Norms and Nobility ch 9 and 10

PART II: The Practice of a Classical Education

9 - A Curriculum Proposal (What Might Have Been)

Theorists who have little experience have been allowed to ruin education with new-fangled objective experiments and ideas that leave a lot of important aspects out of education. But humans engaged in real learning can't be measured with objective, testable results. Relationships between student and teacher don't work that way. In order to be certified, teachers are required to take dull classes that don't make them better teachers. After WWII, we were finally able to provide education for all people of every social class - but then schools began to detour from training the whole person to live well, to political objectives of materialistic success and equality that would eliminate poverty. Education began to focus on material rather than spiritual growth. The focus turned to lowering academic standards and raising poor people's skills to get them better jobs. But, for all that, utilitarian education has not ended financial or class inequality. We teach students to desire wealth, but we deprive them of the knowledge that will bring them true contentment. David Hicks then lists suggested books in his ideal curriculum, such as Beowulf, Churchill's history, Keats and Tennyson, Tolkein and other recognized classics.

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10 - Some Questions and Assumptions (What Ought to Be)

I

The chapter opens with a quote by Jose Ortega y Gasset dividing the world into two kinds of people: "those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves" because they can't be bothered trying to improve themselves.

Every educational plan is based on some foundational assumptions. The amount of thought put into the questions and assumptions determines the quality of the resulting education and its goal/vision, and the assumptions need to be regularly assessed and re-evaluated if the plan is going to stay on course rather than dissipating in different directions, catering to the whims of parents, teachers, board members and everyone else. We must ask what ought to be done rather what can be done - we mustn't confine our vision to practical limitations.

Administrators should ask themselves:
What are our priorities?
Does our school reflect those priorities?
Are we influencing/inspiring our surrounding community to grow spiritually/intellectually?
Do we keep our goal/vision for educating the whole person at the forefront, rather than obscuring it with methodology and details?

Teachers should ask themselves:
How are we teaching better writing and communication skills?
How are we teaching students to think critically and clearly?
Are students learning the differences between poetic, scientific, religious and historical truth, and why they are all needed?
What are the important questions, and are students encouraged to ask them?
Does our faculty communicate well together, and do we know what our students are reading/learning outside of school?
Am I a good teacher? Am I still learning and teachable? Do I accept that I don't know everything and encourage my students to seek answers elsewhere?
How well do I really know my students?
How can I get my brightest students to translate knowledge into responsible action instead of arrogance?
Am I accessible to my students? Do I make time for them to seek me outside of class?
Do I assess my teaching and share what I've learned about teaching with other teachers?
Do I understand that education is a whole, and am I a whole person? Do I teach with vision and passion, or am I simply teaching to the test?

Administrators and teachers should ask:
What is the role of parents/home in our school?
Do we allow for change, or are we afraid to grow?
Do we have clearly articulated reasons for our curriculum? Does it fit our vision?
Do we encourage teachers to continue learning, even if it means taking a sabbatical?
Is our school leading the way in some area?
What are our school's ideals for its students? For its teachers? Do we encourage/work towards that?
What is our goal for our graduates? What do we hope to leave them with; what can they look back on later in life?

II

After reminding us that our assumptions are influenced by attitudes and preconcieved ideas that have unwittingly become a part of who we are, David Hicks lists his own "idealistic" assumptions that his ideal education is based on. I don't trust that I've done a fair job summarizing these points; in fact, I suspect I've misrepresented his point at times and oversimplified to the point of butchering. If this looks intriguing, you'll need to read the chapter yourself.

