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Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Monday, May 23, 2005
Interesting Reading
I spent some time reading the FAQ on a website I found while looking for a poem. The site belongs to Richard Geib, a high school teacher with some definite opinions and a lot of time on his hands -- his FAQ alone was over 200 pages!! Not all of it will be relevant to CM home educators, but some is right in line with CM's thinking, as you can see from these samples. (Note - not everything on his site, or even his FAQ, may be suitable for children). Here are some of his opinions on a variety of topics:
About TV as it enhances cultural literacy:
...The idea that we as a society need a television show to provide us with a common point of reference to talk about around the water cooler at work sells us short as human beings with rich inner lives and imaginative insights to offer each other. I can only speak for myself, but I can think of about five thousand more interesting and more fruitful ways to spend any precious brain energy I have left at the end of the day than watching television. (And more directly speaking, I have often felt -- when a TV is running in a room -- as if an open sewer was backing up into the room.)
In the end, I am only partly interested in the exigencies and quirks of our society and the people who just happen to be walking the earth right now. I am more interested in studying through art and philosophy and history that which links mankind over the ages. That to me is interesting and enriching; the caprices, circumstances, individual tastes, adventures of this actor or that public figure or this company pale in comparison, to put it mildly. If this is the flavor of our public culture, I want little or no part of it.
About books that are challenging to read:
But it is precisely because it is hard that I like it. Francis Bacon said that some books are "to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." I like those few books which takes years to read well. There are a handful of books which I have read many times in my life and never failed to find fresh insights and wisdom as I mature myself. That is why I like books like Plato's "The Republic", Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment" or Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and dislike almost everything by John Grisham, Danielle Steele and Sandra Cisneros or writers like them.
Well, it is not like I dislike them; I simply find them to be lightweight. Their books are like Chinese food that pass through my system in a couple of hours and leave no trace in their wake. Their art does not nourish for a long period of time, and I never hurry to return to them.
About blaming a bad teacher for a lack of education:
Education is an individual responsibility. And even when teachers are bad or biased, the library remains as the great treasure house of knowledge; as Samuel Niger put it, "A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet." Competent, enthusiastic and helpful teachers are always a help; but the responsibility for learning lies primarily with the learner.
About whether the Internet will save education:
I doubt the intractable old issues of literacy and learning will essentially change. For example, what does it matter that the great works of literature and philosophy are now freely accessible online when many people cannot read well enough to understand them? Or if they don't care? Yet for those who do care the Internet will undoubtedly be an invaluable tool for research and communication. ... Information is not necessarily knowledge or wisdom, and too much information simply confuses the mind (especially the young mind). It does not matter how much information by itself can be accessed; it matters how much information can be effectively assimilated and internalized into your life...
About the best books:
...the best thinking is the result of reading the best books. Don't waste your time on mediocrities!
About being a good father:
...I would perhaps repeat one maxim I read recently and which experience has driven home to me in my students again and again: The best thing that a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
About continuing to learn throughout one's life:
...Even after a lifetime of reading you will not even approach understanding the entirety, but if you remain a steady, focused learner you will always know more tomorrow than you did yesterday. That is something....You don't have to be smarter or better read than anyone else, you only have to make yourself better than you were previously.
About the relevance of old books:
When I read Plato, Spinoza, Petrarch, or Emerson I feel like they are talking directly to me across time and culture; and I have no doubt that was their intention when writing. Who cares today about the politics of Regency England in the time of Shelley and Byron? Yet their poetry tells us so much about the ideal and the dour face of authoritarianism. The immortal poets and philosophers make us acutely aware of the permanent things and speak directly to us of the human condition in all its splendor and its misery. Is love any different today than when Byron spoke of it? Has the essential nature of tyranny changed since Shelley originally penned "Ozymandias" at the beginning of the 19th century?
About educating yourself:
If you want to learn, buy the books and start reading. The more you read, the more "learned" you will be - and almost all "difficult" books have excellent introductions which will serve at least as well as any professor's twenty minute lecture.
You have the power to educate yourself without having to rely on anybody else. Want to learn about politics? Read Machiavelli and Thucydides; or read the very divergent positions of Hobbes and Locke. Economics? Read Marx and Adam Smith. Want to learn Spanish? Go find an old Spanish grammar book lying around. And so on and so on. The library is always available to those who wish to learn.
About saving the world:
...I instinctively don't believe in a perfected humanity and the living in experimental communes, etc. I think such are tragically doomed to failure, the result of our misguided longing for utopia. "Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built," claimed Immanuel Kant over 200 years ago, and attempts by man to fashion a Heaven on Earth in some future utopian society by any and all means necessary is inevitably doomed to end in only further cruelty, mass violence, suffering and finally failure. I think it ambitious enough to try to leave this world a little better than I found it. I empathize with Emerson when he tried to "leave the world a bit better..... to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." I ironically think such limited personal goals also have a much better chance at success.
