Tag Archives: education

Orwell Reflects on His School Days

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Biography

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“It was about a year after I hit Johnny Hale in the face that I left St Cyprian’s for ever. It was the end of a winter term. With a sense of coming out from darkness into sunlight I put on my Old Boy’s tie as we dressed for the journey. I well remember the feeling of emancipation, as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an amulet against Flip’s voice and Sambo’s cane. I was escaping from bondage. It was not that I expected, or even intended, to be any more successful at a public school than I had been at St Cyprian’s. But still, I was escaping. I knew that at a public school there would be more privacy, more neglect, more chance to be idle and self-indulgent and degenerate. For years I had been resolved — unconsciously at first, but consciously later on — that when once my scholarship was won I would ‘slack off’ and cram no longer. This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work…

I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood out look. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child’s mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child’s vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would St Cyprian’s appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was in 1915? What should I think of Sambo and Flip, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would no more be frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas — though of this I am not certain — I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now…

I have never been back to St Cyprian’s. Reunions, old boys’ dinners and such-like leave me something more than cold, even when my memories are friendly. I have never even been down to Eton, where I was relatively happy, though I did once pass through it in 1933 and noted with interest that nothing seemed to have changed, except that the shops now sold radios. As for St Cyprian’s, for years I loathed its very name so deeply that I could not view it with enough detachment to see the significance of the things that happened to me there… And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown… Now, however, the place is out of my system for good. Its magic works no longer, and I have not even enough animosity left to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the story of the school being burnt down was true.”

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Pulled from the ending of George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” first published in 1952 in the Partisan Review. It’s thought he wrote the essay a few years prior, sometime in early 1947, just before he started working on Nineteen Eighty-Four. There’s a lot of gold in the essay, but I especially like that understated, forgiving note on which he ends.

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Our Students Are Taught to Feel but Not Think

13 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by in Politics, Psychology

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Thomas Sowell

“Science is not the only field in which American students are lacking in knowledge and — more importantly — in the ability to tie what they know together to form a coherent chain of reasoning. Many American students seem unaware of even the need for such a process. Test scores are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Diane Ravitch, a scholar specializing in the study of American education, reports that ‘professors complain about students who arrive at college with strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively for their beliefs.’ As Professor Ravitch concludes: ‘Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance.’ In short, it is not that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

The phrase ‘I feel’ is so often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term — and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them…”

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Excerpted from Thomas Sowell’s 1993 book Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas.

Below, watch Sowell debating American schools in a 1981 episode from Buckley’s Firing Line.

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Why Poetry?

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Interview

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Peter Hitchens

Questioner: I teach five-year-olds and we’ve been doing poetry — they love writing it. But making them sit down and recite poems would just be a waste of their time and a waste of my time.

Peter Hitchens: Well, I’ll recite you one a teacher taught me some 40 years ago:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

[Applause] And I’m very pleased that my head is full of things like that, and also lots of hymns, which I also remember — and I feel very sorry for anybody who hasn’t had the chance to learn them. And I think it is a great condemnation of our school system that so few people, and particularly only those whose parents are rich, can actually afford to have their children taught things like that, and have their minds furnished with beauty for the remainder of their lives.

And to pour scorn on it, and to say that it is unimportant, is to declare yourself a spiritual desert. Of course people need these things; and what’s more, they’re a profound part of being British. If you don’t know the literature and the poetry and the music of your own country, then you aren’t really fully conversant with its history and its character.

You’ve lost touch with what your ancestors knew, and you won’t be able to pass it on to your own children and grandchildren.

Of course these things should be taught. I wish our government actually had the power and the policies to make it happen. I really do think it’d be a good thing. I also think that people, particularly teachers, should not say these things don’t matter; they matter immensely.

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Peter Hitchens, appearing on BBC’s Question Time on June 14th, 2012.

