Entirely.

Sir Philip Pullman at the Oxford Union ...

I’m too lazy to go to places and look around and see what real places are like, so I prefer to sit at home at my desk and make them up. I didn’t go to the Arctic to write Northern Lights, I went to the Bodleian Library instead. Which proved entirely satisfactory.

Happy Birthday, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Ramsay, Rousseau, 1766

Fresh air affects children’s constitutions, particularly in early years. It enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has a powerful effect on their young bodies. Its effects can never be destroyed. So I should not agree with those who take a country woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and her nursling with her. I would rather send him to breathe the fresh air of the country than the foul air of the town. He will take his new mother’s position, will live in her cottage, where his tutor will follow him. The reader will bear in mind that this tutor is not a paid servant, but the father’s friend. But if this friend cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none of my advice can be followed, you will say to me, “What shall I do instead?” I have told you already—“Do what you are doing;” no advice is needed there.

Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of over-crowded cities. Of all creatures man is least fitted to live in herds. Huddled together like sheep, men would very soon die. Man’s breath is fatal to his fellows. This is literally as well as figuratively true.

Men are devoured by our towns. In a few generations the race dies out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always renewed from the country. Send your children to renew themselves, so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength lost in the foul air of our crowded cities. Women hurry home that their children may be born in the town; they ought to do just the opposite, especially those who mean to nurse their own children. They would lose less than they think, and in more natural surroundings the pleasures associated by nature with maternal duties would soon destroy the taste for other delights.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born on this day in 1712, from Emile

Opened.

Collier, John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 1901

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning — the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies of spelling; they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places, which convey 104no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation to their daily wants and occupations; while in our public schools the same unfortunate results are produced by the weary monotony of Latin and Greek grammar. We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children — to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavor to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil knows a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learnt; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learnt little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew. Children are by nature eager for information. This ought to be encouraged. In fact, we may to a great extent trust to their instincts, and in that case they will do much to educate themselves. Too often, however, the acquirement of knowledge is placed before them in a form so irksome and fatiguing that all desire for information is choked, or even crushed out; so that our schools, in fact, become places for the discouragement of learning, and thus produce the very opposite effect from that at which we aim. In short, children should be trained to observe and to think, for in that way there would be opened out to them a source of the purest enjoyment for leisure hours, and the wisest judgment in the work of life.

John Lubbock, from "Education," found in his book The Pleasures of Life

Fascinating.

Kurt remembers the heady days in Coach Stevens' history class ...

Roosevelt Junior High School was fortunate enough to have Bob Stevens as an 8th grade history teacher. Mr. Stevens would spend each history period walking between the desks of students bringing to life the history of this country. Hands behind his back he would walk and tell the stories of the country.

Occasionally, he would grab the chalk and draw out a battle scheme on the chalkboard, supplementing the drawing with gory and fascinating details.

Several friends and I even decided to bring our own history books into class to “check” Mr. Stevens on his facts. No way could he just roll these details out without at least some exaggeration.

Imagine an 8th grade class with at least four young students feverishly flipping through a stack of books as the teacher told the lesson from memory.

My family moved to Ohio from Michigan in 1977.  On my first day of school at Roosevelt, I had the bright idea to wear a Michigan jersey to school. Coach Stevens noticed it within minutes. He picked me up (in my chair), carried me to his room, placed me in my chair atop his desk and proclaimed to his class, “Look what I found!”

Thirty years later, after a pretty drastic career change, I was blessed to spend time with him in his third-floor classroom as he mentored me through my student-teaching experience.

Through those Roosevelt years, Coach Stevens told amazing stories to engage his students, he maintained the highest standards to set an example for his students, and he carried himself in a way that I still remember today.  I knew he believed in me and all his students.  He was a model of what it was to be not just a good teacher, but a great man.  His sincerity and authenticity were such that you didn't want to let him down.  That responsibility was transformative to a young punk like me.

I’m beginning my twenty-second year as a teacher and there isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t catch me feeling grateful that I was his student. What a fine teacher. What a great man.

Steal.

Kurt points me to an article indicting public education's obstruction of learning ...

It is now preventing young people from acquiring the abilities they need to learn. He agrees with others who have looked into this problem that “attention must be curriculum.”

My buddy prefers brevity and I tend to be long-winded on such things, so here are some bullet points ...

