How to Bring Back Traditional Education
Traditional education has taken a
real beating the last 75 years. The entire Education Establishment lined
up to demonize everything that teachers and schools had done for many thousands
of years. The result is the vastly dumbed down classrooms we
have now in K-12 education.
But how, at this point, can we
resurrect a vanishing paradigm? As we will see, there is one example
left, as if preserved in a time capsule.
Apparently, giving children lots of
knowledge is what our socialist professors hate about traditional education. So these
ideologues came up with a parade of insults, all designed to stop schools from
fulfilling their essential function.
We were told that traditional
schools regard students as "empty vessels" to be filled with facts. Clearly we're supposed
to think this is a terrible thing. But what if these vessels are filled
with intellectual silver and gold? Why is that so bad?
People like Ken Robinson make
speeches attacking the factory method of
education. Robinson wants you to
believe that schools are soulless conveyor belts. Students are merely
products, assembled by careless hands, and then shipped to a Kmart. In
fact, this image is incoherent. Factories make many wonderful things that
function exactly as they are supposed to function.
The attack on traditional education
has been so unrelenting, and so successful, that many people may struggle to
remember what this approach looks like. The distinguishing feature is,
students are there to learn as much as teachers can teach. Isn't that an
interesting concept?
Compare that to what we have now.
Children run (or sit) in place. There is a lot of pointless
make-believe activity and far too much disorder. As a matter of doctrine,
very little factual information is allowed in these schools. The
Education Establishment has virtually outlawed memorization of anything.
In many schools, Constructivism prohibits teaching altogether. Reform Math specifically
forbids mastery. Self-esteem says that you should not have to learn
anything that makes you feel challenged. Finally, multiculturalism says
you can learn only about foreign countries, while relevance says you can only
learn about your own neighborhood. Satisfying both of those requirements
means eliminating everything. That is pretty much what has happened.
These counterproductive methods have
devastated the teaching of science, history, math, and literature.
Children spend 30 hours a week in the classroom, or 1,000 hours a year.
At the end of all that time, they might know not one bit more than they
knew at the beginning of the year. That's the sick triumph of progressive
education.
Fortunately, there is one area where
traditional education survives. If you want to know how to fix our
schools, just look at this one area, and copy all of its salient features.
That area is the study of foreign
languages.
Let's consider the typical French
class. The students arrive ignorant and empty. The teacher is a
Sage on the Stage, a towering expert on the French language. The clearly
understood goal of this class is for the teacher to transmit all of his
knowledge to all of the students, as rapidly as possible.
The teacher starts with the smallest
bits of knowledge. You learn the things that most people would want to
know first: the words for boy, girl, street, mom,
dad. You learn to say la plume de ma tante. You
learn the simplest words and sentences.
There is a feeling of naturalness,
of inevitability. You can't do it any other way. It would be crazy
to teach the words for the parts of a car or terms from physics (although
that's probably the way Common Core would do it).
In all traditional education, you
start at the smallest, simplest spot, and you steadily build outward and
upward.
Imagine the French class in
operation. The teacher presides – teaching, teaching, teaching.
The students listen respectfully – learning, learning, learning.
Everything the teacher is asking the kids to do is reasonable – not like
Reform Math, where each step seems to be devised by insane psychiatrists.
Imagine how history or biology, or
English literature, would be taught if it were taught exactly as French is
taught. French class preserves for us the naturalness and logic of
traditional education. You see it as the perfectly normal, perfectly
self-evident world that it is.
It's only progressive education and Common Core education that are twisted. Things are done in illogical,
unnatural ways. Everybody has to stand on his head and count backwards.
Here is the essence of progressive education: doing nothing at all, or
doing something that's intellectually perverted.
In fact, modern education seem to
have only one big idea, which is that students should interact more.
The Education Establishment often pretends that working cooperatively is
some bold new concept that is the answer to everything. So I'm always
amused when I think back to a comment in the 1955 book titled Retreat from
Learning by a teacher named Joan Dunn. She complained that "[e]verything is done in a
group. The child loses his identity and his responsibility for himself. Praise
is group praise; blame is group blame." So you see that the idea
isn't new at all. It was already getting tiresome 60 years ago. And
you can probably figure for yourself that the real goal was never education,
but that part about the kids losing their identity. Socialists love that.
As for recovering traditional
education, everyone can visualize the foreign language courses he or
she took, assuming they were done with reasonable competence. Then
transplant into that course any other subject you want: American history,
arithmetic, biology, whatever. There you have it. Now you know
how the course should be taught.
QED: the best antidote for Common
Core (click DELETE) is traditional education (click INSTALL).
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