1. Liberal education prepares a person for any job and is more important than training students for a job.
2. No one can do everything; better for students to do a few things well than to fritter time exposing them "to a kaleidoscope of new ideas."
3. Teach basic skills early and refine them later.
4. If taught well, any subject can be learned at any age. (so, start grammar at age 5??)
5. Selectivity of subjects should be done as a school with its vision/goals in mind, not haphazardly by individual teachers/departments.
6. "Begin with the best," teach excellence by using excellent resources and examples.
7. Books are fine, but inspiration comes from a great relationship with the teacher.
8. The bond between teacher and student eliminates the tension between educational freedom and discipline.
9. Provoke questions and stimulate curiosity; don't jump to provide answers too quickly.
10. Teaching students to ask the right questions is more important than being an expert in your subject.
11. Isolating subjects encourages analytical criticism (bad); integrating them encourages wholeness (ggod).
12. Team-teaching, with each teacher only knowing his own subject, discourages integrated wholeness of education.
13. Curriculum must be structured to correspond to the continuity of development (does he mean that difficulty should progress as students mature?)
14. If the curriculum is well-structured and cohesive, students will learn more in less time and retain it better.
15. This kind of cohesive, well-rounded education should eliminate the need for guidance counselors who must fit utilitarian-educated kids (pegs) into the job market (round holes).
16. God and religion are part of the cohesive whole and shouldn't be isolated and removed from education.
17. Schools shouldn't mirror popular culture. They should stick to their own vision.
18. Teachers should reflect the school's commitment to learning by seeking to grow and learn themselves.
19. Education's purpose isn't to prepare us for a job. It is to teach us to live "fully in the present, while we grow in wisdom and in grace, in conscience and in style, entering gradually into 'the good life.'"

Norms and Nobility ch 8 - The Promise of Christian Paideia

No, I didn't forget this book. It's just been busy and I haven't had the time for it. I've also been reading a couple of King Arthur books, which meant that this took a back seat.

8 - The Promise of Christian Paideia (paideia=education)

Why should anyone strive to improve himself through education and morality? The pagan Greeks could never answer this. Their best attempts at self-improvement and balance made them ego-centric, elitist and materialistic. But modern [Christian] classical education has its foundation somewhere between humanism and Christianity, creating a tension between the two. Christ embodied logos (rationality) and mythos (story/parables), which brings both together in a way that I'm skimping too much to explain well.

Greek pagans and Christian both agree that self-centeredness is a big problem. Ancient classical education strived to make students focus on something other than self, like duty and sacrifice. Ancient philosophy tried to help men focus outside the self through reason. Ancient rhetoric sought to build character through literature examples. Ancient art tried to draw man out of himself through focus on a better ideal and inspiration to live divinely. They had the right idea, but they lacked Christ to empower them and make them able to be better people through love.

Christ gave men the 'why;' the purpose for being better: in order to be perfect, like Christ. Christianity answered the questions the Greeks had been unable to reconcile, such as whether man is good or bad (the answer is that he was created good in God's image, but sinned and fell from perfection.) Man can choose to live according to God's law, but he more often chooses to be self-centered. His errors are avoidable sins rather than noble, fated tragedies that are out of his control. Christianity offered hope instead of unescapable fate.

Modern utilitarian education doesn't offer any high-striving idealistic attempt at self-improvement, or a Christian hope-based striving to be better. It offers a value-less secular model of relativism. There's no ancient complexity or Christian mystery; it's all analytical data. In trying to get away from the religious blind faith of a divine God, modern educaton replaces it with the religious blind faith of science that disconnects responsibility from what is learned/known. The student's education doesn't help him live better or be better.

But Christian classical education offers a focal point apart from self (Christ), a reason/purpose for being a better person, and an ideal to strive for (again, Christ). There's a whole-ness to it. Learning isn't an end in itself for the sake of knowledge; it's means to holiness and right living. It teaches love for God rather than egotism.

Modern education doesn't acknowledge any supernatural force; the mind and facts are all that matters. But ancients and Christians recognized something beyond the chemical/physical/material world. Christians relate it to faith and divine revelation. Faith is regarded as an aid to understanding, not a hindrance that opposes fact and intellect.

Ancients wanted the intellect to influence the will - learning truth should make people want to do the right thing. But it took Christianity to connect knowledge with will. After Christ, there were no mythological supernatural heroes because he was the perfect and ideal person -- he couldn't be topped. After him, saints were the new heroes. They were like Christ, the new hero, but not quite as ideal. They combined faith and knowledge with their will by trying to live out what they knew was right.

We can see the final results of ancient classical education in the book of Acts: in Athens by that time, the people only cared to hear the latest ideas. The focus wasn't on truth anymore. Learning had become trivial, and the people had become superstitious. Christianity gave them something worth learning, and something worth learning for. We need Christian classical education today to prevent students from becoming smug in their knowledge of data but incapable of being wise and responsible.

