Children can learn a lot more than schools are teaching.
When you study education, one of the most depressing revelations is the extent to which the Education Establishment has abandoned its main responsibility.
Our elite educators come up with one pretext after another for not doing much in the way of education. Finally, you have this vast landscape full of almost nothing, at least nothing academic, intellectual, or scholarly.
This is wildly counterintuitive. You don’t expect to look across the educational landscape and see an empty wasteland, although a famous professor did write a book in 1953 with that exact title, “Educational Wastelands--the Retreat from Learning in our Public Schools.”
How do they justify this retreat? Basically, they throw out one basic lie: “Our children can’t handle that.” Sometimes they say, “Our children don’t need that.” The constant theme is that children are limited, unable to learn anything difficult, and lacking in intellectual curiosity.
Our Education Establishment justifies having dumb schools by insisting that the children themselves are dumb.
Our top educators seem to think that kids are born ignorant, and we shouldn’t disturb the natural order of things. Obviously, this is a self-serving cop-out by people more interested in social engineering (read: leveling) than in educating anyone.
The problem now is that these silly sophistries have permeated every corner of the country. Adults look at children and think, they’re just kids, we can’t expect much.
Children could and should learn about these things. But it’s safe to predict that if you dared to suggest this to our top educators, they would faint from the impossibility of teaching such substantial information to a child. They haven’t tried in many decades, therefore it can’t be done.
My thesis is you can teach anything to anybody. You teach it at whatever level the class can handle, perhaps a little higher but never lower. Let’s think of the spectators at a football game, that is, average adults. It would be possible to engage and inform them on almost any subject. Whatever you can teach to them, you can teach to children. Who wouldn’t enjoy learning interesting things about nuclear energy, the Olympics, and steam engines?
Everything I’ve said is obvious. The only reason it sounds ambitious is that the Education Establishment shut down all rational thought on the subject years ago. They start from the quackery that zero is normal: zero facts, zero teaching, zero learning. Zero is normal for them. It’s not normal for human beings at any point in their growth. What’s normal is that the brain focuses on interesting things and wants to learn more about them.
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From : http://www.edarticle.com/article.php?id=41118