Continue by memorizing for yourself the Housman poem, “Those Blue Remembered Hills”. Then take a look at Peter debating his brother Christopher — first on Nietzsche then on the motion “Can Civilization Survive without God?”. Watch Peter’s epic testimony here. Read the great David McCullough answer Why History?.

Let Us Plant Our Trees This Afternoon

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Politics, Speeches

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John F. Kennedy

“‘Every man,’ said Professor Woodrow Wilson, ‘sent out from a university should be a man of his nation as well as a man of his time.’

…Every great age is marked by innovation and daring–by the ability to meet unprecedented problems with intelligent solutions. In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true than ever that knowledge is power; for only by true understanding and steadfast judgment are we able to master the challenge of history.

If this is so, we must strive to acquire knowledge–and to apply it with wisdom. We must reject over-simplified theories of international life–the theory that American power is unlimited, or that the American mission is to remake the world in the American image. We must seize the vision of a free and diverse world–and shape our policies to speed progress toward a more flexible world order.

As we press forward on every front to realize a flexible world order, the role of the university becomes ever more important, both as a reservoir of ideas and as a repository of the long view of the shore dimly seen.

‘Knowledge is the great sun of the firmament,’ said Senator Daniel Webster. ‘Life and power are scattered with all its beams.’

In its light, we must think and act not only for the moment but for our time. I am reminded of the story of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon.’

Today a world of knowledge–a world of cooperation, a just and lasting peace–may be years away. But we have no time to lose. Let us plant our trees this afternoon.”

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From John F. Kennedy’s address at the University of California Berkley on March 23, 1962, which can be found in Ted Sorenson’s excellent collection Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements, and Writings of John F. Kennedy 1947 to 1963.

Chomsky on Education, Children, and the Value of Work

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy

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Noam Chomsky

The philosopher Frithjof Bergmann says that most people don’t know what kind of activities they really want to do. He calls that ‘the poverty of desire.’ I find this to be true when I talk to a lot of my friends. Did you always know what you wanted to do?

That’s a problem I never had – for me there was always too much that I wanted to do. I’m not sure how widespread this is – take, say, a craftsman, I happen to be no good with tools, but take someone who can build things, fix things, they really want to do it. They love doing it: ‘if there’s a problem I can solve it’. Or just plain physical labor – that’s also gratifying. If you work on command then of course it’s just drudgery but if you do the very same thing out of your own will or interest it’s exciting and interesting and appealing. I mean that’s why people look for work – gardening for example. So you’ve had a hard week, you have the weekend off, the kids are running around, you could just lie down to sleep but it’s much more fun to be gardening or building something or doing something else.

It’s an old insight, not mine. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did some of the most interesting work on this, once pointed out that if an artisan produces a beautiful object on command we may admire what he did but we despise what he is – he’s a tool in the hands of others. If on the other hand he creates that same beautiful object out of his own will we admire it and him and he’s fulfilling himself. It’s kind of like study at school – I think we all know from our experience that if you study on command because you have to pass a test you can do fine on the test but two weeks later you’ve forgotten everything. On the other hand if you do it because you want to find out, and you explore and you make mistakes and you look in the wrong place and so on, then ultimately you remember.

So you think that basically a person knows what it is that he or she wants to do?

Under the right circumstances that would be true. Children for example are naturally curious – they want to know about everything, they want to explore everything but that generally gets knocked out of their heads. They’re put into disciplined structures, things are organized for them to act in certain ways so it tends to get beaten out of you. That’s why school’s boring. School can be exciting. It happens that I went to a Deweyite school until I was about 12. It was an exciting experience, you wanted to be there, you wanted to go. There was no ranking, there were no grades. Things were guided so it wasn’t just do anything you feel like. There was a structure but you were basically encouraged to pursue your own interests and concerns and to work together with others. I basically didn’t know I was a good student until I got to high school. I went to an academic high school in which everybody was ranked and you had to get to college so you had to pass tests. In elementary school I had actually skipped a year but nobody paid much attention to it. The only thing I saw was that I was the smallest kid in the class. But it wasn’t a big thing that anybody paid attention to. High school was totally different – you’ve gotta be first in the class, not second. And that’s a very destructive environment – it drives people into the situation where you really don’t know what you want to do. It happened to me in fact – in high school I kinda lost all interest. When I looked at the college catalogue it was really exciting – lots of courses, great things. But it turned out that the college was like an overgrown high school. After about a year I was going to just drop out and it was just by accident that I stayed in. I happened to meet up with a faculty member who suggested to me I start taking his graduate courses and then I started taking other graduate courses. But I have no professional training. That’s why I’m teaching at MIT – I don’t have the credentials to teach at an academic university.

