The conversations I’ve had with BelleSon over the past week have been lively, interesting and reconnected me with a part of my past that I’d let go of. I thought I was done with it, but apparently not so. It’s been good for my heart and soul to be part of his reconnection to his family and the things that are good in life. He’s made some promises to me about his behaviour with his teachers and his parents. I know for fairly certain that he’ll break them; not out of malice or forethought, but because he forgets; gets caught up in a moment and can’t get out of it (to paraphrase a certain band).
One thing these conversations have reminded me of is a primary reason I homeschool my children. Some of the reasons he is having trouble in school is because he’s bored. He’s bored because the teachers have been locked in straightjackets are no longer allowed to teach anything but to the SOL tests. The pressure on the teachers to get their classes to measure up to the Virginia State Standards of Learning is incredible. I know teachers in the system and they are bored beyond belief; frustrated that paperwork has come to mean more to the administration in the school system and school boards than the students. Veteran teachers are leaving the system as soon as they possibly can, while the state is making it ever more difficult for young teachers to enter it. It now requires nearly as much education to become an entry level teacher as it does a lawyer without nearly the commensurate pay.
What are the children learning? Are they learning how to learn? No. They are learning factoids. They are learning how to successfully take tests. They are learning to answer questions, but never ask. Never question authority. Never step out of line. Don’t say it in your out loud voice. Just get through.
A classical education is based primarily three stages: grammar (primary), logic (middle), and rhetoric (high). The grammar stage encompasses the years of approximately ages 5 through 10, this is when children want to know what. They learn facts in the manner a sponge absorbs water. Give them facts and lots of them. Learn dates, math facts, historical data, scientific data (age appropriate), read stories, learn to read and spell, learn grammar rules, spelling rules, begin a foreign language (Latin because it’s a root language, but any language is good).
Sometime around 10, though it begins earlier (it’s a process not a breaking point) children begin to want to know why. Why did all these things happen? Why did Queen Elizabeth go after the Spanish Armada? Why did the English want to settle the Americas? Why was Copernicus put in jail? So you spend a lot of time dealing with why questions in the learning process. Taking all of the facts learned in the previous 4 or 5 years and helping the children answer why things happened the way that they did. Or why certain science rules are the way they are. Investigating different theories for why the dinosaurs are extinct, for example.
Then again around 14 or 15 another change occurs and the rhetoric stage begins. This is the stage where children take the what and the why and come up with how. They begin to synchronize the information they have accumulated over the years and put it together in new ways. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes they need a little (ahem) guidance. However, if the teacher is doing his/her job properly the student is making their own conclusions (regardless of the faith or politics of the teacher). The student is learning the valuable skill of being able to assimilate facts and draw their own conclusions without being told what to think by anyone else.
Lest you think this is what is happening in the American public education system, you might think again. It is not and has not been for quite some time. It is becoming a place of zero tolerance, where honors students are expelled for riding in a car with a paintball gun (I know the boy this happened to … it wasn’t his car, he was hitching a ride and it was a paintball gun, off of school property), other students are expelled for taking acetominophin for headaches, where students are suspended for declaring their dislike of a class outside of class time. In high school students who, because of their developmental level, ought to be using the “how” and assimilating their knowledge are still being taught at the “what” level. No wonder they and the teachers are bored.
Ever since the onset of the Industrial Revolution our culture has increasingly engaged in a mindset that items which are made in an efficient, factory atmosphere are better and higher quality than those which are handmade, individuals. Since the Great Depression we have even extended this idea to people. We think that we can factory process people in our schools, in our churches, in our factories, in our large corporations, in our health care systems, and in our farms. But people are glorious individuals, made in the image and likeness of God. They cannot be factory processed. That is the ultimate failure of our educational system. Until we reconcile to that, we will not be able to “fix” it.
