“We both taught school, indoors and out. Perhaps our kids had a weird education…but a girl who can shape a comfortable and handsome saddle starting with a dead mule and not much else, solve quadratics in her head, shoot straight with a gun or arrow, cook an omelet that is light and tasty, spout page after page of Shakespeare, butcher a hog and cure it can’t be called ignorant by New Beginnings standards. All our girls and boys could do all of that and more. I must admit that they spoke a rather florid brand of English, especially after they set up the New Globe Theatre and worked straight through every one of old Bill’s plays. No doubt this gave them odd notions of Old Earth’s culture and history, but I could not see that it hurt them. We had only a few bound books, mostly reference; the dozen-odd “fun” books were worked to death.
Our kids saw nothing strange in learning to read from As You Like It. No one told them it was too hard for them, and they ate it up, finding ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in every thing’.
Although it did sound odd to to hear a five-year-old girl speak in scansion and rolling periods, polysyllables falling gracefully from her baby lips. Still, I preferred it to ‘Run, Spot, run. See Spot run’ from a later era from Bill’s.”
Excerpt taken from Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love
.
This was one of my favourite books as a teenager. I didn’t know at the time that Heinlein was thought to be a misogynist (rather interesting discussion of many of the issues here).
I’m not sure where I stand on that – but I’ve always thought the above passage about education was interesting. I’d quite like my children to speak in scansion and rolling periods, if I was altogether sure what they were ;), and I’m trying to work out what I think the equivalent skills list should be for this society and this day and age. Thought I’d throw it open for discussion – thoughts?
Comments
5 responses to “Time enough to learn?”
I dunno, I think my list would be long, but it would certainly include the following:
– knowing how to cook
– how a garment is constructed
– knowing where the things we consume come from (not just food) 😉
– knowledge of 3rd world conditions
– how to use a computer
– how to properly use the Internet and look things up
I also think the above mentioned things would be useful, except maybe the dead mule part. 😀 But for our family, we always felt it was important for our kids to know and experience where things came from and how to get them, so if need be, they could survive without all this here technology stuff. (grow their own food, build their own house, for example)
Of course, thinking for oneself is at the top of the list.
with andrea on knowing where things come from.
for now:
how things grow, and can be made.
practical skills – cooking etc
how to extrapolate skills and ideas
where to get information
then – well, everything!!!
Completely irrelevantly, your google ads are advertising the drama school i went to!
Thinking about this, and the sort of things that come near the top of my list seem to be things that could easily be at the top of a list from a hundred years ago.
Practical skills, how to use tools, how to fix things, how to grow things, how to cook – not neccessarily to a great level of skill, but enough to build on in the future when necessary – a confidence to pick up newe skills.
Knowledge – enough of an introduction into various areas, science, art, kliterature,history, geography etc. so those areas which really interest can be developed. I do think a scientfiic understanding is important – not so much knowledge, but understanding what it is about, how it works, how to evaluate claims etc.
Computers come fairly low down on my list – partly becuase I expect that they will become increasingly integrated and less discrete items in the future – and much more able to do the job by themsleves rather than the endless prodding we have to give them now. I think knowing how to find things on the Interwebby thing will reply more on smarter tools to find/filter information for us, and I don’t think it’s that hard to learn how to use existing search tools to find stuff reasonably well.
Much more important is the skill of assessing the information we aquire – but I don’t really see them as really different in character to assess other sources of information – such as print media, or TV.
The world has changed so much in the last hundred years and will no doubt continue to do so in unpredictable ways. So the ability to think for yourself, work out new solutions to problems, invent new ways of doing things etc. will be needed. How can that be taught? I guess letting kids work stuff out for themselves – not one of my strongest points. I have to make myself stand back and let them mess up and problem-solve. Part of me wants to say – ‘no – do it this way’ like one of those less talented teachers 😉