The Trouble with School
We are classical homeschoolers. For the uninitiated, classical homeschooling follows the Trivium. That is that children learn differently during key developmental stages. For example, small children - up to about age eleven or twelve - learn best by repetition and memorization, like little parrots. It's called the grammatical stage.
Right about the time kids reach adolescence, they start questioning everything. This is a stage that most people would agree is difficult. Kids need to learn logic at this age - learn to reason. This is called the dialectical stage.
Once children reach 14 or 15 years old, they arrive at the stage at which they want to have their say. This is the rhetorical stage and the time when kids need to learn how to speak and write eloquently. This is also the stage when they should have gained enough reason to express themselves safely and effectively in their person.
Grammar, Dialectic/Logic, and Rhetoric are tools, not subjects. To paraphrase Dorothy Sayers, subjects are the wood we ply our tools upon.
It is fairly easy to teach children in the grammatical stage and most schools do a reasonable job of this. However, it has been my experience that children don't get enough credit for their intelligence at this stage and can often be given inferior material to work with.
The trouble arises when children move into the dialectical stage. If they are not taught to reason, and reason well, children often lose faith in adults. They stop trusting and become convinced that grown-ups are authoritarian and, to put it bluntly, stupid. This is a tragedy since this is the time that their idealism is in bud and they need dependable guidance to help them become effective forces for good.
As children move once again, from dialectical stage to rhetorical, idealism has begun to take hold. If kids have not been taught how to reason, they make bad choices, perhaps with good intentions. The results of faulty reasoning can be disastrous as young people begin to discover their voices. Without having learned to reason and now, to communicate effectively, nay eloquently, young people have not the skills to communicate their views and often turn to vulgar means. This is the time when we notice teens becoming particularly "mouthy". They wear scary Tshirts, opt for expressing themselves in weird, sometimes dangerous ways.
The lack of dialectical and rhetorical skills can lead to inner frustration, which for a few youngsters, may lead to depression and dangerous behavior. They are entirely too vulnerable to "peer pressure" since they don't have the skills to reason, which gives them no confidence to dissent. Neither do they have the skills to speak effectively about why they've made their choices - with or against the crowd. This is by no means true of all children of traditional schooling, but might explain what is now considered "normal behavior". Now, 'weird behavior' is a subjective notion. I have a lot of tolerance for 'weird', so long as it doesn't get carried into coarseness, rudeness, or dangerous behavior to oneself or to others (physically, mentally, or spiritually).
People have asked me, over the last 10 years of homeschooling my children, how I came to such a decision. My standard answer has always been that I felt that public school education didn't serve my children very well; that public school couldn't provide services for my children's level of intelligence. While that is certainly true, it isn't the whole story. I've never fully been able to articulate, even to myself, what the rest of the story might be (perhaps due to my lack of a classical education).
It came to me in a blinding flash just the other day - the trouble with institutional schools is that pedagogy never advances beyond Grammar stage.
Right about the time kids reach adolescence, they start questioning everything. This is a stage that most people would agree is difficult. Kids need to learn logic at this age - learn to reason. This is called the dialectical stage.
Once children reach 14 or 15 years old, they arrive at the stage at which they want to have their say. This is the rhetorical stage and the time when kids need to learn how to speak and write eloquently. This is also the stage when they should have gained enough reason to express themselves safely and effectively in their person.
Grammar, Dialectic/Logic, and Rhetoric are tools, not subjects. To paraphrase Dorothy Sayers, subjects are the wood we ply our tools upon.
It is fairly easy to teach children in the grammatical stage and most schools do a reasonable job of this. However, it has been my experience that children don't get enough credit for their intelligence at this stage and can often be given inferior material to work with.
The trouble arises when children move into the dialectical stage. If they are not taught to reason, and reason well, children often lose faith in adults. They stop trusting and become convinced that grown-ups are authoritarian and, to put it bluntly, stupid. This is a tragedy since this is the time that their idealism is in bud and they need dependable guidance to help them become effective forces for good.
As children move once again, from dialectical stage to rhetorical, idealism has begun to take hold. If kids have not been taught how to reason, they make bad choices, perhaps with good intentions. The results of faulty reasoning can be disastrous as young people begin to discover their voices. Without having learned to reason and now, to communicate effectively, nay eloquently, young people have not the skills to communicate their views and often turn to vulgar means. This is the time when we notice teens becoming particularly "mouthy". They wear scary Tshirts, opt for expressing themselves in weird, sometimes dangerous ways.
The lack of dialectical and rhetorical skills can lead to inner frustration, which for a few youngsters, may lead to depression and dangerous behavior. They are entirely too vulnerable to "peer pressure" since they don't have the skills to reason, which gives them no confidence to dissent. Neither do they have the skills to speak effectively about why they've made their choices - with or against the crowd. This is by no means true of all children of traditional schooling, but might explain what is now considered "normal behavior". Now, 'weird behavior' is a subjective notion. I have a lot of tolerance for 'weird', so long as it doesn't get carried into coarseness, rudeness, or dangerous behavior to oneself or to others (physically, mentally, or spiritually).
People have asked me, over the last 10 years of homeschooling my children, how I came to such a decision. My standard answer has always been that I felt that public school education didn't serve my children very well; that public school couldn't provide services for my children's level of intelligence. While that is certainly true, it isn't the whole story. I've never fully been able to articulate, even to myself, what the rest of the story might be (perhaps due to my lack of a classical education).
It came to me in a blinding flash just the other day - the trouble with institutional schools is that pedagogy never advances beyond Grammar stage.
posted by Nissa at 3:08 PM
3 Comments:
I respect your decision to home school. You are obviously an intelligent person who has done their research!
Fantastic Post! And a good description of the Trivium.
This fault with public school pedagogy is intentional. Dialetics and logic imply a "right" and "wrong", labels which are inevitably used in ideological terms.
For instance, a teacher could best demonstrate reductio ad absurdum to his students by writing in the blackboard "All Truth Is Relative", then asking his students "Is this a relative truth or an absolute truth?" By doing this, the teacher would've taught his students several valuable lessons about logical arguments and logical flaws.
The problem is that a public teacher, by doing this, is essentially teaching that certain religious beliefs are incorrect. (Atheism, and its progeny, are considered "religions" by First Amendment constitutional interpretation.)
This is why you don't see Logic or Philosophy classes (let alone "Religion" classes) taught in a K-12 public school curriculum, even though the lessons of those subject contain the fundamental building blocks of thinking and living.
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