About the 1960's:
I am against the romanticizing of the 1960s. Pop culture, having come of age in the 1960s both America and in much of the rest of the developed world, exploits the adolescent, making adolescence look like something not only normal but sacrosanct with its glorified message of rebellion and rejection. ... I strongly suspect the 60s were a bunch of affluent Western young people doing what young people do and idealizing it into an epic drama. But now it has become big business and the stuff of myth, in my opinion.
About modern art:
...so eager to shock the "bourgeoisie," the "avante garde" artists then imploded in an orgy of destructive narcissism and now its meager descendants desperately grasp at straws to get a reaction, even of disgust, from an indifferent public. Puzzlement is what people experience in the rare occasions they face modern art here at the end of the 20th century, and indifference is much more the norm.
Maybe the 21st century will see a Renaissance in art. I will hope so! But artists will need to stop being so confrontational and wallowing in "oppositional" art. This genre, begun by Shelley and the other Romantics, has long since been played out.
...I would again accede to that old master Voltaire when he said: "Many stupid things are uttered by people whose only motivation is to say something original." This sums up a lot of modern art, in my opinion. Vulgarians talking to barbarians. Today so many artists are overgrown adolescents whose strongest desire is to shock -- these artists want to draw attention to themselves and their work in a society where they are almost universally ignored.
About our current intellectual climate:
Personally, I feel more at home in the 18th and 19th centuries when people still believed in the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
I strongly dislike the pervasive cynicism and extreme skepticism of my age. People seem to confuse cynicism with intelligence, and feel obligated to disdain or "see-through" every topic or issue; too many thinkers today find something wrong with nearly everything and end up believing in next to nothing. To distrust all people's motives doesn't make you smarter than everyone else; it only makes you seem a cranky critic. It is dispiriting; and I cannot believe this will ever lead to a more approximate understanding of the truth of any situation.
About the importance of ideas vs action:
Thought without action is impotent, but action without thought is self-ruinous. On the personal level, we think and learn so as to be happy. "Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men," claimed Mortimer J. Adler. On the social level, we do so to become valuable members of society rather than burdens. Ideas are important - both for good and ill!
Isaiah Berlin once remarked that what philosophers do in the privacy of their studies can change the course of history. Look at John Locke and his role as author of the American revolution and spirit behind the resulting Constitution! Look at Rousseau and the French Revolution! Look at Marx and the Russian Revolution! Humanity lives and dies by ideas: look at Moses, Bhudda, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Mohammad, Aristotle, Confucius, Jefferson, Burke, Newton, Nietzsche! As Thoreau said, "How many people can date a new era in their lives from the reading of a book!" Often these ideas and the books that contain them are twisted and oversimplified for mass-consumption by persons who only half-understand them; and demagogues often use ideas and thinkers for selfish ends to justify any barbarity in the name of an exalted cause. Still, the ideas themselves are important, and they survive the horrors of the day to be studied and re-interpreted by new generations afresh.
About the role and purpose of education in life:
I read recently where the U.S. Department of Education discussed how education brings "higher earnings, better job opportunities, jobs that are less sensitive to general economic conditions, reduced reliance on welfare subsidies, increased participation in civic activities, and greater productivity." This is no doubt true; but since when have we relied on the anemic vocabulary of economists and businessmen to adorn the noble mantle of learning in such prosaic colors? As I have come to see it, the rightful goal of an education (in the fullest sense of the word) is that we can learn to make ourselves happy. This is not an end which something as two dimensional as cash can bring to a person. Money is important resource in providing for oneself, and its surfeit brings hardship and misery. But it does not follow that to be rich means to be happy: life is littered with examples of this.
About educating the working classes:
This is why I disagree so much with socialists today: They advocate in favor for greater benefits for the poor and uneducated ("working class") instead of militating to get them educated in order so that they can find a place in the post-Industrial American economy. Their mindset is stuck back in earlier social arrangements. Today one must get educated or be left in the dust! We import high tech workers from around the world because not enough qualified Americans can be found to satisfy demand. Millions of poor American kids could qualify for those jobs if only they got a decent education! But we have over the past decade or two invested insufficiently in our educational system and have dumbed-down so much of it down in the interests of trying to be all things to all people.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Narnia Trailer
Just 211 days till The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe arrives!
This is a little late, but for those of you who haven't seen it yet, the teaser trailer for "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is online. Go here or check out the official site.
I've been following this movie for a long time (relatively speaking) and all I can say is--wow! If nothing else, the visual aspect of the film looks great. As expected, there appear to be lots of minor changes from the book, but so far nothing important. And I don't expect there will be: C.S. Lewis's stepson Douglas Gresham is working with the project and they are "contractly obligated" to make an acurate adaptation.
