Healthy Feet, Starving Minds

The Tulsa World reports today that all 300 students at Eugene Field Elementary got a free pair of athletic shoes, courtesy of Wal-Mart and other donors.

I don't want to minimize the generosity of these people, nor the importance of quality footwear.  I do hope, though, that the tragedy is not lost on anyone that, while a gesture of this nature is nice, people seem stumped as to how to prevent the almost inevitable intellectual inanition these bright, young children will experience as they grow in an educational system hell bent on depriving them of the only thing a human mind can feed on: good ideas.

"The human [brain] is like a millstone, turning ever round and round,

If it have nothing else to grind, it must itself be ground."

Knowledge for its own sake

"We are hardly aware how children lap up lessons of life like a thirsty dog at a water trough, because they know without being told that their chief business is to learn how to think and how to live; comment and explanation are usually distracting.  By the way, I think there is one point about which we elders must be careful; it is easy to make children intolerable little prigs by giving a personal bearing to their work.  It is bad enough to overhear a mother say: 'All the mothers care about in a school is that they shall be well looked after; it's the fathers who want some sort of education for the boys so that they can go into business; but I've told these boys that if they want a motor-car they'll have to work!'  We see the materialism of such a view and are properly shocked; but a child is in a far worse case who suspects that to read Alcibiades, King Alfred, Sir Galahad, should be to his advantage.  The first thing that this school is designed to teach is a love of knowledge for its own sake, and this I think the children get; they learn that last accomplishment of noble minds, to delight in books for themselves; but any hint that a poem or a personage is administered to a child by way of a pill or a poultice, to do him good, is fatal to the slow, still operation of knowledge upon his personality."

From "The Parents' Union School" 1912

Why I am taken with Charlotte Mason: Part 1

Not long ago, my wife began doing research for the task of homeschooling our children.  Her research brought her to the works of a woman named Charlotte Mason, a British educator and philosopher at the turn of the 20th Century.  She seemed to like Mason's approach from the start, but the more she read, the more she was struck by how similar her ideas were to some things I had been saying, even commenting at one point that, "It seems like everything this woman wrote has come out of your mouth at some point."

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending an internship hosted by Ambleside International at one of their schools in Fredericksburg, TX.  What I saw was amazing, and I hope write about many aspects of that here in the coming weeks.  But one has to start somewhere, so I will choose a place and start.

Can you imagine a school where students try their hardest because they enjoy what they are doing?  Now strike from your mind that they are being entertained via technology or circus antics, and keep trying to imagine it.

Can you imagine a place where students work in peace, confident in the respect they have for each other?  Or where the animosity that so notoriously exists between teacher and student is foreign?

Can you imagine a school that has no need for either carrots nor sticks as incentives?  The reward is the knowledge gained and the relationships developed.  Can you imagine a school without grades?

I can.  I'll write more about it later.