Norms and Nobility ch 7 - The Ennobling of the Masses

Classical education has traditionally been only for the privileged. But even the masses need more than a wage-earning job. "There must be some nobler purpose and a higher sense of value infusing society's material efficiency and informing common people, whose lives are consumed in the daily contest for material well-being." Some say that an educated elite preserves the culture (art, politics, religion, etc) and thus the elite require a classical education. But in our technical society, this could cause a rift between the elite and the masses. After all, who decides which people get to be elite, and on what basis? And the working class may view the elite and culture as unnecessary to their lives and to the world.

In a democracy, every person has the same right to education and access to culture. Democracy runs the risk of too much freedom, causing anarchy, or too much privilege, causing laziness. Democracy can only flourish if everyone is educated and uses their leisure time worthily to reach his full potential. Culture is the right and property of everyone, not just an elite few. Man is neither the custodian of culture, nor a utilitarian worker bee. He is an individual who needs to know how to make right decisions and manage himself, and such a population is a benefit to any society.

What is the purpose of giving everyone in a society a classical education?
1) It addresses the needs "of the whole man" (a very CM objective!), bringing balance to his individual, political and religious sides so that he will be happy to cooperate because he recognizes that his cooperation helps everyone (a cyclical relationship?)
2) It teaches people to weigh and consider all sides of an issue by making use of accessible information, and make logical judgments. When information is freely accessible and people are conscientious and confident about making careful decisions for themselves, democracy works.
3) It helps people to value the greater reason for democracy rather than simply insisting on their own personal freedom for self-interest. Currently, in the name of freedom and democracy, individual rights and special interest groups can tyrranize everyone else. That's not what democracy is supposed to be for.
4) It teaches students to value the rights they owe to others, not just their own rights (another idea CM talked about.) Only a person with self-control who knows truth and acts responsibly should have the freedom to act on what he knows is right. Freedom shouldn't be a license to do "whatever." People need to be trained for this kind of responsibility; the alternative is this: "The state and the marketplace, looking upon education as a means of ensuring a pliant and productivity citizenry, will insist that the school offer a utilitarian education in keeping with their greedy desires." Democracy without responsible people regresses to people concerned only with comfort and self-satisfaction, even at the expense of others.

Norms and Nobility ch 6 - On the Necessity of Dogma

Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, harmonics, astronomy) and trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) were the seven liberal arts of ancient classical education. In the middle ages, logic replaced dialectic because they thought they already had truth and didn't need to continue wondering and searching for it. Teens still go through this process of questioning and re-assessing their beliefs -- that's what dialectic is, though on a smaller and less deliberate scale. Socrates asked his students questions to niggle at their beliefs in a softened way, because anything heavy-handed is rejected without consideration by the mind. In the process, the conscience is fine-tuned. Dialectic helps the student to sort dogma from truth. (Hicks goes into 'dialectic' a lot more in this section.)

Dialectic starts with dogma. It's the opposite of Descartes, which starts with nothing and slowly adds whatever can be proved. A classical student has to accept (and love?) some dogma early on to give him material to be dialectic about later, as he seeks to verify it. The ancient classical student was expected to take on his teacher's beliefs and assess them for himself when he matured. These days, Descartes is our modern educational model (Descartes is analytical; assessing beliefs is based on doubt first) and today's teachers aren't supposed to display any bias, much less expect students to follow suit. Dialectic students never stop questioning their own beliefs and ideas. Unlike Descartes, dialectic questioners must choose one side of an argument before they can dialect about it. Descartes stands aloof, analyzing without committing to any one side, and without making value judgments before analyzing. The Descartes value-free analyzing is useful in science, but not a good way for organic beings to live and find meaning or purpose. Hicks explains how this kind of analyzing encourages knowledge without ethical responsibilty, but I'm not sure how that works, and I don't care enough to re-read to figure it out; I'll trust his conclusion.

Modern teachers sometimes think they can get students to think and reflect dialectically with classical literature, but then they ruin it all by handling the literature analytically, requiring students to tear it apart. (If you're busy analyzing literature, you're not being dialectic or asking the right questions.) Analysis is far too easy for teachers to revert to because it can be tested. Everyone is so afraid of teachers sharing their own belief for students to question, that students are taught nothing and instead asked to analyze everything as if it was all science.

