The Scope of Continuation Schools
This chapter begins with Charlotte’s description of how the current educational systems came to be. In 1900 a man by the name of Dr. Kirschensteiner entered a contest that offered a prize for the best essay written on the best way of training youth. He won the contest and his essay went on to influence all of Western Europe, England, and the United States affecting the changes made to the methods of education that were in place. The essay supported the thought that “a utilitarian education should be universal and compulsory; child and adolescent should be saturated with the spirit of service and provided with the instruments of effective self-direction.” Those educators were not thinking that they were “sacrificing the individual youth to society” but they would “raise” them, give them opportunity and power to “climb the rungs of the ladder.” There was the belief that knowledge was gleaned by what we see with our eyes and from what we have handled. The mind does some work when it is used in a tactile way, which may give the thought that food and work for the mind is the same thing. With regards to the body this may be true, work brings pay and pay buys food but this is not true of the mind.
Education should make our children “rich” towards God, society, and themselves. Charlotte describes the difference between the continuation schools in Germany which were utilitarian in nature and “had no good effect upon morals or manners and no conspicuously good effect upon manufacturers” to the “People’s High Schools of Denmark” which began using works of great literature and studying history of their country as well as the world and produced people who not only enjoyed reading great works on their own, but had a “character and conduct, intelligence and initiative” which came from an “education in which the knowledge of God” was put first. These schools were called “winter schools” where young people between the ages of 18-25 attended and were residential schools. These countries were also largely agricultural countries and these students could spend five winter months for five years there, unlike England, which was a largely manufacturing nation.
Charlotte wanted to focus her efforts on the young adolescent, those from 14-18 years of age. She asks “how shall we spend those 7or 8 hours a day in which “education” is to do her part for the young citizen?” She believed that this time should not be dedicated to learning a technical skill for employment because those skills can be taught in a very short amount of time and they are learned through practice. The time set aside for education should be “dedicated to things of the mind”. Most educators take these 8 hours a day and realize there is too much to learn so a compromise is made. We want to make the students into “good citizens” and “good citizens” should have “sound opinions about law, duty, work, and wages” and so the teachers pour their opinions into the young students. The teachers and administrations decide on what material should be taught and what should be left out and this material is “poured “into the student “like a bucket”. Ground is covered each year and teachers are satisfied but students leave school discontented and their work bores them, as does every other area of their lives, because the schools have “failed to find them.” The solution they have come up with to the huge amount of things to know about is that if you know one thing well you have the power to learn more. Charlotte says this solution hasn’t totally failed but it didn’t fit what was wanting to be accomplished academically in the nation- “Enlightenment of the masses”.
What educators have failed to recognize is the “hunger for knowledge” also called curiosity that exists in everyone along with the great “power of attention” that everyone also has within; that all of us like to learn things in a literary way; what we learn should be wide and various giving the mind lots to reflect on. This type of learning only occurs by the “act of knowing” which grows through and tested by narration and later tested by the recorded exams. Charlotte gives and alphabetical list from an examination paper written by a 13 year old girl. There were 213 names of things, people, and places that used them all “accurately and with interest.” Charlotte concludes that when we give the students “the thoughts of the best minds we can secure on their part the conscious intellectual effort, the act of knowing, which bears fruit in capability, character, and conduct.”
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