Scroot on education

From Times Online
July 13, 2007

It's not meant to be 'relevant'

Roger Scruton

It is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the
purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it. What we teach in
school, what subjects we encourage in universities and the methods of
instruction are all subject to the one overarching test: what do the kids
get out of it? And this test soon gives way to another, yet more pernicious
in its effect, but no less persuasive in the thinking of educationists: is
it relevant? And by "relevant" is invariably meant "relevant to the
interests of the kids themselves".
From these superstitions have arisen all the recipes for failure that have
dominated our educational systems: the proliferation of ephemeral subjects,
the avoidance of difficulties, methods of teaching that strive to maintain
interest at all costs - even at the cost of knowledge. Whether we put the
blame on Rousseau, whose preposterous book Emile began the habit of
sentimentalising the process whereby knowledge is transferred from one brain
to another, on John Dewey, whose hostility to "rote learning" and
old-fashioned discipline led to the fashion for "child-centred learning", or
simply on the egalitarian ideas which were bound to sweep through our
schools when teachers were no longer properly remunerated - in whatever way
we apportion blame, it is clear that we have entered a period of rapid
educational decline, in which some people learn masses, but the masses learn
little or nothing at all.
True teachers do not provide knowledge as a benefit to their pupils; they
treat their pupils as a benefit to knowledge. Of course they love their
pupils, but they love knowledge more. And their overriding concern is to
pass on that knowledge by lodging it in brains that will last longer than
their own. Their methods are not "child-centred" but "knowledge-centred",
and the focus of their interest is the subject, rather than the things that
might make that subject for the time being "relevant" to matters of no
intellectual concern. Any attempt to make education relevant risks reducing
it to those parts that are of relevance to the uneducated - which are
invariably the parts with the shortest life span. A relevant curriculum is
one from which the difficult core of knowledge has been excised, and while
it may be relevant now, it will be futile in a few years' time. Conversely,
irrelevant-seeming knowledge, when properly acquired, is not merely a
discipline that can be adapted and applied; it is likely to be exactly what
is needed in circumstances that nobody foresaw. The "irrelevant" sciences of
Boolean algebra and Fregean logic gave birth, in time, to the digital
computer; the "irrelevant" studies of Greek, Latin and ancient history
enabled a tiny number of British graduates to govern an empire that
stretched around the world; while the "irrelevant" paradoxes of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason caused the theory of relativity to dawn in the mind
of Albert Einstein.
It is worth saying all that, not only because the superstitions to which I
refer are so deeply rooted in our modern ways of thinking, but also because
those who adopt them will never see the educational value of culture, and
will never have a clue as to how it might be taught. What does it benefit
ordinary children that they should know the works of Shakespeare, acquire a
taste for Bach or develop an interest in medieval Latin? All such
attainments merely isolate a child from his peers, place a veil between his
thinking and the only world where he can apply it, and are at best an
eccentricity, at worst a handicap. My reply is simple: it may not benefit
the child - not yet, at least. But it will benefit culture. And because
culture is a form of knowledge, it is the business of the teacher to look
for the pupil who will pass it on.

> From Times Online
> July 13, 2007
>
> It's not meant to be 'relevant'
>
> Roger Scruton

Good article - Teach the child, not the subject.

--
Later on,
Mike