Communists have focused solely on man's class status and material needs/abilities, while Americans (until recently) have accepted every individual's right and ability to think dialectically and ask the important questions about life and meaning -- regardless of their social class. Hegel, Marx and Mao viewed man as all chemical reactions and physical sensations. Education in their opinion, even reading, is to teach utilitarian skills. They ignored man's need to find purpose beyond his immediate utilitarian activity. But man is more than his utilitarian role in society and he has a right to find meaning in life.

Norms and Nobility ch 5 - Saving the Appearances

Science as a school subject is a relatively new concept. Philosophically, the changing nature of the world made the ancients doubt the reliability of repeatable observation, which is the basis for scientific experiment. They put more stock in man's reason than in nature's stability. Truth was to be found in logic, not empirical evidence. They wanted to rationalize a simple explanation for what they saw in nature. Technology and devices were seen as hands-on -- inferior to the mind.

Man's mind and spirituality were seen as being parallel to God (because He made man in His image). Thus, intellect was seen as being on a higher plane than physical. Nature and technology just weren't as important to the ancients, unless you had a need to know (such as a doctor's need to know anatomy). If you had leisure, it was considered more blessed to spend it contemplating than experimenting.

Math was thought to illustrate God's divine mind (example: a perfect triangle), so it was acceptable to think about math because it helped men to understand God. In a classical curriculum, math is not mainly a practical subject you learn to balance your checkbook or double a recipe. Its purpose is to draw men closer to the mind of God.

Ancient thinkers felt that science and technology led to greed and laziness (inventions ease man's work and make him money.) If science was studied, it was to make what they observed line up with what they had reasoned to be true or find a way to make it parallel something in man's Ideal character. Bacon and Descartes were the first to value science for itself. We view technology as a way to control and get ahead; ancients only valued it if it helped inspire worthy character. Modern technology has allowed man to sin more -- birth control, nuclear weapons, media haven't really brought us closer to truth. Modern man hopes that technology will fix man, but ancients thought man should focus on self-improvement rather than ways to ease his workload or increase productivity.

Modern man doggedly tells himself that his gadgets and progress are making the world a better place, but man is really losing something he once had as technology makes us more rushed and confused. We can put a man on the moon, but we're worse than ever at controlling our greed. Our view of education is strictly utilitarian -- to help students get better jobs.

But today's educators see classical education as old-fashioned and irrelevant. They don't care what a student reads as long as he's reading. They never ask whether a student's book is making him a better person, making him ask the right questions. Thinking through issues isn't testable, though, so such learning is deemed not worth doing.

Norms and Nobility ch 4 - The Tyrannizing Image

Ancient teachers strived towards being as close as they could to the Ideal, and everyone knew what the Ideal was, and knew whether the teacher was living up to it or not. Even today, although we don't acknowledge the Ideal, we judge teachers by how well they live up to it. But few can really define what exactly that Ideal is. It's a perfect balance between the mythologized hero and reason. Although we can't always describe it, we recognize it when we see someone who embodies it.

You can't teach it by having student memorize its characteristics. But you can show examples of it in stories -- such as mythological heroes. Discussion clarifies what makes a person heroic and challenges students to imitate. The goal is for students to reach as close to the Ideal as they can.

Times change, and some might argue that the Ideal man changes, too -- but it really doesn't. What's good and right and true in one culture will always be good and right and true. The Ideal has been questioned and challenged over history so that we think it's out-dated. Even truth itself is thought relative. Descartes maintained that only what can be proved scientifically should be believed -- and not all truths can be proved scientifically. An Ideal can't be proved scientifically, therefore, it's considered a relative concept.

Our modern education demands measurable success. Our dilemma is that we can't prove sucess on tests by raising examples of Ideal men so we claim that such a concept has little value, yet in the back of our minds, we admire strive for that Ideal.

Ch 3 - Teaching the Father of the Man

More on Norms and Nobility (David Hicks)

Before the Roman era, classical teachers weren't as caught up in political power and money. Their focus was on ideas and balance and curiousity - much like Socrates. Socrates didn't resignedly accept things the way they were as the Sophists did. Sophists were more concerned with appearances.

