Heinlein's Crazy Years

The Crazy Years.  Robert Heinlein has a series of novels exploring the inevitable unraveling of Western Civilization.  My favorite is Friday, for I think what are obvious reasons.  Heinlein predicted that because of a combination of various factors, Western societies would face disintegration from within.  His primary reasons are the educational system, the inefficacy of the warm-bodied franchise, and the inherent impulse among many people to use the powers of the state coercively against others.

I have tried to avoid talking about personal experience on this blog.  I always try to speak within a more general framework and not to involve myself in my writing.  I have however had a great deal of experience in working with children of all ages as a private instructor for the past ten years or so.  I have witnessed in the span of one generation the rapid evisceration of true teaching.

This problem is not immediately evident.  Schools assign a plethora of homework during children's early years of education.  Many of my clients report an overwhelming avalanche of homework during their children's early years of education, only to find that somehow, homework disappears from the radar when children reach middle school.  This is where I come in.  I am a highly specialized tutor who focuses on teaching my students how to improve their metacognition and ability to process information deeply.

The abyss of work that accompanies a students entry into middle school is as illusory as the torrent of useless busywork assigned by teachers in elementary school.  It is not that middle school students have no homework, it's instead that teachers assume that students are aware that they must read, problem-solve, and explore the world on their own.  Teachers assume that students know how to take notes.  Teachers assume that students know how to pull critical information from a textbook.  But it is not purely the fault of students.

Most of the students that I work with are high school age.  I rarely get to associate with middle school students because the workload is frighteningly easy that most students are able to slide through with good grades without doing any work at all.

A few weeks ago however, I had the opportunity to work with a middle school student.  She was having problems with her physical sciences class.  She was in the eighth grade.  As I thumbed through her textbook, I was appalled at the level at which it was written.  I found it to be both banal and vacuous.  It felt like it had been written for a six year old.  The girl was like many children her age: unaware in the extreme.  Her knowledge of the classics was scant.  Her cognizance of the outside world severely limited.  She had not been taught how to seek out and be thrilled by new knowledge.
Needless to say our session was challenged by her limitations.  A student can only accept what they are capable of digesting--if she has not developed the correct palate, the ability to differentiate and discern subtle concepts and ideas, then she will not be able to learn more complex and difficult ideas.

This deficit is not entirely her fault.  It is a cultural, social, and political failure as well.  Children are naturally inquisitive.  How does a naturally inquisitive mind become finely attuned to the demands of conformity within the absurd social hierarchy of a classroom?  The answer: easily.  The classroom is the antithesis of learning.  Learning is interactive, it is physical, it is multidimensional, and it is interdisciplinary.

Our entire educational pedagogy is founded on the notion that learning happens sequentially, in an ordered and organized fashion, and that it must be directed.  Children have a globular intellect that is not focused on information in an encyclopedic sense, but in an evolutionary sense.  In other words, children seek information as it pertains to their particular level of development and how it is applicable to their world.  Children naturally work within the realm of abstractions--how else do you explain their capacity for pretending and putting the "real" world aside in the blink of an eye and then returning with as much ease?  Yet teachers seek to condition students to all behave exactly the same, and teachers expect all students to progress at the same rate and to be capable of the same skills.  We are all endowed with abilities, we all have gifts, and education should be about helping each person discover what it is not only that they are interested in, but what they are going to do with their life.  Education must also be about culturally informing students as to who they are, and while we do not have worship our way of life, we should at least acknowledge how good we have it compared to the plight of most people throughout history.

This post has explicitly ignored the progressive pedagogy promulgated throughout the academy and textbooks because it would require multiple posts to even begin to address the blatant bigotry toward conservative ideas and policy positions, to say nothing of teaching the history of the evolution of philosophical thought from Plato until today.  I think it ought to be assumed by everyone that the progressive push toward uniformity of thought has so thoroughly permeated the institutions of education that we needn't directly address it.  Education should not be a means to an end, it should be an end unto itself.  Learning, like science, is never settled.  To say that you have learned something is to deny the possibility that what we know is most likely wrong, that in the future we will make new discoveries that improve our understanding of the natural world.  We have been using the Platonic model of education for the past twenty-three hundred years.  It is time we tried something else.  

The consequences of poor education have been evident for generations.  Those who are highly educated in the sciences are paid more money.  Those who are not, are not paid well.  The more technically and technologically proficient a person is, the greater their earning potential is.  The economic stratification of society will intensity as all manual labor will very soon be done robotically.  What will we face then, when every hourly employee in the country become wards of the state as they have no marketable skills?

Heinlein warned us about the world we are living in.  I feel more and more indebted to my father for having introduced me to Robert Heinlein at an early age.  It is becoming more and more apparent that events, are simply beyond anyone's control.  We should feel edified that evolution is still at work in our species, that we have not become separated from the pressures of the evolutionary invisible hand, functioning much in the same that interactions in the market generate prices; indeed we are still part of the great game.  To make the best possible world for our children, we must allow a flowering of educational experimentation.  After all, somebody is going to have to rebuild the world after whatever conflagration awaits us this century.