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Charlotte Mason in Modern English
Charlotte Mason's ideas are too important not to be understood and implemented in the 21st century, but her Victorian style of writing sometimes prevents parents from attempting to read her books. This is an imperfect attempt to make Charlotte's words accessible to modern parents. You may read these, print them out, share them freely--but they are copyrighted to me, so please don't post or publish them without asking.
~L. N. Laurio
pg 112
Chapter 7 - How We Make Use of Mind
Principle 9. The child's mind is not
a blank slate, or a bucket to be filled. It is a living thing and needs
knowledge to grow. As the stomach was designed to digest food, the mind
is designed to digest knowledge and needs no special training or
exercises to make it ready to learn.
Principle 10. Herbart's philosophy
that the mind is like an empty stage waiting for bits of information to
be inserted puts too much responsibility on the teacher to prepare
detailed lessons that the children, for all the teacher's effort, don't
learn from anyway.
[For more insight into Herbart's theory and its
relation to CM, read Lynn Bruce's article An Oyster and a
Jewel.]
I can't resist presenting Herbart's psychology by quoting this humorous
bit by John Adams:
'We haven't been able to explain ideas by the mind, so why not flip it
around and try explaining the mind by ideas? That's not quite how
Herbart put it, to be sure. He's a German philosopher. It's true that
he starts with the mind, although he calls it 'the soul.' But don't
worry, the concept is just as ridiculous. This 'soul,' as he calls it,
is no more an actual soul than it is a crater in the moon. The way he
defines it, the 'soul' has absolutely no substance. It isn't even a
trap
that can catch ideas! Ideas can slip in and out at whim, or, more
accurately, at the whim of other
ideas. The 'soul' has no ability to invite, create, store or remember
an idea. The mind has no say at all.' [The
Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education]
'The 'soul' has no power or means whatsoever to receive or produce
anything. So it's not even a blank slate because
pg 113
you can't leave any marks on it. It's not a substance, as Leibnitz said
when he spoke of the mind being capable of some activity. Herbart's
'soul' has no ideas, feelings or desires of its own. It has no
intuition, no thought, no laws of will or behavior, not even the
slightest hint of predisposed tendency towards any of these things. The
pure nature of the 'soul' is an unknown mystery, and will never be
known. You can't even speculate about its nature, much less do
scientific research on it. [Lehrbuch
zur Psychologie, by Herbart, Part 3: p 152-153] A strong force
of inactivity is the only power that the mind has. Yet it is subject to
the effects of other forces. The only thing that can attack the 'soul'
is ideas. Therefore, the mind must be made up of nothing but the ideas
that have collected there.'
We can imagine what a struggle must ensue at the mind's doorstep among
the ideas all jostling each other to get in, and for those lucky enough
to squeeze in, to get the most influential spot in the front of the
mind. It must be like people who edge their way into groups when
society is in a state of anarchy. This behavior of ideas jostling to
get into groups has a name: Herbart called it 'apperception masses.'
Whichever group of ideas struggles and becomes the strongest mass gets
to have its way and dominate the mind. We won't spend a lot of time in
this book analyzing Herbartian psychology, even though his ideas have
been very influential to education in a serious way. Our interest is in
considering how practical it is when worked out while teaching real
children. But before we determine how it does when put to the test,
let's read what Professor William James said about psychology in
general:
'When we talk about psychology as a science, we shouldn't assume that
it means psychology has been proved by science. In fact, the reverse it
true. As a natural science, psychology is very fragile, and
metaphysical critics find leaks in every point. All of its foundational
assumptions and information need to be considered in relation to things
beyond the realm of psychology, and translated into other terms outside
of psychology. In other words, the term is used hesitantly and
with trepidation, not arrogantly. That's why it's so strange to hear
people talk about 'New Psychology' with an air of finality and triumph,
and to write books about the 'history' of psychology--while the real
substance of what 'psychology' means is still so vague. Psychology has
a strand of raw facts, a bit of
pg 114
gossip and debated opinions, a little classification and
generalizations in its foundational description. But after all the
research and theories, not one single law, not one single proposal from
which any result can be definitely predicted, has been found.'
Yet Professor James went on to write a whole book about psychology, a
very interesting book. And we'll do the same thing, although our
foundation is made up of nothing more than the common experience of
mankind, at least as common as the experiences of mind can be to all of
us.