Isokrates was another teacher. He rejected the idea that children needed their free, uninhibited childhood sheltered from the demands of adulthoods. Isokrates looked ahead at what kind of adults they needed to be, and focused on preparing their minds for the rigors of thinking maturely. Our own experience tells us that children usually want to be grown-ups, and trying to keep them in childhood is a bad idea. Children cherish memories of progress and achievements they made in childhood more than their memories of carefree play, and that period is the ideal time to instill virtue rather than fritter away their time on idle pleasure. Isokrates gave students an ideal image of adulthood to rise to, not a pampered existance of frivolity -- nor a child-centered education that makes children self-centered.

Ancient people knew which qualities were valued in a man, so they knew what to teach. Teachers had a goal they could urge their students toward, unlike moden man who doesn't exactly know what makes a man virtuous. The period of childhood was just a step towards the all-important adult the child would become. Childhood wasn't an idyllic place to stop and dwell. Teachers would sometimes teach the hardest things first (whereas we would wait until the child was older.) David Hicks remembers his friend's piano teacher who made his friend learn a Mozart minuet as his first lesson instead of learning simple beginner pieces. But his friend went on to playing Bach and Chopin, while Hicks lost interest because of his banal lessons. Knowledge-based education places more importance on the value of what's being learned (and the child's ability to rise to the occasion) than on the child-led concern of the child's readiness to learn it.

Knowledged-focused learning (rather than child-focused) gives teacher and student a common bond of shared content and shared activity as they learn together. Ancient teachers became real mentors; there was a real emotional bond between them. Our perverted society views all bonding, passionate love as physical mating, so we can't understand the love between teacher and student as they did. Within that love, teachers expounded knowledge by talking rather than by having students read books. The teacher was fully trusted to make his students wise and virtuous. Today's teachers learn how to appeal to the immature mind instead of expecting the child to try to grasp the teacher's more educated mind. Today's lesson plans that expound the tiniest details of information give the appearance of knowledge rather than truly helping the student to learn the balanced whole.

A Classical Understanding of Language

My summary of Norms and Nobility by David Hicks

2 - The Word is Truth - A Classical Understanding of Language

Myths show that, however much myths themselves don't make sense, man has a drive to make sense of what he observes in the world. Mythos (man's imagination trying make sense of the world) and logos (man's reasoning attempts to make sense of the world) are two sides of man's mind. Myth, as far as I can make out from this chapter, is like poetry in capturing everyman's feelings and giving them added dignity and beauty. Job's suffering couldn't be rationalized, but in the poetic terms of his dialog with God, Job was able to come to terms with his 'why' questions.

Plato defined and clarified the difference between mythos and logos. It's hard to express reasoning with words because old stigmas and associations stay with words even after their meaning has changed. Words are too fluid and evolving to pin them down and make them express reason, except when words are used in a legal or scientific sense. In education, words have to be used in that precise sense to have any testable standard. So science becomes emphasized over literature, which is more emotional. Schools find it easier to teach scientific principles than vague values like bravery and justice.

Classical education recognizes the power that a word has to inspire, even when the results aren't testable. Character is caught, not taught, through imaginative words rather than rigid scientific terms. Words have power that goes beyond what's observable on a graph.

Norms and Nobility ch 1 Virtue is the Fruit of Learning

Part I - The Idea of a Classical Education

1 - Virtue is the Fruit of Learning (another four part-er)

In Victorian England, only the wealthy received some version of a 'classical education,' so classical education and privilege came to be seen as the same thing. By 1900, others started coming up with various theories (mostly utilitarian) to educate the less privileged, and their models were far removed from classical and its stigma of luxury. But real classical education, which is based on "inquiry" that involves curiosity and imagination, isn't limited to any one time or place or class. It trains the mind to keep asking so that a classically trained student never stops learning, and is able to follow a concept to its logical conclusion and pronounce it good or bad. Since "nature doesn't tolerate a void," the young mind is first filled with a core of knowledge using a set curriculum. That way his mind has raw material to inquire about. The curriculum should encourage logical reasoning and spark curiosity and inquiry. The student will probably be taught the right thing to do according to his culture's highest ideals (which might be considered dogma), but he will be invited to test whether it really is right against alternative viewpoints.