Go here to read a review of the trailer that says a lot of things I would have said if I had thought of them.
*Although Disney is involved (doing the marketing), they are not the ones making the film. That honor belongs to WaldenMedia, the company that made "Holes" and "Because of Winn Dixie".
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Monday, May 09, 2005
Montessori and Charlotte Mason
This came up on another message board, so I read a couple of articles about the Montessori method and tried my hand at comparing MM and CM.
I've taken quotes from two Montessori articles (the quotes are highlighted in green) and commented on them. I hope those who have a firmer grasp of Montessori will correct me.
http://www.eaglespeak.org/curric/approach/mont
http://www.jmjpublishing.com/montessori_basics.htm
First of all, it looks like the goals of both MM and CM are the same:
"education, rather than being the rote transfer information, must seek to serve the whole child, and to nurture the human potential of each individual."
"The long-term aim of a Montessori education is to develop productive, culturally literate, life long learners who display a sense of responsibility for self and the global community. Through working in cooperation with the child's nature, it is believed that a sense of wonder and desire to learn can be maintained throughout an individual's lifetime."
CM agreed that the whole child - body, mind and spirit - needed to be included in his education. If education was handled correctly, a child should grow and develop to his full potential and enjoy continuing his education for his entire life.
"Her educational foundations have been tested and have survived because her ultimate goal was to preserve the dignity of the child. How can a child not thrive and learn in a prepared environment that emphasizes respect and integrity? A respect and integrity not only of the materials, but more importantly of the child, and of those with whom he interacts."
CM also placed respect for the child very high. She felt that education, twaddly books and insipid lectures, under-estimated the ability of children.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
"The basic philosophy of Montessori is to 'follow the child.' "
This is similar, yet very, very different. Both present learning opportunities and allow the child to take from it what appeals at the time. But my impression is that MM leans a little towards unschooling, or at least towards child-led schooling - you lay out the materials and the child chooses which of the materials he feels like learning from that day. You provide the opportunity, but the child doesn't have to take it unless he wants to. Or the child may take some and leave the rest. CM is similar, you provide lots of material (in books) and the child assimilates what he needs and discards the rest, he won't latch on to it in his mind, so it won't be in his narrations. The difference is, with CM, each child will be learning from the same materials, they won't be by-passing some books altogether in favor of another book. But each will get something different, a different twist, on the book, his own individual slant. I'm seeing some similarity to unschooling in MM, but I don't know if I'm getting that correct or not.
"In the Montessori environment the materials are designed to be self-correcting. ... it allows the child to learn in an atmosphere of success and positive reinforcement. The child corrects his own errors and works towards the mastery of concepts through repeated manipulations of the materials. His motivation is not for external reward, but for internal fulfillment."
CM also wanted learning to be its own reward. But the self-correcting aspect doesn't sound like anything CM mentioned. Her goal was for children to to educate themselves by learning to extract information from books themselves. So there's an element of independence in both MM and CM. But there, the similarity ends.
MM seems to rely heavily on environment:
"The basics of the Montessori principles can be illustrated with a triangle, where you have the child; you have the directress, or the teacher; and you have the environment which includes the materials. The teacher takes the role of directress, it's one who directs the child to learning. She is responsible for the preparation of the environment. The prepared environment is one that invites the child to grow. It's an attractive environment that will lead the child to a spontaneous exploration and discovery, or self-learning."
It seems like Montessori creates an artificial environment, even to using child-sized props, and Charlotte Mason thought it was better for the child to learn things in his own real environment with real things in the real world. Charlotte Mason didn't go out of her way to specially prepare an optimum environment for children to learn.
"The interrelated, hands-on, sequential Montessori materials provide concrete learning on which the child can build abstract understanding. They are designed to be self-correcting and teach one skill/concept at a time which encourages development of the individual's self-confidence and problem-solving abilities."
CM differs in that it doesn't really set apart specific skills for special focus so the child can develop mastery. CM is more of an all-over-at-the-same-time experience, the child would master skills as they came up in his daily routine - he'd learn to tie shoes because his shoes need to get tied every morning, but there's no special time or anything set aside during school to specifically encourage that. With MM, I get the sense that the child is encouraged to focus on a task to master it. CM also relies heavily on focusing attention, but the focus is more in the mind, attending to assimilation of information, especially from words. MM sounds much more hands-on. The articles talk about color-coding with phonics cards and household tasks, and, in geography, putting together map cut-outs. CM is more about reading about different places and getting a sense of what the people are like in that country, and then the child would be interested enough to go find the country on a map in a book.
What I'm seeing is that MM is more sensory, learning by doing. CM has that element, especially in handicrafts, but learning is primarily the assimilation of ideas (thoughts and concepts), which are processed in the child's mind from books, art, music and his natural environment. The senses seem to have a larger role in a Montessori education than in a CM education.
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