Wise School Choice: Pedagogy is Primary
Image by Ken Haines from Pixabay
I don’t know if school choice was a thing when you were growing up or whether it was like the Model T which Henry Ford declared you could have in any color you wanted, so long as it was black. I went to a public school mandated by my place of residence—no choice. Like it or lump it. My parents and I had to make the best of what the system was built on. We were small cogs in a vast machine, so to speak.
Things are different today. Educational choices are available almost everywhere in the USA even for those in lower income brackets in the form of charter schools and even vouchers in some places. So how do you choose wisely?
What follows is an approximate transcript of my podcast, “Preschool Pedagogy is Primary.”
The late Sir Ken Robinson said in 2013,
“There are three principles on which life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education.”
You want the best for your children (and grandchildren in my case). Does your choice of an educational environment help them to thrive?
Ken Robinson’s critique of the culture of education clearly hit a nerve. His first TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” was, at the time of his death 2020, the most watched TED talk of all time.
Robinson’s three educational principles are:
Create learning environments with sufficient breadth to align with the reality that humans are a very diverse lot.
Education needs to fan innate curiosity.
All humans are creative if properly nurtured.
If you’re a long-time listener to this podcast, you know I’ve previously critiqued the way some people label themselves as creatives as though that distinguishes them from the rest of humanity. Because every human is made in the image of God, who is the Creator, we are all wired for small ‘c’ creativity in some realm. Ken Robinson maintained that creativity can be taught and defined it:
Creativity is "the process of having original ideas that have value".
The culture of education in general kills creativity by its industrialization of learning. Cohorts of students of the same age span are treated as relatively homogenous batches to be processed—so much for diversity. The rigidity of this approach has little toleration for curiosity because it is unpredictable, non-uniform, and would slow the batch processing down. Since curiosity is the mainspring of learning, education sooner or later cuts the heart out of motivation to learn. This jaded view is nearly universal by middle school.
This is a tragedy of thwarted potential. Children are invariably curious. If their curiosity is cultivated by their parents and teachers, it erupts in a Vesuvius of “Why?” questions. Children are natural learners from their first months of life and require only nurture and a healthy diet of ideas and experiences to reach their potential.
In the public-school arena, there may be localized exceptions to these harrowing generalities, but usually the exceptions are individual classrooms with gifted teachers who are swimming upstream against a mandated curriculum and testing regimen. When your child moves to the next grade, those advantages are likely to evaporate. Don’t kid yourself that because you are in a rural school district and the teachers are nice conservative people that they have the freedom, the vision, or the stamina to nurture your child as an individual. In this podcast I’ll confine the focus to optimizing learning, but it’s also true that your child’s worldview is being formed. I’ll deal with that aspect in the next podcast.
For full disclosure, let me tell you about my educational background and my choices for my children. I went to public schools in Utah until I went to college. There was no Christian school option or other private school available, and homeschooling was unheard of. In kindergarten through 2nd grade, I did not learn to read but there was a breakthrough when we moved to a new school in my 3rd grade year, and I was exposed to phonics. Pretty soon I was reading on grade level, and I muddled along. I was always puzzled after PTA meetings in elementary school when my parents would return to tell me that my teacher said I wasn’t working up to my potential. I tried to focus in class and I wasn’t a goof-off. I always did my homework. How can anyone else know what I can potentially do?
In 6th grade, evidently because of this phantom potential, I was chosen for an advanced track in Math and English despite my C+ performance. In the advanced track I didn’t find any of my courses especially stimulating and my grades hovered around B-. Something happened when I entered the 9th grade, and I still don’t know what it was. I caught fire academically. From that point on, I made all A grades, and I loved learning and made plans to enter university and study biology.
While at a Christian college studying biology in the late 1960’s, I became burdened for Christian education. Christian schools were few in number, probably fewer than 50 in the whole U.S. Christian schools had to fight the educational establishment to exist and there was lots of litigation over curriculum, teacher qualifications, and accreditation. Parents had to sacrifice financially to send their kids, but many tightened their belts or took on an additional job to do so because of the secular agenda of the public schools.
