Ignition for Education

  • The Quantitative Tyranny in Education

    How can we find out how well our students are learning? Or how well a teacher or a school is teaching? I’m sure most teachers will tell you to look at the results: the students’ writing, discussions, lab reports, equation resolving, translation, and so on. Go to the concert. Watch the play. Attend the games.…

  • Conformism and Authoritarianism: The Closely Related Enemies of Education

    I’ve argued in previous posts that education defined by the Creation Paradigm prioritizes the individual, rather than conformism, and that “Liberal Democracy and education guided by the Creation Paradigm are two sides of the same coin.” In other words, conformism and authoritarianism are opposed to what education ought to be. So, I find it interesting…

  • How Learning Begins, and Why Children Do the Maddening Things They Do

    In Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates proves, to the satisfaction of Meno, that learning would be impossible without innate knowledge. We would not recognize truth when we encounter it unless the knowledge of it was already in us. In other words, what we think of as learning is actually recollection of what we already, in some…

  • How to Become a More Effective Teacher in May

    May is not the month in which teachers evaluate their craft. It’s when we finish the curriculum, not rewrite it. It’s the time by which we hope to have tried out new teaching techniques, not a time when we think of more. It’s when we’re tired and longing for the summer break. It’s not when…

  • Yes, Some Students Should Fail. And No, We Should Not Give Up on Them.

    In my last post, I encouraged readers to read an article in The Economist which argued that the rise in high school graduation rates is merely that–a rise in the number of student who graduate. It does not represent an increase in educational achievement. In fact, it represents the opposite–the dumbing down of standards to…

  • Passing Isn’t Learning

    This week, the Economist delivers a data-laden critique of rising high school graduation rates: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/03/10/new-numbers-show-falling-standards-in-american-high-schools In short, more kids are passing because high school is getting easier, not because of improvement in learning. Some people will argue that this means that the United States needs a national curriculum, or perhaps some sort of national or…

  • The Need to Teach Self-Cultivation

                In my last post, I argued that we should teach children to aim to be creators by the lights of the Creation Paradigm. That means becoming creative of others and oneself, and, of course, of products ranging from bricks to engines to oil paintings to mental health services. I argued that we should prefer…

  • Should we really teach leadership?

                When I last posted about curriculum, it was a culmination of posts about knowledge, skills, and “creativity,” all important aspects of a good school’s learning objectives. Since then, I’ve realized how many elements I left out. One is an idea that I find problematic: “leadership.”             Schools frequently boast of cultivating leaders, as though…

  • How to Write a Curriculum

                I’ve been working up to this post for several weeks. I’ve examined knowledge, its organization, its origins, and its acquisition, as well as its relationship with opinion. I’ve grappled with skills and how they are acquired. And I’ve argued that “creativity” is not serial “making” but rather originality—something that school-aged children may build towards…

  • BOOK REVIEW: Invisible China

    Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, by Scott Roselle and Natalie Hell (2020, University of Chicago Press) Roselle (a development economist at Stanford) and Hell (a researcher who works with Roselle at the Rural Education Action Program) argue that China may become caught in a middle-income trap because of shortcomings in its…