broadcaster of prejudices - as Arthur Schopenhauer said:

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

Robert E. Peterson at The Freeman offers an account of a far better model:

The results of colonial America’s free market system of education were impressive indeed. Almost no tax money was spent on education, yet education was available to almost anyone who wanted it, including the poor. No government subsidies were given, and inefficient institutions either improved or went out of business. Competition guaranteed that scarce educational resources would be allocated properly. The educational institutions that prospered produced a generation of articulate Americans who could grapple with the complex problems of self-government. The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today, even in our universities, were written for and read by the common man. Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today. A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.

See also Sapere Aude.

The Educational Expert

To augment Georg’s post containing the Feynman quote, I present (what I believe to be) the key point made within an excerpt entitled ‘School Is Bad For Children’, from John Holt’s book, ‘The Underachieving School’.

In the same way, kids learning to do all the other things they learn without adult teachers – to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bike, skate, play games, jump rope – compare their own performance with what more skilled people do, and slowly make the needed changes. But in school we never give a child a chance to detect his mistakes, let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought he would never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the expert. We should let him do it himself. Let him figure out what this word says, what is the answer to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or that.

There isn’t a question that goes un-asked around here. There isn’t a fixed spot wherein the kids must sit (although they prefer the dinette area where the sun shines warm in the morning). There isn’t peer pressure confining their personal actions to some expected norm, outside the realm of universal manners. There isn’t one way to pursue knowledge, and there isn’t much help from Mom & Dad.

They do the work. They do the learning – sometimes fast, sometimes slow. They use whatever references they choose. Learning is autodidactic and the sooner a child gets a feel for it, the better. They’re at the upper ninetieth percentiles of their classes. In my eyes, they’re just average kids.

Me? I hover. I print things. I buy their school books and take them to the library. I solve disputes. I attend to wounds. I resist the urge to help them by believing in them, but never stop searching for answers with them. I discuss things and ask their opinions on science, history, reading books, music, etc. I watch them grow and wish I could slow them down a bit. They’re their own experts developing their expertise with the help of their Mom & Dad, and their neighbors, and their community.

As a parent, it’s nice to be needed. It’s even nicer when I am not… something I learned in homeschool.

Scientists Not Interested in Science

Richard Lindzen commenting on a speech given by president Obama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

On the one hand, he was calling for sound science and critical analysis, on the other he was calling for the marginalisation of naysayers concerning global warming. It is, as an aside, an appalling feature of the present environment that this kind of abuse of scientific integrity is conducted to cheers at universities. Universities as such provide virtually no defense against this kind of behaviour by important officials.

(See time mark 22:00 of the below video)

The field is corrupt, without any question. I would say most scientists don’t believe this and didn’t believe it 20 years ago. But for young scientists they know they're in trouble if they say it, and so they don’t.

You created a community of scientists who are not interested in the science.

(See time mark 47:20)

On potential converts to the cause of veracity amongst scientists knowledgable enough to see through the politically correct travesty of climate science:

How do you describe these people 'for' or 'against'. It's meaningless. They're opportunistic.

(See time mark 49:20)

 

See also one of my earliest posts (from January 2008): The Sun Queen of Germany, and the very recent Tangents of Wisdom - Dürer and Popper.

Sapere Aude

Früh übt sich, wer ein Meister sein will - Start young, if you want to be a master. (Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell)

Can tablets take the place of teachers? (h/t askblog)

I seem to remember, both before going to school (and in school) it was impressed on me that I could not (yet) learn and grasp what was being taught in school (the higher grades). I believed them. It took me decades to systematically distrust educational authorities and to practice my ability to approach truth independently of human totems of authoritativeness, be they teachers, professors or other ritually empowered experts.

Eventually it dawned on me, in remarkably large measure, (pre-)educational socialisation and education itself are aimed at incapacitating the human urge and need to learn, so as to subordinate the human mind to concerns of social station and self-importance.

“Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit …”,

the full quote in English:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!”

Immanuel Kant, Königsberg (Prussia), 30 September 1784

Commanding Heights

Image credit.

In a highly instructive, brilliantly written article containing lots of useful facts, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz argue:

Over the past few decades, our economy has undergone some fundamental changes — with the result that the fight for control over the commanding heights of American economic life is still very much with us. And it is a fight that, at least for now, the free-market camp appears to be losing.

The commanding heights of our economy today are not heavy manufacturing, energy, and transportation. They are, rather, education and health care. These are our foremost growth sectors — the ones most central to employment and consumption; the ones that, increasingly, drive our economy. And it is in precisely these two sectors that the case for extensive government intervention and planning, if not outright control, is dominant — and becoming ever more so.

If there is to be any hope of reversing this trend, champions of market economics must come to see these two sectors as the front lines in the battle for capitalism. At stake is not only an ideological or theoretical point, but also American prosperity.

Read the entire article entitled The New Commanding Heights.

Kids, get out your owner's manual…

Forty-six of 50 states have adopted new education standards in regard to the material students in [government] high schools read.

The new requirement, part of the Common Core State Standards in English, require 70 percent of what students read to be non-fiction books by the year 2014.

Even elementary students will be affected, with 50 percent of elementary reading required to be non-fiction books and informational reading.

Suggested non-fiction books to replace classics such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and “The Grapes of Wrath” include Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” “FedViews,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2009) and “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” published by the General Services Administration.

Full Story

"The grain once ground into flour germinates no more." ~ Henri Amiel

The Fourth “R”

“It used to be just Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, now there’s ‘Recreation’”:

“We can’t just keep subsidizing higher tuition” – Pres. Obama

Wanna bet? I’m sure that recreation isn’t the only cost factor, only a symptom of college subsidies. From a state perspective, why shouldn’t they subsidize? Can politicians put a price on the value of indoctrination and academic support for state endeavors? The sky’s the limit for these “institutions of learning”.

Big-Headed Presidents

The More Things Change…

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.” ~ Doris Lessing

Urine Trouble, Mr. Green

Plans to build an inside outhouse backfire:

Students at a high school in Boca Raton, Florida, must step over rivers of urine and endure the stench of rancid waste after a plan to bring 'green' waterless urinals into bathrooms backfired.

School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms.

But with no water moving through the school's copper pipes to flush the urine into the sewer system, the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.

'It was pretty disgusting,' school board chairman Frank Barbieri told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

'The girls had to step over a river of urine. I could smell it as soon as I walked into the hallway.'

Now, the school district, which was hoping to save $100 a year in water costs for each waterless urinal, must pay $500,000 to repair the damage and replace the appliances with the traditional flush variety in four high schools.

Full article.

The environ-mental solution here is obvious: get rid of the boys.