• Schooling imparts the what and how of curriculum very well.  The why was never part of the plan. See Cornel West on the cultivation of the self.
• It's been my experience, as a student and a teacher, that students are told to think, but never taught the skills (it's not in the curriculum ... seriously).  Students are told to study, but never taught the skills (it's not in the curriculum).  Students are told that reading is essential to success, but never taught the fundamental skills required to eagerly experience reading with joy and voracity. If it's not in the curriculum, the perception of importance vs. time will loose everytime to the tyranny of the teacher's planbook.
• The love of learning -- thinking, writing, and reading -- therefore, must come independently from cultures, explorations, and discoveries outside of the classroom.  Stop expecting the flawed experiment of public education's ship to right itself. Henry Miller: "Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."
• Sir Philip Pullman strongly criticizes education for turning reading into a chore. He warns that asking students to write rigid plot summaries, dissect texts for analytical tools, or find synonyms kills their natural love for reading. He argues that the true intention of literature should first be simply to delight, enchant, and console.  Critical analysis can and will naturally come later.
• The days of a school having well-resourced libraries are over. These sacred spaces have been eviscerated and transformed (in both spirit and purpose) into media centers. The library should be the most important room in a school. It should contain a broad, unexpected collection of books, where students are given time to freely browse and discover on their own. (And don't get me started on the wasteland "Book Fairs."  I can't remember the last time I saw a classic literature title offered at one.)

The attitude of the article's author reinforces what I regularly see and hear at school: "I’m forced to think about what it would look like for me to explicitly teach students how to do what they should already know how to do. And this is pretty much the equivalent of a factory worker ‘learning to code.’ I have no idea how to code, and I don’t want to learn to code. I resent the fact that I have to ‘adapt’ to the wreckage.”

Opinions must be earned.  Opponents of the status quo lose the right to criticize what they have no solution for.

THE SUMMER DAY

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life? 

Mary Oliver

Our middle school students (grade 6-8) get half an hour for lunch, no recess.  There is no transition time between classes, the single bell that signals the end of one class marks the beginning of the next, travel time between three floors isn't accounted for.  My point is, from 7:30 to 2:10 these kids are pedal to the metal, time-on-task, working.  

Grinding.  

With little choice or option for how their "precious time" is spent.

I preach an underground philosophy in my Creative Writing class that the students seem to understand and appreciate.  It needs to be carefully taught because it can be misunderstood as multi-tasking. We call it "stealing time," and I guess it's based on the concept of opportunity cost.  The philosophy promotes developing and applying habits like making the choice to carry and write in a journal, to simply stop working and just quietly sit still (and if slightly more daring, closing the eyes) or the ultimate defiance, keeping a book open in the lap, under the desk, taking that book and that journal everywhere you go.  This rebelliousness still lives, but done without tact, it'll get you a detention in our school. So that time needs to be stolen because its been taken away.  Research supports the necessary benefits of all these acts of defiance, but they're not in the curriculum, so they are punished. 

Live fully.  Steal time.

With apologies for my long-windedness.

Outside.

No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

Ivan Illich, from Deschooling Society

Happy Birthday, Thomas Edison

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

Thomas Edison, born on this day in 1847, from an interview in the New York Dramatic Mirror titled "The Evolution of the Motion Picture,” conducted by Frederick James Smith

Edison's ...

• Mental Models
• Journaling Habits
• Napping Techniques

See.

To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

John Ruskin, from "Of Kings' Treasuries"

Consequential.

The culture loves the simplicity of labels. 

Like its sibling catch-alls passionate, awesome and kind, smart is a word that is misunderstood, misused, and inappropriately labelled.  

We have surrendered one of our most consequential words.

“Smart” once described a rare and admirable combination of quick pattern-recognition, sound judgment, deep understanding, and intellectual courage. 

Coffee makers are smart.  Doorbells are smart.  Thermostats, scales, toothbrushes, refrigerators, and even trash cans are now smart.  Today it is a hollow compliment applied to almost anything that moves, sells, or flatters our self-image.  A toddler who stacks two blocks is “so smart!”  An adult who can parallel-park receives the same adjective.

When everything is smart, nothing is.

Worse still, we have begun to use “smart” where intrinsic value is lacking.. Calling someone “smart” now frequently substitutes for saying they are good, wise, honest, or brave. The implication is clear and corrosive: intelligence (or any cheap counterfeit) is the only virtue that really matters. Decency, integrity, humility, and perseverance have been demoted to secondary traits—if they are noticed at all.