Herbart's ideas about psychology are enormously satisfying and
appealing to teachers. Like any other group of people, they're
naturally eager to make their profession look indispensable. Herbart's
philosophy shows that every child is a new creation, able to be molded
completely by the teacher. If the teacher just learns how to do it, she
can gather the best collection of ideas in the most effective sequence
so that they form groups to the best pre-ordered advantage [unit studies]. Then the
job is done. In the student's mind, the strongest and most powerful
idea masses take over, and, if the teacher has selected beneficial
ideas, then, viola, the student is made into a full-fledged, educated
man.
Here's an example of a week's schedule, assembled by a teacher to make
the best use of correlating subjects to manipulate ideas into
apperception
masses: 'Math (Decimal fractions, simple equations, parallelograms),
Science (latent heat), Domestic Skills (nerves, thought, habits),
Geography (Scotland, industries in general).' Here's one for another
week: 'Math (metric problems, four rules of symbols, sum angles of
triangles), Science (machinery), Domestic Skills (circulation),
Geography (sculpture of Britain).' Apparently the ideas in these subjects of study
are more clever and limber than they appear, and are able to recognize
and leap towards each other to form apperception masses on cue!
One popular educational expert gave a valuable introduction to
Herbartian education. As
pg 115
an example, he wrote a unit study series of lessons for elementary-aged
children titled, A Robinson Crusoe
Concentration Scheme. It starts with nine lessons in literature
and language arts. The subjects are things like, 'Robinson climbs a
hill and discovers that he is on an island.' Then there are ten object
lessons, including The Sea, A Ship from Foreign Parts, A Life Boat,
Shell Fish, A Cave. The lessons don't show how these objects are
supposed to be produced. The third series is drawing lessons, probably
nine or ten, drawing a ship, an oar, an anchor and so on. The next
series is on manual work, all involving Robinson Crusoe, building a
model of his island, his house, his pottery. The next course of studies
is for reading. There are lots of lessons taken from selected portions
of Robinson and from 'a general reader about the items studied in the
object lessons.' Then there's a series of creative writing assignments,
where students write a composition based on the object lesson. The
children would come up with sentences, the teacher would write them on
the chalkboard, and each student would copy the completed composition
from the board. Here's a sample: 'Robinson spent his first night in a
tree. In the morning he was hungry but he didn't see anything around
him except grass and trees without fruit. On the seashore he found some
shellfish and he ate them.' Compare that with the prolific output of
six and seven year olds working in our Parents Unions Schools. They can
write about any subject they're familiar with. In fact, they can
dictate their own compositions from pages they've heard read aloud just
once directly from Robinson Crusoe--and I don't mean a children's
edition, but the original.
Arithmetic also has its lessons with lots of simple mental problems
dealing with Robinson Crusoe. The eighth and last series was singing
and reciting such things as, 'I am king of everything I see.' 'Each
lesson lasted about forty five minutes.
pg 116
Generally, a unit study based on a book like Robinson Crusoe would last
the entire year. Students in England seemed as eager and interested in
studying Robinson Crusoe as the students in our German schools. One can
easily see the wealth of material in the story to develop even more
lessons.' One certainly does! The whole thing must be fascinating for
the teacher. Ingenious plans to amplify a thing are always interesting
when you're the one putting the time and work into it. And no
doubt the children were thoroughly entertained. The teacher was
probably at her best developing as much as she could from a little bit
by her own sheer force. She was like an actress putting on a show and
the children were spectators, as they would be at a puppet show or a
movie. But one thing we can be sure of. The children developed a
loathing forever afterwards, not just for Robinson Crusoe, but for
every
other subject dragged in to illustrate his adventure. Another unit
study uses an apple to base a hundred lessons on, including
construction of a paper ladder to pick the apples. But, for all this,
not one of the lessons suggests actually eating the poor apple. We won't
name the author of the Robinson Crusoe study because, as a Chorus in a
Greek play would say, 'we cannot praise him.' But he has followed the
Robinson Crusoe study with one about the Armada.
