I hope to convey this clearly and concisely.

In ED, we often speak of how education has apparently slid a long ways, and I for one don't think it's even debatable: it clearly has.

But what might we compare it against as an outstanding exemplar?

I'm wondering if the Greek philosophers' students were the high water mark, or the English public school system of the late 19th early 20th C, or the Chinese when preparing for the Imperial exams?

Or what?

Any ideas?

I think it would be fun to talk about.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish, in your thread title, what do you have in mind with “individual “?

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Sawfish, in your thread title, what do you have in
> mind with “individual “?


I was thinking that the system would take each individual and encourage not only a level of mastery of a broad body of general knowledge that the system deemed essential to an "educated" person, but also an encouragement of special talents when they are recognized by the pedagogues. This would seek to boost such talented individuals into superior levels of expertise and advanced inquiry or usage.

From this latter emphasis would come "breakthru" discoveries.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish, I don't know if an arrangement such as you describe has ever been in place anywhere for very long. I probably had a history of education course -- for whatever it might have been worth -- years ago, but I wouldn't bet on it to supply much that's relevant to what you are thinking about. My hunch is that something that came relatively close to this scenario might have occurred in a monastic context, probably did at least now and again. Monasticism is, of course, not exclusively a Western phenomenon.

Broadening this a bit, I've tried to construct a continuum of optimal educational environment.

Ignoring for the moment peer interactions (multiple bright students in healthy competition with each other--and I *do* mean healthy, not forced by the pedagogue) and concentrating on the mentor-to-pupil interaction I figured that toward one end you'd have a potential one-to-one relationship, with a student being instructed by a certifiably gifted subject matter expert (SME), and ideally the greater the qualification, the better.

This also ignores the teaching ability of the mentor, because many extremely gifted SMEs have no skill for teaching: they are less than useless. But for the sake of our hypothetical continuum, we'll assume that we've vetted a near infinite list of SMEs for both expertise and teaching ability, and we have selected the most qualified for each subject area we want to teach the child. The mentor relationship would last for as long as the mentor had anything of value to add to the pupil's academic growth in that area.

Less optimal, but still a significantly better environment than most, is to get a single generalist SME, well qualified to introduce the pupil to the basics, and beyond, in a multitude of subjects. A sort of polymath would be best. This mentor would recognize when the best time to bring in the more narrowly focused experts to augment the basic understandings achieved by the pupil in each of the areas.

Still less optimal would be to have the polymath instruct a moderate number of students--perhaps 20. There would be the benefit of pupil peer interaction, but eaxh pupil would have less undivided time with the mentor.

Less still is where we are with even a GOOD publicly or privately funded system. You have well qualified generalists, but by no means of the caliber of the polymath, teaching content in each of the subject areas with which they have a level of mastery. The number of students is at least 20, and due to the the assorted priorities originating in each of the families with kids in the school, the instructors must tend to teach in a non-controversial fashion, but still emphasizing accepted content over interpretation, allowing the students to form their own opinions, which will vary a great deal depending on family background.

But that's not the current state of US mass education. For quiten a while now content has been used as an introductory framework to teach interpretation, and the interpretation must conform to a central dogma for the teacher to remain employed. So history, for example, is used to provide a setting for a lesson against inequality of the sexes. In fact, if the the object is to teach ethical lessons, it greatly simplifies the task to find extreme exceptions to present (which because they are prominently presented, the students will take as the normal case, not the exception), thus presenting an extremely clear-cut example of correct or incorrect actions.

This has seeped easily into the social sciences and soft sciences, but has made inroads into probability and statistics. One wonders when physics will succumb.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Scan down to paragraph beginning "Today's censorship."

[pubs.acs.org]

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Sawfish, I don't know if an arrangement such as
> you describe has ever been in place anywhere for
> very long.

Didn't crafting guilds exist all through known history and well up the 20th century, picking up children at a very young age to become master craftsmen. Such architecture and art required early training and focus, to be realized. That was before everyone was required to go through the same formalized school system, wasting individual talent.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 8 Aug 21 | 06:20PM by Knygatin.

Knygatin, thanks for reminding me/us about the guilds and other traditional ways of education.