Aristotle is "our best introduction to the idea of a classical education." He thought that the goal of education was to produce "happy, well-adjusted individuals" with leisure time to enjoy a good life, and he saw this happening in state-run schools so that it wouldn't be limited only to the privileged classes. Learning and knowing must result in right actions, because knowing isn't passively collecting data, but actively doing. Happiness comes from recognizing good, loving beauty and pursuing excellence and moderation -- harmony with the laws of the land, and virtue. The community's political system is obligated to provide this kind of education to ensure this happiness for the sake of the community's corporate good, but not for utilitarian uses (utilitarian: making productive workers). The state owes the individual a good life of harmony. It's not the other way around: the individual is not a cog in the wheel of the state to be trained/indoctrinated to be its servant or slave.

Cultures down the ages have always taken it for granted that virtue is something that can and should be learned at school. That was never questioned or doubted. Everything else (math, science, language) was secondary. Today, that's reversed: teaching virtue is pushed aside to make room for facts and disciplines. We tell students that they can have luxuries that will buy them happiness by learning technical skills that will result in a good job. In so doing, society has shot itself in the foot -- virtue and constant self-improvement have given way to practical utilitarianism, and the result is greedy, selfish people who don't care about charitable works that benefit the community. The only virtue we demand and teach anymore is basic reasonable civility so as not to be an annoyance to society.

Ancients cultures debated whether virtue was inherent in man and only needed saving out of flawed society and bringing out the virtue within him, or whether man lacked virtue and needed it to be taught and developed in him. Technology might develop more virtue in man if it's already there, but technology could be dangerous in the hands of men who have no inherent virtue. Plato's dialectic method of questioning was supposed to bring out the wisdom already in men, and it was only the man living the unexamined life, no longer questioning and analyzing his own motives, who unwittingly did evil acts because he was ignoring the virtue inside him. Aristotle, on the other hand, thought that right actions were what developed goodness in man. Just thinking about goodness does nothing; it's the bodily behavior that makes a person good. That debate kept everyone focused on the nature of virtue and how best to produce virtuous people. Today, we no longer debate it. We just ignore virtue altogether and teach uniformity -- everyone the same.

Norms and Nobility Prologue

I've just started Norms and Nobility by David V. Hicks. I think the book is going to make a case for classical education. This is a 4-part Prologue.

David Hicks begins by talking about a book called "The Rector of Justin" by Louis Auchincloss, in which a man tries to build a school where students will learn to know, serve and reproduce what is good and realize that their knowledge carries responsibility. But the school fails. In our materialistic culture, is such an education possible? Social theories, important-sounding scientific research and faddish educational models have replaced life's important questions about truth and justice, and old fashioned common sense. Today's people are more fluent in computer language than with age-old questions about what really matters. Our experts are not only inexperienced about wisdom; they aren't even asking the right questions, but people are too awed by their intelligence to notice. They are like raw college graduates steering a ship who are too full of their books and technical skill to respect time-honored experience. We know schools are failing and students are getting involved in drugs and bullying, but we don't know what to do about it. Hicks is going to offer a solution based on ancient classical education. Science should serve and supplement education, not the other way around.

Education reflects what its culture believes about the nature of man, and, whether stated or not, every person who writes about education is influenced by and espouses what he believes to be man's nature, value and purpose. Ancient cultures had an ideal heroic model that they felt man must aspire to, although they varied about whether that ideal was based on bravery or loyalty or duty or whatever. Art, history, science were tools to encourage bravery or duty in the student. But today's experts call such ideas unscientific. The ancients thought that attempts to improve the world with science were arrogant. It was man who needed the improvement. Even math was thought useful only as far as it helped to transform man. Our modern emphasis on using technology to change the world -- and even society and man himself -- is the wrong priority and "can only lead to mental confusion, physical destruction, and spiritual damnation." The problem isn't the world; it's within man himself. Educating man to fix his opinions or environment or circumstances won't fix the evil nature within him.

