Ahead of the Learning Curve

After a summer of homeschooling our daughter, we are getting ready for the beginning of a new school year in either public or a charter school. Homeschool is just not going to fit in to our busy lives right now, so it will be a long-term goal. We are continually teaching our children at every opportunity, as any parent should, and I am most impressed by eight year old's abilities in math. 

We are going to be supplementing her institutional studies with a variety of resources, including the Khan Academy. We are progressing through the lessons nicely, and she is really proud of her accomplishments. The system shows awards for mastered areas. She is doing three digit addition with carrying in her head fairly consistently. She will be going into third grade soon, but is already way ahead of her peers. Sometimes she jots down part of the problem on paper, but she is really proud to be challenging her parents on her mathematics ability. I couldn't be more proud. 

Growing headwinds for Common Core

I haven't been following the progress of PARCC....and I hadn't realized how central the idea of common assessments were to the Common Core undertaking, although I should have.  

Looks like things aren't going well on that front:

Yesterday, PARCC released the cost of its tests—and right on cue, another state, Georgia, dropped out of the testing consortia. This is a disaster.

At this point, I won’t be surprised if we end up with 20 or more different testing systems in 2014–15. So much for commonness, so much for comparability. Rigor and alignment with tough standards are likely the next to fall. 

That's how the consortia crumble

More: Growing headwinds for Common Core

Its not really that surprising. This is a social change, a defiance of top-down control over all aspects of society, we are simply recognizing the defiance of homogenization of the population in education in this setting, but these are all interconnected. Who knows better than parents and local communities what is better for our children?

True, we can have help from across the planet in teaching and raising our children, but to give up that right to educate our children to some distant whim of a career politician? Therein lies the failure in these collectivist efforts.

Teaching Children to Learn using the Classical Method

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? 

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected), but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves?  

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a "subject" remains a "subject," divided by watertight bulkheads from all other "subjects," so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon--or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium. The second part--the Quadrivium--consisted of "subjects," and need not for the moment concern us. The interesting thing for us is the composition of the Trivium, which preceded the Quadrivium and was the preliminary discipline for it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order. 

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. 

Obviously the twentieth century is not and cannot be the fourteenth; but if "the Middle Ages" is, in this context, simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular educational theory, there seems to be no a priori reason why we should not "go back" to it--with modifications--as we have already "gone back" with modifications, to, let us say, the idea of playing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, and not in the "modernized" versions of Cibber and Garrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus--a modern Trivium "with modifications" and we will see where we get to. 

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher. 

It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. It may, indeed, be rather less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in school; and anyhow, elders who have abandoned the wholesome principle that children should be seen and not heard have no one to blame but themselves. 

To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers–they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For 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. 

- from The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1947

Teaching the Trivium to Children - Trivium Education.com