# Education  ## Metadata - Author: [[Gary Thomas]] - Full Title: Education - Category: #books ## Highlights - nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.’ ‘True,’ he said. ‘Do not, then, my friend, keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.’ ([Location 234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=234)) - should we be telling children facts and ideas and telling them to learn them, or should we be encouraging them to discover knowledge for themselves? ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=237)) - Learning became firmly subject centred rather than child centred. ([Location 304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=304)) - While progressive educators stress the child’s development from within, formalists put the emphasis, by contrast, on formation from without—formation that comes from immersion in the knowledge, ideas, beliefs, concepts, and visions of society, culture, civilization. ([Location 541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=541)) - Table 1: Progressive versus formal education ([Location 603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=603)) - Policymakers should perhaps learn more from the Finns, who avoid imposing ‘teacher-proof’ approaches on their schools. Instead, they cleave to their respect for the teacher’s knowledge, skill, and professionalism. In Finland, teaching is a highly sought-after career; teachers are universally respected, paid well, and are all educated to Master’s degree level. They are trusted to do a good job … and the trust pays off: even using the most formal measures of success, such as those employed in international comparison tables, the schools of the English-speaking countries lag well behind those of the Finns. ([Location 768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=768)) - connection: language is the tool for thought while social intercourse is the means by which it is developed— ([Location 904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=904)) - John Holt, a Boston teacher. He began his bestselling book How Children Fail in ([Location 917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=917)) - They had to learn the facts of science, but they shouldn’t have original thinking squeezed from them in the process. It was the formal versus progressive controversy in a nutshell. ([Location 958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=958)) - teaching and learning: anyone can learn almost anything if it is pitched at the right level and presented in the right way. ([Location 1189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1189)) - The Saber-tooth Curriculum, it has become a classic. ([Location 1344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1344)) - ‘That wouldn’t be education,’ they said. The traditionalists insisted that the new skills would just be ‘training’. ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1349)) - ‘transfer of training’. ([Location 1369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1369)) - Note: C.1 - There is no evidence that this is the case, but for some reason we carry on believing that doing complicated puzzles of one kind or another—or, indeed, learning a dead language—trains us in thinking. It’s one of those widely believed fallacies that seems to be impervious to the intrusion of evidence which might contradict it. ([Location 1371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1371)) - Note: C.2 - Neil Postman argued compellingly for a curriculum built around what he called ‘the three As’ (as distinct from the three Rs): astronomy, archaeology, and anthropology. ([Location 1429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1429)) - by Guy Claxton in What’s the Point of School? Eschewing a subject-based curriculum, he suggests that today’s curriculum would more profitably be based around qualities and habits of mind rather than subjects. ([Location 1435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1435)) - For Oakeshott, the subjects of the curriculum—history, mathematics, science, and so on—offer ways of capturing and understanding the world; they are a precious legacy passed to new generations, ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1441)) - The subject matter itself, the knowledge, while important, is less important than the opportunities it offers for the development of thinking. Knowledge, Stenhouse suggested, should principally be seen in the curriculum as a medium for thinking. His point is perhaps doubly true today, when knowledge pure and simple—facts, information—is so easily located. It’s no wonder that down the ages, in fact until the dawn of the Internet, knowledge was treated as if it were hidden treasure: ([Location 1449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1449)) - when you teach well, it seems as if three-quarters of the students are above average. All practising teachers will concur. ([Location 1473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1473)) - Children should be taught how to think by using the shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap. ([Location 1489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1489)) - Like a huge magnet, assessment drags the curriculum toward it. ([Location 1555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1555)) - One hopes that there will come greater recognition of the damage done to the fabric of the curriculum—to the quality of education—by the accountability-testing mindset. ([Location 1571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1571)) - A US Secretary for Health, Education, and Welfare, John Gardner, in 1965 made the controversial assertion that everything a high school graduate learns in twelve years of schooling could easily be learned in two years. ([Location 1731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1731)) - Here was evidence for Illich’s argument that people learn best outside school. ([Location 1735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BG73FQM&location=1735))