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This was a quote from one of the wonderfully stodgy characters who populate the world of Oxford as shown on the PBS Masterpiece Mystery, Inspector Lewis.
It was a toss off quote but it hit me as the show moved on. After watching the whole show, I went back to make sure I had the quote correct. I did.
It made me think about the state of our culture and how we value what we teach. In one way, you could dismiss this as an old codger pining away for the days that are gone and best forgotten. But it went deeper than that. I thought about how we are teaching our children now that we have decided to quantify education.
Of course we have always quantified education, ever since the first A was given to the first student, we have all craved validation. What better way to measure yourself than to see if you are making the grade, so to speak.
After all, knowledge for knowledge sake was best left to those who populated the idle class.
But once the industrial revolution attempted to burst the class bubble, people needed to be versed in certain skills. What better way to provide proof of those skills than to have some form of measure. And to better prove which were better qualified, the quantification of the grading system appeared.
And so the industrial education model was born and has thrived.
We now have political figures, both red and blue, who are trying to press more and more with information and not worry about that touchy feely stuff like beauty and truth and wisdom.
Anyone can be smart but it takes a lot of contemplating to become wise. And since contemplating is almost surely not quantifiable, we can no longer even consider contemplation in the factory model of education our leaders are championing.
I guess it falls out that if you want a trade, a craft, you need to learn by books. But if you want more from your education than mastering a skill, you need to learn to think beyond the book. And that is where the truth and the beauty come in.
Now before I take one step further, I am not saying one way or another is better or worse. I am merely pointing out that by teaching to the tests; we are doing a disservice to those who wish a different outcome from their education.
So, how do we teach truth and the appreciation of beauty?
My guess would be to study the classic, learn by adopting the standards of those who came before and then be made to feel free to go beyond those standards.
I was lucky; I had several really good teachers who pushed me in ways that I had never been pushed. Mr. Calmus taught me to learn from history and not just remember it. Mrs. Keyes taught me how to dive into a work of literature and pull all that can be pulled out of that work and then to hold it up again to take another look. Of course both of these teachers, and there were many more, led by example. But what they all had in common was to search for that sweet spot where form meets function.
There is beauty all around us. We need to be exposed to what is there in order to imagine what is not. As to me, the best way to understand beauty is to learn what has been call beautiful by others so you can measure your opinion against mankind. The best part about this is that you become exposed to all sorts of ways of looking at everything.
There is wisdom in those dusty pages of history that is important to learn if only not to make the same mistake again. This cannot be taught if all we are expected to learn is dates and events.
So I for one will embrace wisdom, beauty and truth until the spark of life leaves my body.
I think we do a disservice to the future of our students if they do not have at least one Mrs. Keyes or one Mr. Calmus in their life to challenge what it is they think they know.
I wonder how that fits into a system of education that champions the goal of quantification and sacrifices quality to reach that goal.
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