The result is an overvalue of discernible cleverness. We celebrate people who are quick, shiny, and rhetorically flashy while growing blind to those who are slow, deep, awkward, and true; I admiringly call this group the "crooked trees."  We have convinced ourselves that being “smart” is the same thing as being useful. It's not.

Language is a tool used to shape reality. When we continue to culturally degrade language that once pointed toward something difficult and valuable, we devalue the very thing it pointed toward. We no longer have a reliable way to name genuine excellence because we have spent the word on light bulbs, algorithmic patterns, and passive-aggressive comebacks.

It is time to retire “smart” from this type of casual drivel.

Let it rest until we're able use it to describe a mind that sees the wonder others dismiss, holds conclusions lightly but courageously, changes its mind when the evidence demands it, and remains humble in the face of what it does not yet understand.

I move that we abolish the cult of smart.  Instead, especially where kids are concerned, try using ...

1. Hard-working
2. Enthusiastic
3. Determined
4. Poetic
5. Perceptive
6. Shrewd
7. Discerning
8. Experienced
9. Well-read
10. Critical
11. What else?

These still carry weight. They still cost something to say, a reminder that not every convenience, not every quick reply, not every small optimization deserves to be canonized with the same adjective we once reserved for the keenest forms of understanding.

What matters for recognizing high levels of performance is that a person is challenged, requiring attitudes that are perceptive and receptive to being challenged, if not actively seeking out challenge and eagerly facing and admitting the prospect of misadventure, even failure. 

That may be the most important thing a parent, a mentor, or even a teacher can impart.

James Hamblin explains ...

People are born with some innate cognitive differences, but those differences are eclipsed by early achievement, Boaler argues. When people perform well (academically or otherwise) at early ages and are labeled smart or gifted, they become less likely to challenge themselves. They become less likely to make mistakes, because they stay in their comfortable comfort zone and stop growing. And their fixed mindset persists through adulthood. The simple and innocent praising of a smart kid feeds an insidious problem that some researchers track all the way up to gender inequality in STEM careers.

From Inc. ...

Our society is obsessed with the label of being smart. Even more so, we're obsessed with how smart you are compared to others. Historically, these measurements started in early education as a way to place children in the "right" class levels. As a result, our society has become overly focused on intelligence, so much so, that in the business world it's common to innocently describe others as smart without much thought. Being smart is defined in the dictionary as having or showing a quick-witted intelligence. This just tells someone they're fast thinking, but what value does it ultimately provide in the workplace?

The proclivity to use this label can cause long-lasting damage. Below are some reasons why being labeled "smart" is actually a hindrance rather than a help.

Hamblin continues ...

At whatever age smart people develop the idea that they are smart, they also tend to develop vulnerability around relinquishing that label. So the difference between telling a kid “You did a great job” and “You are smart” isn’t subtle. That is, at least, according to one growing movement in education and parenting that advocates for retirement of “the S word.”

The idea is that when we praise kids for being smart, those kids think: Oh good, I'm smart. And then later, when those kids mess up, which they will, they think: Oh no, I'm not smart after all. People will think I’m not smart after all. And that’s the worst. That’s a risk to avoid, they learn.“Smart” kids stand to become especially averse to making mistakes, which are critical to learning and succeeding.

“Mistakes grow your brain,” as the professor of mathematics education at Stanford University Jo Boaler put it on Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by The Atlantic. I wondered why, then, my brain is not so distended that it spills out of my ears and nose. I should have to stuff it back inside like a sleeping bag, and I should have to carry Q-tips around during social events as stuffing implements. Boaler notes, more eloquently, that at least a small part of the forebrain called the thalamus can appreciably grow after periods of the sort of cognitive stimulation involved in mistake-making. What matters for improving performance is that a person is challenged, which requires a mindset that is receptive to being challenged—if not actively seeking out challenge and failure. And that may be the most important thing a teacher can impart.

Psychology Today looks closely at the culture's neutering obsession with "smart"...

The other aspect of "smart" is an evaluative one. It says, roughly, that this display of intelligence is one that the speaker considers praiseworthy, or which accords with the speaker's values. If there is a cleverly worded advertisement in favor of a political cause that I support, or a thoughtfully posed objection that supports my point of view, that is "smart." But if there is a cleverly worded advertisement in support of my political opponent, or an objection which undermines my favored theory, that is not smart at all.