When I graduated in 1971, my first job was teaching science at a Christian school for grades 7, 9, 10, and 11. After that job, I went to graduate school with the intent of teaching biology in a Christian college after getting my PhD. I fulfilled that ambition, and it fulfilled me for over 45 years.
As a parent, I sent all five of my children to Christian school K-12. Homeschooling only started to be a thing once most of my children were in college so we never went down that road.
By contrast with my choice for my children, my 14 grandchildren have had a diversity of educational experiences. Some families have used the public school, some have used Christian schools, Montessori schools, and others, home schooling.
Image by ParentiPacek from Pixabay
As you consider school choice for your children, let’s start by recognizing that children are born natural learners. A desire to learn is something to be nurtured and that must be the guiding principle in your educational choices. Small children are invariably curious. They constantly ask “why” and they won’t be brushed off by superficial answers. One question leads inexorably to the next “why.”
Curiosity and passion for learning become less than universal in elementary school. Children who have behavior problems in school are often children who are bored with being bathed in facts of dubious relevance to their lives. Other children are frustrated with the pace of learning which assumes the cohort in the classroom is mostly homogeneous in their interests and attainment.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio in Pexels
Middle school and high school further winnow the pool of engaged students. Most are tired of academic gamesmanship. The questions they care about aren’t being addressed in their fact heavy classrooms and the curriculum doesn’t expect them to generate questions. Supportive homes, parents who are still learning, and career aspirations carry a group of survivors through to college entry, but with little expectation that learning will look different going forward.
University should be transformative—but it isn't for most students. Transformative in that it changes immature thinking into adult thinking about issues of significance. Universities really have their work cut out for them when students are only there for a credential. Burned-out students who have been hosed down from K-12 with “information” are not in the best condition for ignition to occur. But—speaking from experience—”combustion” is entirely possible! Learning is possible for anyone, regardless of their previous academic track record. It is never too late! As someone who has ignited a passion for learning that lasts in hundreds of my students and in my fellow faculty, I’m hoping this podcast will reawaken wonder in you and renew your hope for your children and grandchildren.
Let me focus the discussion of school choice by asserting that preschool and K-3 are crucial. Starting well sets a pattern that can make all the difference. It is during preschool and kindergarten that curiosity should be fanned and channeled, and rudimentary concepts developed through student exploration as a foundation for future learning. In some educational schemes parents are content to let their child play and encounter the world haphazardly. These parents view learning as innately pushy for young minds that just aren’t ready for schooling—at least until they are six or seven. Still other parents favor a rigid and pressure-packed curriculum that pushes the child to memorize mountains of facts that impress parents and grandparents alike. Certainly, every child is an individual and that diversity should guide the choice of preschool and kindergarten. Several of our children learned to read joyfully before kindergarten with no pressure other than sibling rivalry. One of my grandsons that my wife and I homeschooled learned to read by the time he was four and was also extremely proficient with numbers. This was entirely fueled by a curriculum that expected him to take the initiative and bursts of structured academics seldom added up to more than 90 minutes total each day. Take your cue from your child.
On a broad level the choices boil down to two major categories. Either others will teach your child, or you will teach them. I realize that homeschooling is not an option for many for a variety of reasons: the need for two incomes being paramount, followed by the perceived teaching acumen of the parents. If you can find a way to tighten your belt for the beginning years of your child’s life and if you are willing to learn how to teach using good resources that are now available, these early years can be some of the most rewarding you will ever experience.
Even more important than who will teach your child is how they will be taught. Yes, I mean the curriculum, but more fundamental is a pedagogy informed by how people learn. This is the 9th season of my podcast and I’ve dealt with this in detail in the past. I suggest you go to my website deepanddurable.com to look at blog posts and an index of all the podcasts to explore relevant concepts in more detail. Today I’ll address just a few issues that for me at least are deal breakers with various early education pedagogies that have enthusiastic supporters. Prepare for the possibility that I might step on your toes. I might be wrong but hear me out and entertain the opportunity (however slim) for personal transformation.
