arndt@lymph.DEC (02/26/85)
PART III
[I'm trying to break this up into digestible chunks!]
Some more resource articles on the topic of Kids and computers:
See the Sept. issue of PERSONAL COMPUTING '84, especially the articles,
"Computers In Education: Promise and Reality, Education's New Challenge,
and A Buyer's Guide to Educational Science Software."
A good journal to follow is, T.H.E. (Technical Horizons in Education).
They offer free subscriptions to teachers, etc., and I get one as an
advisor to my kids school on using computers.
There is a book I have at home entitled, HOW TO GIVE YOUR CHILD A SUPERIOR
MIND which has some good ideas. I can't remember off hand who the author is.
(You may recall my satire about the 'German Science Truimphs' add I answered.)
Once one starts looking there is a wealth of material with differing degrees of
value on this subject.
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And now for the main thing that has prompted me to post on this issue:
HOW TO TEACH JOHNNY TO 'THINK'
I offer for discussion an article by Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Lost Tools of
Learning."
She puts forward the idea that something is 'missing' from our current
methodology of teaching - the lost tools! The tools we need in order to
think and study ANY subject. Hardly any argument here - almost everyone
is saying something like this today. We have a population bent on the
pursuit of 'facts' and 'facts' in a very narrow frame of reference. See
I. Asimov's book, THE VIEW FROM THE HEIGHT. From every side educators and
educated are decrying the narrow focus of formal training today. In fact,
a 'new' disipline is springing up called Generalist which seeks to move
across our current 'disiplines' and do things like help physicists under-
stand the work of biologists, etc.
Sayers looks back four or five hundred years to the Middle Ages at how
education was pursued then. (I can hear the 'n' keys tapping - no loss!)
Let me quote Sayers:
"Is not the great defect of our education today - a defect tracable
through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned-
that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils 'subjects', we
fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they
learn everything except the art of learning. It is as though we had
taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play "The
Harmonious Blacksmith" upon the piano, but had never taught him the
scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized "The Harmonious
Blacksmith," he still had not the faintest notion of how to proceed
from that to tackle "The Last Rose of Summer.""
She looks at the syllabus of the Medieval Schools. AT ISSUE IS THE OBJECT OF
EDUCATION AND THE RIGHT ORDER OF THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS!!!
The syllabus was in two parts:
Trivium and Quadrivium.
The Quadrivium was 'subjects' as we largely think of them; it is the Trivium
that is of interest here.
The Trivium consisted of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order.
Only Grammar is to be thought of as a 'subject'; the other two are methods
of dealing WITH subjects!
Grammar:
Learning a language as a medium of expression. What it is, how to put
it together.
Dialectic:
Logic and Disputation. How to USE language! How to define terms, and
make accurate statements, to construct an argument, and how to detect fallicies
in argument.
Imagine Johnny trying this on for size in the early grades!!!! I mean
little kids can naturally split hairs with the Jesuits - only our formal
educational process takes it out of them! "I didn't kick her, my foot did.
Rhetoric:
How to express himself (or herself!) elegantly and persuasively!
At the end of this course he was required to compose a thesis upon a theme
set by his teachers or chosen by himself - and defended! Not just written
but spoken! Criticism included heckling.
So armed one proceeds to 'subjects'.
Today very little is given over to learning to learn and we are thrown from
the crib into the world of 'subjects'.
Sayers makes the point that by teaching everyone to read and not how to think
we have left them at the mercy of the printed word!!!
Trying to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of 'subjects'!!!!
Sort of like the Poles charging the German tanks on horseback.
Are we not ALL doing this sort of thing on the net because of OUR training?
She then goes on to posit a modern school that gets hold of these ideas and
starts to apply them. Food for thought.
Children taught according to the principles of the Trivium though 'behind'
their peers at first would soon surpass them after a few years.
Sayers says, " . . . I am concerned only with the proper training of the
mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems
presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same,
in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at
any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter
of the effort expended by a person who does not have the tools at his
command."
"For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn
for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to to this is effort spent in
vail."
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And where to find this article??? Why where else, in the National Review,
January 19,1979, p.90ff.
Regards,
Ken Arndt