The well-intentioned, clever, hard-working teachers who create these
concentrated studies have no idea that each lesson is an offense
to young minds. Children are eager and capable of a wide range of
knowledge and literary expression. But these kinds of lessons reduce
their learning to senseless trivia and insipid, pointless drivel. They
develop apathy that stays with them, and the mere mention of learning
makes them anticipate boredom. Thus their minds wilt and deteriorate
long before their school career ends. I've spent so much time on this
subject because I, too, believe that ideas are the
pg 117
only proper diet to grow children's minds. We are more clueless about
the mind than about Mars! The only way we can draw conclusions is by
looking at results. And the results conclude that the mind is a living
thing, a spiritual organism. (I don't need to apologize for calling a
substance-less thing an organism, since Herbart made a greater
contradiction by speaking of 'apperception masses.') Just like the
physical body, the mind needs regular and adequate nourishment. This
nourishment comes from ideas that are assimilated when the mental diet
is enthusiastically devoured, and growth and development are the result
under this kind of diet. The fact that children like lame, uninspired
talk and insubstantial, insipid storybooks doesn't prove that it's good
for them. They like lollipops, too, but they can't live on them. Yet
some schools are making a concerted effort to meet the intellectual,
moral and spiritual needs of children with mental candy.
Like I said before, the kinds of ideas that children need to nourish
their minds are mostly found in books with literary quality. If
children are provided with these kinds of books, then their minds will
do the work themselves to sort, arrange, select, choose, reject, and
group the ideas together. Herbart has the ideas themselves doing this
work after they push their way into the mind. This isn't just a trivial
difference. As a philosopher, Herbart's thoughts influence universal
perceptions. Most schools probably don't consciously know that it's his
philosophy they're adhering to, but they are, in England and elsewhere.
There are many reasons why. His theory throws the entire burden of
educating on the teacher. With so much responsibility, the personality
of the teacher becomes a major force in education. This gives
challenging, creative, interesting work to teachers who are very
intelligent, devoted and have a passionate hope to leave the world a
pg 118
little better than they found it by raising children to a higher level.
Surely this vision will be appealing to teachers. It appeals to
educational boards and school principals, too. Think how much influence
teachers have if they're seen as the fountain of all knowledge, and all
they need to do is turn on the spigot and let the information flow
forth from
themselves. Responsibility is placed fully on the teacher rather than
the
student. Lessons become entertaining and fun in order to hold the
students' attention. The popularity of jigsaw puzzles shows how much
people like to put unlikely things together--such as Robinson Crusoe
and lifebuoys! The teacher is encouraged by small evidences of success
every day, success that she has caused by her own cleverness, skill and
drama in drilling some point into her students. I say 'her' because
women seem to excel in this kind of teaching, although many male
teachers do quite well at it, too. And what about the children? They
are entertained and enjoy the amusement. They like their teacher
because she puts so much effort into attracting their attention. While
all of this is happening, it looks wonderful, who could fault it? But
later, thoughtful people become dismayed and anxious about this kind of
education.
A lot has happened in the decade since Alexander
Paterson alerted us to oppressive conditions in South London in his
book Across the Bridges. At
the time, England was pleased with the resulting reform they brought
about. What holds more promise than a freshly educated, eager school
graduate ready to make his mark in the world? But the reality of the
work world was horrible, conditions were terrible. Young men would be
lured into promising-sounding jobs that entrapped them like blind
alleys until they were let go to face a life of unemployment and
poverty, and most lost their integrity and character. What's the
solution? The issue of conditions after graduation is being considered.
pg 119
We already have adult educational classes so that, even if a graduate
loses his job, he can continue to learn something that might help him.
But Alexander Paterson thinks those classes don't prevent the best
graduates from ruining their lives. What about a decent enough youth
who gets a steady job and goes to a technical school to get a higher
paying career? William Pett Ridge wrote about such youths. A young man
may get a better job by going to a technical school, but the training
does nothing to make him a fuller, better person. He may continue to
have simple ideas about things, lack of moral principle, not be
interested
in much of anything and content with base entertainment. Yet, deep down
inside, he's a decent person. What a waste! An enrichment school could
have taught him to make the most of all the possibilities within
himself, and to enjoy the challenge of using his mind. But schools give:
'Too much learning, without requiring any effort on the part of the
student. The teacher works too hard to use all her training and
experience, but the student does nothing. If education is made too
easy, then students are robbed of the active mental challenge of
learning. Learning can be a difficult challenge, but the exercise
teaches students to concentrate and to work independently. The student
should be left alone with the book so that he's forced to put his whole
focus on the dull words in front of him. There shouldn't be someone
right there to paraphrase or make the remembering easier with memory
tricks. A promising youth who graduates might get a job with the
railroad. He'll be required to sit and memorize Morse code. Perhaps the
only school work he's done on his own is reading some exciting poem,
which hardly trains the mind to persevere when the work seems hard.