The most basic aspect of the brain is its relentless search for patterns that impose some order on what William James called the “blooming buzzing confusion” of our experiences. When we see a pattern, our minds collect the examples we encounter and form a category which then gets an appropriate language label. Underneath words are concepts and concepts are perceived regularities. The brain does not do well with things that are just a one-off; it tries to connect them with previously learned concepts. We formulate concepts all our lives, but the most intense period is from birth until about four. Most of the concepts from that period are of physical objects and some phenomena. Dogs and the possibility that they will bite are examples. The child then moves on increasingly to things that are non-material and more abstract such as emotional states like sadness and systems (spheres of authority for example).
Teaching that leverages the brain’s design emphasizes the formation and enrichment of conceptual categories and the ways in which they connect with other concepts. A concept is an idea with all the potential inherent in the world of ideas. In conflict with this focus, most preschool and elementary curricula focus on the retention of facts. The mechanism of retention is usually memorization. I have nothing against facts as such, but facts are the result of someone else’s thinking and attempting to retain them without constructing and logically connecting the relevant conceptual categories violates the way the brain remembers. Durable memory is intended to be the result of understanding. The fact that most of what we adults memorized has not been retained is mute testimony to the vapidity of doing an end run on the brain’s operating system.
With that background refresher, let me compare two popular approaches to homeschooling. The first is Classical Christian education and the second is the Charlotte Mason approach. These approaches are also reflected in brick-and-mortar schools with teachers and classes. Classical Christian education is enjoying something of a renaissance. Classical Conversations has made it operational for homeschoolers, but devotees in all places consistently trace the roots of their approach to an essay by Dorothy Sayers called “The Lost Tools of Learning” given as a public address in 1947. Dripping with sarcasm, Sayers first words were,
That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, and whose life of recent years has been almost wholly out of touch with educational circles, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. . . . There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing—perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing—our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.
That what follows for nearly 20 pages in its written form should serve as the touchstone of truth about pedagogy all these years later is curious indeed. What Sayers attempts to resurrect is an approach to learning from the Middle Ages the antiquity of which she imagines gives it time-honored credibility. This is a foil because she plays “fast and loose” with that tradition to quote one of her ardent supporters.
The Medieval approach employs as its foundation the Trivium consisting of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. These in order constitute three phases in the schooling of children. After the Trivium the student encounters subjects in the Quadrivium. Young children begin with Grammar, but the term is too limiting as we currently use it. Language is built on grammar the advocates say. Just so history is built on “dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities,” Sayers says, and she continues, “Geography will similarly be presented in its factual aspect, with maps, natural features and visual presentment of customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on.” Susan Wise Bauer, a well-known modern advocate of classical education says of the grammar stage,
“Memorization and repetition are the primary methods of teaching; children are expected to become familiar with a certain body of knowledge, but they aren’t yet asked to analyze it. Critical thinking comes into play during the second stage of education, the logic (or ‘dialectic’) stage.”
The most foundational of the so-called lost tools of learning are memorization and repetition with no immediate need for analysis or logic? I submit those counterfeits were never lost. Critical thinking can’t be deferred until the logic stage which Bauer estimates to begin around 4th grade. Fact memorization without logical justification is not likely to last (hence the interminable and boring emphasis on review that begins most school years) and recall of the empty shell convinces most students they already “know” this and there is no need to probe more deeply.
Classical Conversations makes this year’s long grammar phase crystal clear. I’m quoting here, “the Five Core Habits of Grammar [can be used] to teach students how to learn the grammar of anything. The habits are these:
Naming: Know the appropriate word.
Attending: Differentiate the word from other known ideas.
Memorizing: Remember the definition to build a knowledge base.
Expressing: Use the body and senses to share knowledge.
Storytelling: Use words to share knowledge.”
This is the vice of verbalism as Mortimer Adler characterized it. The word is an empty shell. Note the confusion of naming the word in #1 with differentiating the word from other ideas in #2. Words are mere shorthand for ideas and the ideas are primary as they reference a set, a pattern, in other words—a concept. Merely memorizing the definition (#3) doesn’t give you a knowledge base since knowledge is “justifiable belief” and the student has only a memorized definition.
Because of the focus in the grammar phase on building blocks without answering the natural how and why questions, I’m tempted to call this phase “drill, baby, drill.” It is a non sequitur for Classical Conversations as it extols the grammar stage to maintain, “The natural imagination and curiosity of children must be embraced and encouraged at this point in their development, and that is what the grammar stage is designed to do.” Just how is the natural imagination and curiosity of the child embraced and encouraged by memorizing definitions?
