In Beacon Hill Park

The boys and I were off for a walk in Beacon Hill Park on a blustery but beautiful Sunday. A mother duck and her 11 ducklings were walking across the trail.

Written by jay on May 10th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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Go not Gently

I have been thinking about homeschooling and my own, upcoming, half century mark. The two are related in the sense that as I was educated a life could reasonably, if roughly, be divided into quarters with the first quarter being taken up with education, the next two with productive work and the final quarter given over to retirement and drool time. (Oh Joy.)

This is less true for my generation where, as I devoutly pray, 50 is the new 30, or at least the new 40 and human life expectancy in Western countries is out at85 and rising. But it is even less true of my 5 and 2 year olds. For Sam and Max it is literally impossible to predict life expectancy due to the onrush of medical procedures, genetic therapies and wellness knowledge. Even now the fastest growing demographic cohort in the United States are the spry 100 year olds.

Which raises an interesting set of questions about what the educational objectives should be for a generation which has every possibility of saying, “Well, 100 is the new 60.”

The core curriculum of K-12 has changed a bit since I was a kid. Assorted political and social engineering notions have been tossed in the mix. A nod is given to continous learning. But the out and out, radical revision which a fundamental change in the human prospect demands is not going to happen within the industrial school system. In a sense it can’t if only because most of the players in that system - teachers, administrators, parents and politicians - are too busy keeping a lid on the current explosion of kids’ capabilities.

That explosion is driven by the wee box on which I type this blog and on which my 2 year old is now, quite competently, bookmarking his favorite websites. The PC is a great leveller. My five year old likes to use Photoshop to crop and filter the pictures we take on our walks. He is not particularily good at it; but he can produce results which satisfy him. And, in a year or two he’ll be shooting his own pictures and Photoshopping them like a pro.

What the PC has done is given adult tools to children. While no one would give a five year old power tools, letting him fool around on a computer is safe (more or less) and extends his capabilities in the same way a Skillsaw or electric drill makes for rather faster treehouse construction.

Getting adult tools when you are five, or two for that matter, means you have insight into the adult world at a much earlier age. You may be just learning to read and you may still be making your printed “S” backwards, but you can surf the net and use programs just like mum and dad.

Like calculators when I was growing up, computers and the net make a good deal of what used to be included in “an education” seem rather quaint. Why go to a library to look something up when you can Google it? Looking something up and then reporting on your research formed a large part of a conventional education in the upper grades when I went to school and it still does. It is a skill which, rather like mental arithmetic in the age of calculators, is something of an anachronism.

Looked at within the 80 year lifespan model, anachronisms are really a waste of the child’s time and so there is a drive, often lead by the kids themselves, to have a calculator in every pencil case and always on broadband internet in every classroom. Competitive parents seem to think there is some virtue in acquiring “computer skills” in school.

Looked at from the perspective of a 120 or even a 160 year lifespan the one thing which is certain is that the computer skills acquired this year will be entirely useless in ten years and long forgotten at the turn of the next century. (”What is this typing thing you speak of grandpa?” “A mouse? Our cat chases mice. What do they have to do with computers?”)

What might last is the more ineffable: a feel for numbers, a sense of the texture of information. I overuse the example of the estimation question “How many golf balls fit into a suitcase?” simply because it underlines what a calculator can’t tell you. Ask a calculator kid that question and he or she will be back to you with, “How big is the suitcase?” with the critical insight that the size of the suitcase really makes a difference in the answer. A calculator is very good at manipulating data, it is entirely useless where the data is imprecise. Answering, “You know, a suitcase, just your average suitcase.” drives calculator kids to distraction.

Open ended research questions or questions where there cannot be a right answer, have much the same effect on people who see Google as a solution rather than a tool. Information comes in two broad categories, fact and opinion. Unfortunately for the “right answer brigade”, your opinions often colour what weight you give facts and, worse still, facts can easily and effectively change opinion.

Looking for a way into the idea of information having a texture I constantly come back to history. Looking at ways of knowing who we are and how we arrived where we seem to be. The great advantage of history is that it so clearly underlines the disputed nature of “facts” without having to become terribly abstract. Plus, and I think this is a huge bonus, there are plenty of historical questions which do not have definative answers. (How were those pyramids constructed anyway?)

The other advantage which a history based education offers is that history broadly defined gives you a way into science, literature, politics, theology, engineering architecture, art and music. It also gives a structure into which other cultures and religions, other languages and other understandings of the world fit naturally.

I have no way of knowing what my hundred year old children are going to need to know. I am pretty sure it will not be facts per se. What I can be sure of is that a sense of history, a bedrock foundation in the evolution of Western and World culture, will not be wasted. If, along the way, they learn to read critically, write with assurance and use numbers as the powerful tools they are, then they should be well placed to deal with the twenty second century. If they also happen to pick up a sense of the critical importance of civility, an understanding of toleration, a comprehension of just how vital and fragile a culture and civilization is, then my work will be done.

Written by jay on May 10th, 2006 with 5 comments.
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