A very thought-provoking article -- very much in line with
what a lot of homeschoolers believe and practice.
Here's my favorite line from the article, though I have
one big problem with it:
"Students who have been given the kind of liberal
education I am describing here, an education for being a
complete human, are ultimately those who - ironically for
our contest with the utilitarian forces of Fordism and
Rockefellerism - make the very best workers after all, for
this ideal education creates the capacious mind, one that
can see the relations of things and ideas, a worker who
understands where he is not only in the job but in the
larger world that contains it."
The problem is at the beginning: Students who have been
given... While the author addresses the critical issue of
education being more the understanding of the human
experience, the figuring out of why we're here and how we
should live in light of it, he still seems to advocate the
very ineffective model of "doing it" to the student.
Of course, as long as schools are run by the state,
education will be something we do to children and young
people. And as long as it's something we do to them, the
results will be much the same as they are today, even if
what we do to them changes.
Like it or not, children resist impositions that
contradict their nature. We want them to think certain
ways about certain things. We want them to explore things
the way we do. They have minds of their own, and when we
do not allow them to use those minds as they naturally
operate, when we do not respect their autonomy and
interact with them as if they're human beings instead of
lumps of clay, we get predictable results: they rebel or
zone out or play the game then forget all about it later
or become dysfunctional.
Children want to make sense of the world. Young people
long to understand the big picture. It is our job as
adults to guide them in that process. That will, of
course, always mean exposing them to our own worldview and
even trying to inculcate that worldview in them. The
problem arises with compulsory state schooling; there is
no variety of this unnatural, inhuman approach to
understanding the world and our place in it that can work,
or at least that can create "the capacious mind, one that
can see the relations of things and ideas, a worker who
understands where he is not only in the job but in the
larger world that contains it."
Wonderful insight on the part of the author, but the
vehicle cannot be the state -- it won't work.
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