This account of the meaning of "smart," if it is on the right track, encourages a degree of caution. Thick concepts are notorious for the way they build evaluative views into purportedly neutral language. Consider "chaste." This term has a certain descriptive content to it, but it also tacitly accepts a certain view of gender and sexual morality, one which many of us would now reject. We are therefore rightly reluctant to describe people as "chaste," and I think we should show a measure of reluctance toward "smart" as well, which is not as descriptive as it seems to be. 

Let’s stop using smart.

Thinking.

Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

John Ruskin, from The Stones of Venice

Use.

Booth, Discovery En Route to Antarctica (detail), 2014

Lapham's Quarterly reminds us that man is the maker ...

We do nobody any favors by outsourcing the acts of discovery to machines. The suggestion runs counter to the arrogant belief that machines are the salvation of the human race, technology the light and wonder of the world. The prophecy is false, but the sales promotion is relentless. The data-mining dwarfs in Silicon Valley praise the glories of artificial intelligence and the internet of things, talk about attaching a human consciousness to a computer that lives forever. The Pentagon recruits drones to wage and lose its wars, Wall Street hires bots to mint and spoil its money; in the nation’s schools, the curriculum known as STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) sweeps the classrooms clean of improvised literary devices, downgrades the study of history and the humanities because they don’t get along well with tests administered by computers. At our colleges and universities, the oracles in residence complacently assume that man’s machines have vanquished nature, commodified the tribes of Paleolithic instinct, will construct Elon Musk’s stairway to the stars. The humanities they construe as exquisite ornaments, meant to be preserved together with the alumni slush fund and naming opportunities, in the vaults of the endowment. Their piety recalls the lines of Archibald MacLeish:

Freedom that was a thing to use

They’ve made a thing to save

And staked it in and fenced it round

Like a dead man’s grave.

To bury the humanities in tombs of precious marble is to deny ourselves the pleasure that is the love of learning and the play of the imagination, and to cheat ourselves of the inheritance alluded to in Goethe’s observation that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth. 

Education.

It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from August 1914

Discrimination.

We should reject the view that high culture, as the possession of an elite, is of no use to those who don’t possess it. This is as false as the view that science or higher mathematics are useless to those who don’t understand them. Scientific knowledge exists because a few talented people are prepared to devote their energy to pursuing it. That is what a university is for: and since you cannot pass on difficult knowledge without discriminating between the students who can absorb it and those who cannot, discrimination is a social good. The same is true of high culture. Those able to acquire it will be a minority and the process of cultural transmission will be critically impeded if that teacher must teach Mozart and Lady Gaga side by side to satisfy some egalitarian agenda.

Roger Scruton, from "Why We Need Grammar Schools"

Unsophistications.

Wyeth, N.C., Self-Portrait, 1920

The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child's unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace.

N. C. Wyeth

Hats matter.

Truly.

Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.

Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

Revolt against the modern world.

Transition

Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives.

John Dewey, from "Art as Experience"

Uncertainty.

I think we educate kids to be settled in the comfortable chair. You have your job, you have your little car, you have a place to sleep and the dreams are dead. You don’t grow on a secure path. All of us should conquer something in life and it needs a lot of work and it needs a lot of risk in order to grow and to improve you have to be there at the edge of uncertainty.

Chef Francis Mallmann, from Mallmann on Fire: 100 Inspired Recipes to Grill, Roast, and Bake Outdoors

Able.

We should reject the view that high culture, as the possession of an elite, is of no use to those who don’t possess it. This is as false as the view that science or higher mathematics are useless to those who don’t understand them. Scientific knowledge exists because a few talented people are prepared to devote their energy to pursuing it. That is what a university is for: and since you cannot pass on difficult knowledge without discriminating between the students who can absorb it and those who cannot, discrimination is a social good. The same is true of high culture. Those able to acquire it will be a minority and the process of cultural transmission will be critically impeded if that teacher must teach Mozart and Lady Gaga side by side to satisfy some egalitarian agenda.

Sir Roger Scruton

Happy Birthday, Piaget

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. The great danger today is of slogans, collective opinions, ready-made trends of thought. We have to be able to resist individually, to criticize, to distinguish between what is proven and what is not. So we need pupils who are active; who learn early to find out by themselves, partly by their own spontaneous activity and partly through material we set up for them, and who learn early to tell what is verifiable and what is simply the first idea to come to them. 

 Jean Piaget, born on this day in 1896

Depends.

Doisneau, L'écolier puni, 1956

“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451