I was talking with my mother today -- okay, not really talking, it was more like venting -- about my public education in grades 1-12 and then four more years at a state university.
I'd been reading the introductory remarks to a series of books that belonged to my late father, "Great Books of the Western World," edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler back in 1952.
The 54-volume set has either complete or excerpted writings from everyone from Homer and Plato all the way through Newton, Locke, Rousseau and Goethe to Darwin, Engels (yes, THAT Engels) and Freud.
Somewhere in the illustrious mix there are also works by Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, and Thomas Aquinas.
Poetry and prose -- religion, history, politics, art, literature, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, economics -- the books span the best (and worst) Western civilization has had to offer.
My father got the set years ago from a woman who worked for him. She'd committed suicide and my dad was one of the attorneys who tidied up matters related to her estate. In exchange for his help, the executor of the woman's will gave Dad the set of Great Books.
At the time, I couldn't understand why my dad wanted these books instead of money. I was in high school and when you're in high school money, any money, is a very coveted thing. It gets you stuff, right?
So why didn't my dad ask for payment in the form of cold, hard cash?
It's taken me nearly 30 years to realize the answer.
Proverbs 16:16 sums it up: "How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver!"
My family has been homeschooling for four years even though we made this radical decision roughly ten years ago.
In the process of preparing to teach our own -- and in the process of actually teaching them -- I've come to understand just how much I lost as the result of my typical American public school education.
Regular readers know by now that I claim I lost time, lots and lots of time. That virtually everything I culled from my 12 years of public education that turned out to be useful could have been condensed into about five years.
These past four years, though, I've begun to realize that I lost something else. I say I lost it. The greater truth is that I never had it to begin with and I think I should have. I'll try to explain.
When I look back on the schooling I received, it looks like stacks and stacks of fabric squares -- the kind that people sew together to make a quilt. The squares are all different colors and patterns and they are set about in random piles.
Ostensibly they were to be pieced together in some sort of an aesthetically pleasing arrangement, just as you would expect to see on a finished quilt.
Instead, the squares were either sewn together haphazardly or they remain in distinct piles with no apparent relationship to each other or to the whole of the quilt.
In all my years of schooling, not one teacher ever bothered to attempt to show me that what I learned in This Class was somehow connected to what I would learn in That Class. The examples of this are endless, so I'll list a handful:
The study of astronomy necessarily includes the study of geometry.
The study of Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar" needed an understanding of ancient Roman history.
The study of physics demanded an understanding of the evolution of thought from Aristotle to Newton to modern-day Stephen Hawking.
The study of Tennyson's poetry cried out for a foundation in the great myths and fairytales from which he drew his inspiration.
(This list assumes that I was exposed in any degree to any of the above things over the course of 12 years. I wasn't.)
The point is that everything we deem worth learning is interconnected with everything else -- the quilting squares sewn together make the quilt.
The problem for me is that my quilt was never sewn.
In looking for ways to help my children grasp the interconnectedness of all of human history with its monumental achievements and horrific failures, I have come to the conclusion that traditional contemporary education assumes that a scatter-shot approach to learning is sufficient.
A little of this and a little of that and somehow it is supposed to inspire in the majority of children a desire for life-long learning and a craving for conversations about the most significant issues of the past, present and future.
That last part sounds lofty and a bit unrealistic, doesn't it? After all, who has time to sit around and ponder the things that brought us to where we are today.
One need look no further than Congress to see the devastating effects of what happens when a people become ignorant of the principles and practices upon which their nation was born, when they fail to have the deeper discussions about the very essences of things like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
My American public education did very little to teach me what it means to be an American. I didn't read the Declaration of Independence until I took it upon myself to do so some five years after I graduated high school. I never studied the Constitution beyond knowing that the first ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights. I never wrote about either of these great documents, never discussed them in class or explored their significance. I was never assigned the biographies of great statesmen like Pericles, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Benjamin Franklin. I was never asked to read the Federalist Papers or to debate with any real depth of thought the most pressing and controversial events of modern times -- slavery in America, the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Japan, the civil rights movement. I never read the biographies or knew anything beyond birth/death dates and major discoveries of scientists like Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein or Clyde Tombaugh.
(Tombaugh, for those of you who, like me, received virtually no teaching in astronomy in school, is the American astronomer who discovered Pluto.)
What else did I never learn? I never learned that the various functions in math -- addition, subtraction, multiplication, division -- were interrelated. Now, it seems obvious, but then it was literally four different kinds of math rather than four variations on a theme.
I never learned the patterns of numbers, how they work in harmony in so many obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Would it really have taken a teacher that much time to point out that when we learn the multiplication tables we're really learning the skip-counts of 2's, 3's, 4's and so on?
Would geometry have been easier if instead of throwing formulas at me the teacher had taken time to introduce us to the world and ideas of Euclid and Archimedes? Yes! Would "pi" have been so mysterious if only I'd been taught how and why it came about? No!
Some 28 years after graduating high school I am finally picking up the various squares of information and inspecting them more closely. As I start to stitch them together, patterns are emerging.
Meanwhile,I spend endless hours helping my children sew their own quilts so that they, unlike me, won't look back someday and wonder exactly what they were supposed to learn and why they were supposed to learn it.
My dad's Great Books set gathered dust for a long time after he passed away because I was too stupid to divine their worth. Now that I know what they represent in terms of knowledge, I'm starting to use them with my kids.
Better late than never, some might say. I argue that it shouldn't have been late at all.
I leave you with a quote from the editors of the 1951 Great Books series:
"Education is supposed to have something to do with intelligence. It was because of this connection that it was always assumed that if the people were to have political power they would have to have education. They would have to have it if they were to use their power intelligently. This was the basis of the Western commitment to universal, free, compulsory education. I have suggested that the kind of education that will develop the requisite intelligence for democratic citizenship is liberal education, education through great books and the liberal arts, a kind of education that has all but disappeared from the schools, colleges, and universities of the United States. Why did this education disappear? It was the education of the Founding Fathers. It held sway until fifty years ago. Now it is almost gone."
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