From Norms and Nobility by David V. Hicks
Unlike Aristotle, the modern educator looks upon observation, not reason, as the starting point; and he distrusts the classical school master’s tolerance for normative questions and for the use of methods appropriate to such questions, as well as his insistent search for moral content and reasonable form in history, literature, religion, and art. His misgivings stem perhaps from a too lofty regard for the experimentally verifiable or from a lack of sympathy with the goals of the classical teacher, who is not trying to serve up verifiable facts, but is hoping to engrain in his students the wonderful spirit of inquiry. Whatever his reasons for rejecting the classical curriculum, his classrooms suffer from its absence in three notable ways. In them, human experience tends to be dealt with narrowly and reductively, broken down into isolated, unconnected units; students ignorant of what questions to ask are presented with uninvited and consequently meaningless information; and there is no basis for making moral and aesthetic judgments or for attaching learning to behavior.
On the other hand, the classical form of instruction serves a cultural purpose, as well as an intellectual one. It invites the student to adopt for himself his civilization’s highest moral and aesthetic values; at the same time, the student learns the rules governing a universal process of inquiry. There is, of course, more than a hint of dogma in any education presuming to pass judgment on the way a person lives and on the way he thinks. Yet a classical education presents the right way, not with the intention of stifling future inquiry, but as a necessary starting point for dialogue. In this sense, dogma can resemble art: it confronts man with some truth about himself, a kind of truth that might have taken him a lifetime of error and misdirection to arrive at for himself, but ultimately, a truth he must test in his own experience of life if he is to appropriate it for himself and benefit from the confrontation.
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In the early years of homeschooling, I often worried if we were adequately preparing our children for “the real world”. After ~19.5 years, I am now of the conviction that we were, even when I didn’t always have confidence in what I was doing, even if the “results” aren’t all in yet. Our kids aren’t standouts in the way that many kids are, but they seem to have a firm grasp of who they are and why they’re here on earth, or at least they are actively seeking the answer to that question. Education in the past couple of decades at least seems to have had the goal of detaching students from reality. It is the strong student who survives who is the exception, not the rule. Of course parenting has played a major role in this. If it was healthy to have a mind suspicious of “authority” in the ’90s, even more so now. Thankful that our kids seem to be deadset on homeschooling, or if not, there is no doubt they will be very involved parents who will guard their children’s schooling zealously.
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