Educational thoughts
Today my sister wrote a journal entry lamenting the abuse of literature by trying to teach it to high school students who are woefully incapable of comprehending it. I responded to her post and I want to copy/paste my response here because it addresses some thoughts I’ve had on education recently. The response:
I did study literature in college fairly extensively. I remember reading an essay about exactly what you just described. It cataloged how The Lord of the Flies was first analysed at a phd level and then masters, then undergraduate, and then high school. It got stuck at high school because it had reached near incomprehensibility to the students.
The goal of teaching literature to high school students is supposed to stretch their capabilities. I agree that stretching leads to growth, but I frequently wonder if we are stretching too hard too fast. No matter how many times you walk a child around the room holding on to your fingers, he isn’t going to walk by himself until he is developmentally ready to do so. Lots of parents around here lament the fact that the schools aren’t teaching enough. Kids should know MORE by fourth grade. They should know this, they should know that, why isn’t more history taught? Why haven’t they memorized the 50 states yet? My kid knows the original 13 colonies in first grade! I listen to all of this and feel like they’ve made education into some kind of a race.
Education is not a race. Education should be a process. The most important thing my kids learn from school is how to learn. They need basic reading skills, basic math skills, basic history for reference, and then they need to learn how to use a library. If they learn that, then ANYTHING they want to know they can go and find out by themselves. This is why my kids remain in public school rather than private school or a charter school. I do want them to go to college, but I don’t need it to be Harvard, the local community college is just fine with me. (And cheaper!)
When I was little I remember watching the olympic gymnastics competition. We always got totally beaten by the team from the USSR because they would snatch young girls and make them live nothing but gymnastics for 10 years. The Japanese and Chinese teams had the same sort of intense focus. I remember hearing adults lament the loss of childhood that represented. Now as an adult I watch my neighbors running their kids to soccer and piano and dance and gymnastics and karate and then to a special charter school which they deem to be sufficiently academic. I watch all this and I wonder if America is becoming what we once mourned over. Where is the time for kids to play?
That strayed far from a discussion of literature. Sorry, I’ll get off my soap box now.