Image by Rebecca Tregear from Pixabay
Sayers refers to the grammar stage as the “Poll-parrot state.” The second phase is typically known as the dialectic or logic stage which she calls the “Pert state.” Sayers observes,
“It is difficult to say at what age, precisely, we should pass from the first to the second part of the Trivium. Generally speaking, the answer is: so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to Pertness and interminable argument.”
In other words, when the pupil has had it with being confined by memorization, finally we can answer their questions.
I’m sympathetic with the objectives of emphasizing logic and rhetoric in the rest of the Trivium though not with developmental rigidity nor the compartmentalization. I believe, however, that the grammar phase is a disastrous beginning. It is precisely what Classical Conversations decries when they say, “the art of learning has been lost and replaced by a mindless regurgitation of facts.”
I likewise think the artificial distinction between the so-called tools of the Trivium and the subjects in the Quadrivium as well as the prerequisite of the Trivium for subject matter study is unhealthy. I am, however, in hearty agreement with Sayers when she concludes, “the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” This is the right end sought through the wrong means. There are much better ways that honor the design of the human mind and end up exactly where Sayers points us—with people who know how to learn for themselves.
From the standpoint of a recommended pedagogy, I would commend much of the Paidea Proposal of Mortimer Adler which dates to 1982. I gave a basic outline of this curriculum in my book, Unforgettable: Enabling Deep and Durable Learning. There are a very small number of brick-and-mortar Paidea schools and the headquarters of the movement is in Asheville, NC. I’ll link to their web site in my blog post which will also have a variety of other helpful links.
As a sample, here are three of the twelve Paidea Principles:
“that the primary cause of genuine learning is the activity of the learner’s own mind, sometimes with the help of a teacher functioning as a secondary and cooperative cause;
that the three types of teaching that should occur in our schools are didactic teaching of subject matter, coaching that produces the skills of learning, and Socratic questioning in seminar discussion;
that the results of these three types of teaching should be (a) the acquisition of organized knowledge, (b) the formation of habits of skill in the use of language and mathematics, and (c) the growth of the mind’s understanding of basic ideas and issues;”
By way of healthy contrast to the educational philosophy of the Sayers’ Trivium, I would offer for the homeschooler, Charlotte Mason who was an English educator who passed away in 1923. She published an influential book called Home Education in 1886 and had a significant following in England. Her works have been resurrected and repackaged since 2017 by Simply Charlotte Mason. Their website declares:
“Charlotte believed that we should give children living thoughts and ideas, not just dry facts. So, all of her methods for teaching the various school subjects are built around that concept.”
Charlotte Mason laid out in detail her educational philosophy in 1922, the year before her death. When lined up next to Sayer’s Trivium, it is a study in contrasts. I’ve stitched together here quotations from a synopsis written by Ms. Mason that lay out the essentials:
“The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum. We hold that the child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. . . . Such a doctrine . . . that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress . . . on the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels duly ordered [by] the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge. . . . and the teacher's axiom is ‘what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.’ But we, believing that the normal child has powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a full and generous curriculum; taking care only that all knowledge offered him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas. Out of this conception comes our principle that, Education is the Science of Relations; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we . . . help him to make valid as many [relations] as may be.” (emphasis original)
The centrality of ideas is an obvious contrast. Indeed, Mason declared, “[the] mind cannot live on information. What is an idea? A live thing of the mind.” She declared that the aim of learning is to equip students for “the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons [which] is the acceptance or rejection of ideas.”
Regarding the roles of student and teacher, she emphasized:
“The children, not the teachers, are the responsible persons; they do the work by self-effort. [and] The teachers give sympathy and occasionally elucidate, sum up or enlarge, but the actual work is done by the scholars.” (p. 6)
To catalyze learning she maintained, “we are limited to three educational instruments-the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas.”
I hope you held on for the ride. Much more could be said but ending with an emphasis on ideas—another name for concepts—should be familiar territory for listeners to this podcast. That’s the crux of your schooling decision. Does my choice for my child intensify their development of concepts and their connectedness?