But that’s what education ought to be like. Otherwise it can be extremely alienating – I see it with my grandchildren or the circles in which they live. There are kids who just don’t know what they want to do so they smoke pot, or they drink, they skip school, or they get into all kinds of other anti-social behavior. Because they have energy and excitement and nothing to do with it. That’s true here, I don’t know how it is in Europe, but here even the concept of play has changed. I can see it even in the place where I live. My wife and I moved out to this area because it was very good for children – there wasn’t a lot of traffic, there were woods out the back and the kids could play in the street. The kids were out playing all the time, riding their bikes whatever. Now there are children around but they’re not outside, they’re either inside looking at video games or something or else they’re involved in organized activities: adult-organized sports activities or something. But just the concept of spontaneous play seems to have diminished considerably. There are some studies about this, I’ve seen them for the United States and England, I don’t know if it’s true elsewhere but spontaneous play has just declined under social changes. And I think it’s a very bad thing because that’s where your creative instincts flourish. If you have to make up a game in the streets, if you play baseball with a broom handle you found somewhere that’s different from going to an organized league where you have to wear a uniform.

Sometimes it’s just surreal – I remember when my grandson was about ten and he was very interested in sports, he was always playing for teams for the town. Once we were over at his mother’s house and he came back pretty disconsolate because there was supposed to be a baseball game but the other team that they were playing only had eight players. I don’t know if you know how baseball works but everybody’s sitting all the time, there’s about three people actually doing anything, everybody else is just sitting around. But his team simply couldn’t give the other team an extra player so that the kids could have fun, because you have to keep by the league rules. I mean that’s carrying it to real absurdity, but that’s the kind of thing that’s happening.

It’s true in school too – the great educational innovation of Bush and Obama was ‘No Child Left Behind’. I can see the effects in schools from talking to teachers, parents and students. It’s training to pass tests and the teachers are evaluated on how well the students do in the test – I’ve talked to teachers who’ve told me that a kid will be interested in something that comes up in class and want to pursue it and the teacher has to tell them – ‘you can’t do that because you have to pass this test next week’. That’s the opposite of education.

What is your personal work routine? How do manage to work so much?

Well my wife died a couple of years ago and since then I’ve done nothing but work. I see my children once in a while but almost nothing else. Before that I worked pretty hard but had a personal life outside. But that’s unique.

How many hours of sleep do you get?

I try to get about six or seven hours of sleep if I can. It’s a pretty crazy life – tremendous number of talks and meetings so I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I’d like to just plain work because other things crowd in. But I nearly never have any free time – I never go to the movies or out to dinner. But that’s not a model of any sane kind of existence.

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Excerpts from Noam Chomsky’s recent interview on Work, Learning, and Freedom with Michael Kasenbacher of ZMagazine.

It’s tough to know where to begin with Chomsky. I try to read every word he writes, and listen to most of his interviews, but it’s a daunting task given just how much he produces and how wide a range of topics fall within the scope of his knowledge. If the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page is any indication —

Noam Avram Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, historian, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. 

— you can see just how much breadth and depth there is to his work. I’ve also exchanged about 500 emails with him since I was 15, and these have provided a sort of intellectual sounding board for my deepest political, philosophical, and personal questions about the world. I plan on posting some of those emails on here soon.