For a few weeks I've been working on an Article titled "Classical Education --  still the way Children learn best today."

Nominally, this article is about three schools in the Tidewater part of Virginia.

But what the article is really about is a better way to run schools and teach children. This approach is called the classical method. These are all the best ideas from Greek and Roman schools, collected, organized and, during the Renaissance, often blended with Christian teaching.

The basic concept, which is just so completely obvious if we didn't live in the long, dark, cold shadow of John Dewey, is that children are changing and evolving in all those early years,  from 5 to 18. So let's  exploit those changes. Use them for the good of education.

Duh, right?

Dewey did not recognize any change. He was trying to move children from A, whatever they are, to B, what he wanted them to be. That's as unsubtle as Stalin sending another thousand people to the gulag.

Some of these good schools today are Christian academies, some are classical academies, some are Christian classical academies. Indeed, don't get mixed up by the details and distinctions. Henceforth, let's ignore them. What matters is that these schools are very serious about creating educated graduates. This is what all schools were trying to do 100 years ago, until the great Darth Vader Dewey showed up.

I urge everyone to take a look at this article or similar articles. Learn a little about the classical approach. Don't get sidetracked by the details, as I say. Focus on the fact that when the children are six, they like certain things so let's give them those things. When they're ten, they like to do other things, so let's give them those things. It's so brilliantly simple, you want to scream insults at the silly people who run our public schools. These people have not had a new idea in 75 years. What they have new is jargon and marketing phrases. Their biggest goal in life is making more ignorant students.

What the classical approach is trying to do is to make more educated students.

There's no question that these students work harder....But do they really?? Have you ever been on a trip where, due to somebody's bad planning or bad luck, you spent the whole day hanging around accomplishing nothing? How much fun was that? Well, that's a perfect capsule description of what goes on every day in our public schools. Children are bored. They're smart enough to know that they're not moving very fast. They're not learning anything very interesting. They often get A's even as they think, I don't know anything.

I'd think most animals and most humans would rather be busy, productively engaged, even worked or overworked, rather than they would like to be sitting around all day doing nothing much, nothing useful, nothing intellectually stimulating. But the truth is, when children are six, they don't even know what it means to be worked or overworked. The British Empire was built on six-year-olds working in factories, 10 hours a day. At that age, they might not have known enough to know that they should hate what they were doing. At least, they could see something real being created by their hands, by their work, by their attention to detail.

The only way to get public schools back on track is that they take it as a sacred mission, when kids are still four, five or six, to bring them all up to the same speed knowledge-wise. Dewey's ideological zealots hate the idea of children learning anything-- so the whole educational process is rendered moot. The classical approach is trying to teach something every minute of every day, but doing this in a way that is simpatico with the child's nature and temperament.

If education has a bright future, it's in that last sentence.

http://www.examiner.com/article/classical-education-still-the-way-children-learn-best-today

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