Wednesday, April 30, 2008
In a earlier post, "My Empty Mind", I described a direction I thought education probably would go, based on what is needed, and the direction it has already turned. I guess what I didn't make clear is that I don't think it should go that way, I just think that it will. It will become more and more difficult to justify a classical education.
In high school, I took both French and Latin. Of the two, I found Latin to be the most useful, because with Latin and a smattering of Greek, I can pretty much figure out the meaning of new words. It's easier to read and understand technical papers, medical terms, even other romance languages. The only downside is the disgust one feels when elementary school authorities call the combination cafeteria and auditorium a "cafetorium", with no understanding of what's very very wrong with that word. That scares me.
It's now rare for a high school to offer Latin. It's considered a dead language, so why bother? In my opinion, it's not dead. It lives on everywhere --- except in the schools.
When I went to college, even though my major was math, we were all required to take Philosophy I and II, critical appreciation classes in music, art and literature, Psychology I and II, writing and composition, and several other general non-major classes, and we didn't graduate until we could draw a bow, hit a golf ball, swim, and bat a tennis ball. The goal was to turn out a "well-rounded individual", capable of carrying on conversations on topics other than TV shows and Paris Hilton.
When my daughter went to college, thirty years later, I was looking forward to having philosophical and critical discussions with her about what of the world she was being exposed to. Didn't happen. All of her classes were technical. She was in a five-year engineering program, and it took all five years to fill her with what she needed to know in math, physics, chemistry, and electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering for her architectural engineering degree. There was no room left for "well-rounding".
I believe that with electronic devices and the internet taking over our skills and eliminating our need to remember things, there will be a change in the purpose of education. I do think that critical thinking, communications and research skills, logic and discrimination, and analysis and synthesis are the most important things one should get from an education. The rest is tools to learn those skills.
The challenge is to select the best tools.
I am sure a change in the purpose of education will happen. I am not sure it will be in the right direction. Students will become increasingly resistant to learning things they think they don't need to know, and in our current social climate, they will not be forced to. Unfortunately, I'm not sure our current crop of educators are repositories of "critical thinking, communications and research skills, logic and discrimination, and analysis and synthesis", and I don't think that's going to get better...
...no matter how many meetings they have in the cafetorium.
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