Philosophies of Edumucation

[Rodin]

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Out of curiosity from leafing thru John Taylor Gatto's books, I came across this standard infograph representing the standard skoos on the differing philosophies of education. Out of boredom, I assorted a variety of public intellektuals into these skoos.

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Social Reconstructionism: Paolo Freire, critical theorist that promoted "muh culture o'silence" & furthered colonial oppression narratives that explain away amerindian & afreakan academic failure.
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Pereniallism: Harold Bloom, da youf should stick to Chaucer, Ovid, & Shakespeare to cultivate exalted cognition & imagination.

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Essentialism: E.D. Hirsch Jr, just fill kids brains with brains and cultural references.
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Existentialism: John Taylor Gatto, kids minds are being poisoned! Foucault but not pedophilic.
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Progressivism: John Dewey, just have a perpetual cargo cult whats the worst that can happen?

[Guest]

why do you write your words like that

[anthony]

I don't know about this terminology. Might be worth investigating further. I've read Gatto but that was a while ago.

For now I'll add a name to our collection. Max Stirner: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Arc...nciple.pdf

Fun reading above if you have time. And I don't mind the way you write. My mind didn't even process anything unusual first time over.

[Rodin]

I don't know about this terminology. Might be worth investigating further. I've read Gatto but that was a while ago.

For now I'll add a name to our collection. Max Stirner: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Arc...nciple.pdf

Fun reading above if you have time. And I don't mind the way you write. My mind didn't even process anything unusual first time over.

I sometimes create BAPisms as a lark. The terminology is stuff some of my associates who are in postgrad ESL stuff & in PublicEd are always encumbered with, I was able to get hard copies of some of these books off of them. One of them used to teach at one of these weird anti-schooling experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

[Guest]

Dewey's main problem is that his belief of perpetual human flourishing has no specific terminus. There is no telos in his pedagogical theory.

[Guest]

Dewey's main problem is that his belief of perpetual human flourishing has no specific terminus. There is no telos in his pedagogical theory.

That is just the result of holding back on making potentially flaky assumptions about mankind into a projected future. Who, in your experience, have better plans and teloses to offer?

What was your name in old Amarna? I was a guest, because I don't trust any email services which could trace back to these forums.

[Svevlad]

Coincidentally, I am just reading the archived threads on public schooling.

My idea - people have innate drives to certain things. Predispositions, call them - what a school should do is equip the youth with the basic tools to act upon them, but most importantly, unlike our current systems, *strengthen* this drive. It has to be done on an abstract level, due to the diversity of "innate goals" but I believe it is possible. Once done, things snowball from there.

The best way to teach someone is to make them want to learn something themselves. Autodidacticism as the ultimate value in education. Not sure where this would fall. Probably off-continuum.

[BillyONare]

That sounds like Montessori schools.

[Leverkühn]

Both Montessori and Waldorf Schools seem somewhat better than traditional education, though I am a bit suspicious about them. It's interesting that the spread of both has connections to Theosophy (not trying to make any conspiracy claims here). Maria Montessori was associated with the Theosophical Society since 1899 and Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf-Astoria Schooling, was originally a theosophist but went on to form his own "Anthroposophy" movement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner

It seems like there were a lot of efforts during the early 20th Century to revolutionize public education as something was clearly wrong with shutting kids up in a classroom for 8 hours a day.

Edit: In case anyone is interested, there's actually a youtube channel that just posts audio of lectures and papers by Rudolf Steiner. If people have any interest in 20th Century New Age spirituality stuff it's a pretty good place to go. It's interesting to see how people who came to be innovators in modern education also held some out-there beliefs. Here's a video of Steiner talking about the Lemurian Race:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bcQJC7xiBk

[cats]

Seems like quite a number of America's rich and famous enroll their kids in Waldorf schools. From what I've seen, it doesn't act as a damper to success by most metrics, but I can't speak to how much healthier of an environment it would be for young men (the only demographic that matters). The "success" might be solely reliant on the fact that people who school their kids in this method are generally better bred, as are the teachers. The Theosophical dances and whatnot are pretty strange as well.

Basically, I'm not convinced that either is sufficient to unlonghousify education in the West. I'm still of the opinion, which I expressed on the last iteration of Amarna, that society's best would best be served by private tutelage, just as has been done in Europe for thousands of years.

[anthony]

I've never heard of a great mind emerging from Waldorf.  Seems like a racket to me, even if it's a step up from being locked in a rat cage with people two standard deviations dumber than you while a miserable woman harasses you with jewish propaganda for 12 years.

[Guest]

Horrible dichotomy. Most often, one trained in a more exacting, difficult "teacher-centered" way will have a better grasp upon the subject being taught than one using the "student-centered" way. Having a better grasp upon the subject, they consequently are more aptly able to apply it to themselves and society at large. Depending on the subject learned, they may even be left in a better place to branch out into and learn other subjects by being able to relate them to their initial subject of study. Excessive "student-centered" learning really only works for the eccentric genius. The problem with modern education isn't that it's too "student-centered" or too "teacher-centered," it's that it chooses neither so the eccentric genius remains stifled while average Joe schmo never receives the discipline or direction required to make him properly learn any topic.

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I don't think the 'teacher-centered' approach is explicitly better when the majority of your teachers are female.