As PJ O’Rourke has been known to note, only people who have never dated an EE [Elementary Education] major fail to understand what is wrong with education. We’re not exactly recruiting the brains of our generation into that workforce. Which is of course why that workforce falls for the sort of tripe the progressives tell them about teaching snots.
“Progressivism rests on the idea that children want to behave and they want to learn, the teacher needs to step back and allow the child to explore their natural curiosity, which will motivate them and keep them engaged,” Mr Bennett said.
Isn’t that fun as an assumption? Because if it were true then we wouldn’t need trained teachers in schools, would we? The brats want to learn, they will learn therefore. Actually, we don’t even need schools. Just release them into the wild somewhere near a library and they’ll get on with it themselves. [Perhaps the best known historical exponent of this theory was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Émile, a treatise on education.]
Ah, you say, that wouldn’t work? Then and therefore our assumption about all just wanting to learn is wrong, isn’t it?
To approach the same point alternatively. If kiddies just thirst for that knowledge to be imparted then why do we monitor truancy? If the first assertion is true then there won’t be any of the second. If we have incidence of the second – and we do indeed have a system to both monitor and try to prevent it – then the first assertion cannot be true. Not of all, all the time that is. And that’s all we need to be able to insist that a teaching method based upon its universal existence is wrong.
Not for the first time Progressivism fails when applied to actual human beings.
Jacob Rosser, “When Progressive Teaching Meets The Reality of Human Children — Not A Pretty Sight”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-13.
August 29, 2022
QotD: Refuting the “children want to learn” notion
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