Our education strives to control our environment [engineer bridges, re-route rivers, genetically modify crops, cure disease, build a business empire] rather than answer age-old questions about our purpose in life. 'Ought' has been replaced with 'can.' Focusing on what seems do-able with science seems more productive than reflecting over questions that make us uncomfortable. Medieval men saw God as being perfect and far off, and their own world as corrupt, they were looking in at heaven from outside God's realm. Modern man sees himself as enlightened and looking from the inside out. Older cultures saw man as a servant who dared not exalt himself to the heights of his deities. Modern man doesn't feel he is out of place to rule nature and rule others.

Education today focuses on the operation of 'can' instead of the normative 'ought:' we exhaust possibilities without questioning whether such a thing ought to be done. And our lives reflect this - the same thinking was at the root of the 1960's attempt to use technology to subdue inequality in Vietnam without asking whether it was a good idea, or simply presumptuous. We teach communication skills to score well on the SAT (and other utilitarian reasons) and rarely ask why communication is necessary for us as people and as a society. [If a person can get a decent job and raise a family, does it really matter if he's illiterate?] We raise brilliant intellectuals who are too prideful to let a bad idea go. We strive to make men more efficient and productive at building and carrying and figuring, as if this present existence is all there is, and ignore his spiritual side. Good education shouldn't just teach what people want to know -- it should teach them what is right to want.

New Book

I'm starting a new book. For the moment, I'm just going to paste a couple quotes from its Preface without even divulging the title of the book...

Having now had an opportunity to study schools as a headmaster as well as a teacher, I would argue that the teacher, not the curriculum, needs to be the focus of reform. The greatest value of the curriculum proposed in this book, I now believe, is that it sustains and nurtures teachers as practioners of the art of learning while discouraging non-learners from entering the profession. (What non-inquisitive, discipline-bound person would want to teach in such a school as I have outlined in the second part of this book?) The classroom should be no place for teachers who are afraid of change, who are willing to talk about ideas ad nauseum but unwilling or unable to act on them, to experiment, to grow, to absorb new disciplines, to teach beyond themselves, their college lecture notes, their State-approved lesson plans, their textbooks.

[My book] presents a formidable challenge to schools controlled by administrators and teachers who simply want to be left alone and allowed to maintain old habits in the midst of a rapidly changing world. Some will defend their traditionalist stance as a means of protecting time-honored values or of avoiding educational fadism, but underneath, I suspect, indolence and insecurity have not a little to do with it At any rate, this type of conversation is contrary to the spirit of learning. Schools are places where students learn because they are places where teachers learn. Only a school (and by extension a curriculum) that encourages teachers to be always learning will keep its teachers fresh and fearless and its students happy and motivated in their studies, ready to test their lessons against life.

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There is a disturbing trend these days, in this era of hyphenated Americans, to seek to motivate students and to build their self-esteem by devising ethnocentric studies tailored to their race or creed or to some high-sounding social agenda. Until now, the American school -- for all its shortcomings -- has embraced the idea of a common American culture and has acted as a powerful centripetal force in American society. The new craze for ethnocentric studies, however well intentioned, erodes the school's power to help our nation forge out of many, one.

American culture is, like all cultures, derivative. Its sources are sundry and varied, but they are not different for Latinos and Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans. It is one culture characterized by racial and ethnic diversity and, yes, by predominantly Western and European influences, but none of these sources or influences is as worthy of study as the common landscape and history, the shared political creed and social identity, the mutual aspirations and disappointments of the American people. Intellectuals, the media, and ethnic leaders tend to dwell upon our differences, which are often more interesting (for some reason) than our similarities. This makes it all the more important for schools to define in their curricula a common American culture and in this way to frame the debate that will naturally arise in a pluralistic society like our own.

One must ask, if our schools fail to believe in a common American culture and to teach it, what will become of us? This question would certainly perplex the ancient whose language, perhaps wisely, could not distinguish between education and culture. It is -- as this book attests -- the sacred duty of the school not only to believe in our common inheritance, but to teach the unfolding truth of that inheritance. Respect for truth -- not the self-esteem of our students or our regrets about the past or our hopes for the future -- must guide us in the quest for that common inheritance and in our definition of the curriculum.