Basic Schooling

Thoughts on what I’d like to see in tomorrow’s schools.

Introduction

The primary education system in America was designed at the end of the 19th century to create good mill-workers among the lower classes, by stressing two traits above all: obedience and conformity. Such characteristics have never been uppermost among good citizens in a democracy. More active and creative traits are needed.

In the past, it was taken for granted that children learned the practical lessons of life at home. This is no longer a given, so I propose real-life education be added to the more intellectual pursuits of traditional liberal arts education upon which the mill-worker’s school model was built.

When addressing the needs of growing human children, we must acknowledge their true nature in all its facets, and consider what will best prepare them for life in the real world as neighbors and citizens of their community.

What follows is a number of thoughts on ways to improve today’s schools. The list is by no means comprehensive, nor do I offer the items in any particular order.

Same Sex Schools

After the children are 10 years old, they attend different schools. Boys are taught by men. Girls are taught by women. In this way boys learn what is is to be a man and girls learn what it is to be a woman. The children are not distracted or intimidated by members of the other sex.

Running Sitting Jumping Reading

Each hour of the school day is divided into two parts, a major part and a minor. In the major part the students sit and take instruction, practice reading and writing, take tests, and so on. In the minor part the students enjoy physical activities such as running, stretching, sports in lightning games, and so on.

Children need to move about and rest their brains between lessons, so the instruction can sink in. The calm glow that follows exercise heightens the concentration in the next learning session. Increased oxygen in the students’ brains also helps them learn.

Non-intellectual skill training can also fill the minor part of the hour. Musical practice, for example.

As a guide, say out of every 60 minutes the students have 40 minutes of traditional inactive learning, 15 minutes of physical activity, and 5 minutes for a break to go to the toilet, have a cup of water or juice, and eat a piece of fruit or vegetable.

Practical Lessons

Students learn skills beyond the traditional intellectual skills of reading, writing, thinking. They should school capable of building a house, carpentry, masonry, electrics and plumbing. They know how to clean and maintain the houses they build. They know how to grow their own food and cook it. They know how to make their own clothes, work metal and tools.

Most of these skills require mastery of basic mathematics and so afford the chance for the students to apply their math lessons in real world situations. These activities also require co-operation and help to teach the students about community. The application and practice of these skills are also physical and can serve for the 15 minutes of physical activities in the hour.

Each school is built as a small model of the community, so as to afford the students an opportunity of practicing all these skills. The students help to build and maintain the school buildings. They clean the halls, classrooms, and offices. They grow food in green houses and outdoor plots, they harvest, store, and cook the food they grow. They help to construct and maintain energy-harvesiting systems. In all ways possible the school becomes a self-sufficient community, a model of the adult community the children will enter as citizens when they graduate.

As the children themselves build, maintain, and clean the school buildings, they gain a sense of ownership and responsibility for them.

Some children are better-suited to sitting quietly and obediently all day, and are quicker at learning abstract concepts. As a result, these students today are regarded as the ‘best’ and the future leaders of their community. But it is a sorry old story that book-learning is not all there is to life, and the brilliant scholar who can’t take care of himself, and does not achieve brilliant success in real life, is alas too well known to us. In the school as I would propose it, where practical lessons are taught alongside the traditional liberal arts, and are given equal weight with them, the scholarly students will find that they are not necessarily brilliant at all things. And the students who are better-suited to working with their hands in practical matters will be rewarded and honored for this, even though their achievements in the more-intellectual classes don’t shine.

Common Sense

Logic, skepticism, and justice are of the highest value in community. Students learn them as well as common sense. They learn that authority in and of itself has no value unless it speaks the truth and upholds justice and sustainable values of living in human society. Students are taught at all times to distrust authority, be skeptical of the claims of their elders, leaders, masters and teachers. Students are rewarded when they demand their teachers prove the rightness of the lessons they teach. Students are doubly rewarded when they prove their teachers are wrong.

This demands a different kind of teacher than the one who thrives in the current ‘obey and conform’ school. But the student who does well in the kind of school I propose will also make an excellent teacher of it when he is an adult.

Each student before he graduates is able to listen to a Presidential address or campaign speech and say, ‘That’s bullshit!’ — and explain why.

The only way I can see how to shape such skeptical, common sense minds is to build skepticism into every class. Those who are presently called the ‘worst’ students — the most rebellious, those who lead the gangs, want to grow up too fast and engage in criminal activities are, if properly taught, among the best citizens and the leaders of their communities. These are the students who are put in positions of Doubters, Skeptics, and Challengers constantly defying their teachers to support what they claim in their lessons.

Meditation

Along with intellectual lessons and physical activity, students learn to meditate. Meditation serves various functions. It helps the students learn how to focus their thoughts and concentrate. It helps rest their minds between periods of intense learning. It helps them combat stress of all kinds. It helps them become more aware of their bodies at the deeper levels. It helps free them from fear, craving, cowardice, doubt.

Religion

Meditation verges upon prayer, which raises the question of spirituality and religion. In any school founded by a religious order, religion will naturally have its place in the curriculum. No school founded by and supported by the community as a whole ought to include any religious teachings except in the study of history or society and how religions have influenced societies past and present.

I also don’t see any way to combine the teaching of religion (which is founded upon faith in an authority which never does or need justify its claims) and a scholarly attitude of Skepticism and Doubt. The religious school forms a harmonious part of an authoritarian, despotic society, but it can never harmonize with a democratic society in which all claims must be justified and proven, and men meet on the common ground of material reality.

Conclusion

These random thoughts only partly represent the ways I’d like to see public education change. The overall goal is to address the child in body as well as mind, in the life of the hands as well as scholasticism, and prepare him to play a useful role in an egalitarian, democratic society of free men.

(Composed by pen on paper and first posted Saturday, January 19, 2008)