He'll find it difficult to learn the code . . . . Silent reading is
sometimes scheduled for a half hour, but it should be regularly
scheduled because reading to oneself is much more valuable than
listening to a read-aloud.' [Across
the Bridges, by Alexander Paterson]
What good does our current curriculum do for students? Read what Mr.
Paterson wrote:
'What do our schools strive to teach students by the time they
graduate? What kind of person do they aim to graduate? A look at the
scheduled curriculum
pg 120
should reassure every disgruntled critic who complains that his tax
dollars are paying for the luxury of French and algebra and violin
lessons for elementary students. The curriculum was carefully planned
so that a graduate would have enough knowledge of reading, writing and
arithmetic and enough familiarity with English, geography and history
to allow him to vote or read the newspaper or know a bit about what
he's doing. But that's only secondary to the three R's. Teaching the
three R's occupies fully half of the scheduled blocks of time on the
curriculum. That must be disheartening for both the teacher and the
student since learning the mechanics of reading, writing and arithmetic
doesn't train or teach anything. Those are just the elemental skills
one needs to do any real learning. In many schools, students spend two
years or more going over the fundamentals, even after they've learned
all they need to enable them to read, write words and count. If an
intelligent visitor
looks at the work of an average classroom, he will be impressed by the
accuracy and neatness, but he will find that this high quality is
merely an outward veneer. The handwriting may look polished, half the
boys may turn in compositions with flawless grammar and spelling. But
the visitor might notice what's missing--their ability to think and
reason independently, the curiosity that drives them to ask questions
and use their imaginations, hasn't even been stirred up. In fact, the
image of such perfection may make the visitor suspicious about the
foundational principles of the government's official curriculum. In
private boarding schools, boys aren't trained to be lawyers, ministers
or doctors. They're trained to be men.
Once they've been taught to work systematically and think for
themselves, they're prepared to learn whatever trade or take on
whatever kind of life they need to. But our public elementary schools
seem to aim at making boys clerks. After all, it's only clerks who need
perfect writing and spelling skills and nothing else.'
The teacher's best qualities are really her greatest obstacles. Her
flaw is in doing too much. Quoting again,
'The mental capacity of the average ten to thirteen year old boy is
wasted, and it's a great loss to our country. Ten productive years at
school could make up for the drawbacks of home life, and could reveal a
clever mind ready to learn. Many opportunities are lost in the early
years of school. But if those years are wasted after age fourteen, the
damage is irreparable. The mind probably won't be challenged again
pg 121
and will shrivel into nothing more than a center of automated responses
to appetites and sensations. 'Asia' is nothing more than a
hard-to-spell word, even though at school, he had to memorize its ports
and rivers. It's likely that a forty year old man has less vocabulary
than he had at fourteen. When the mind shrinks, it loses its ability to
feed and grow from life experiences. For most boys, only half of their
capabilities are used in the career they end up in after graduation.
The other half curls up and goes to sleep permanently.'
And here we have a gloomy prospect of more tragic waste to come in the
future. We all praise the Fisher
Education Act of 1918 [which raised the age of compulsory
education] because we think it's important for children to receive
education until they're 16, or even 18. The nation feels generous, and
employers don't mind supporting the new law. If they have to wait a
couple of years for new workers, they feel that they'll be compensated
with better workers.
But I see pitfalls ahead. The only way to make this plan really work is
to make the students spend eight hours at a private school. As Mr.
Paterson said, those schools don't train lawyers, pastors, stockbrokers
or bankers, or even soldiers or sailors, with specialized training for
their job skills. Their conviction is, that if you educate a person,
cultivate his imagination, train his judgment, and open his mind to
wide interests, then he'll be ready to master any profession. At the same time,
he'll know how to make himself useful, and how to find pleasure in the
skills of observation that his study of nature has given him. He'll
have interesting ways to spend his free time and he'll be a good
neighbor and good citizen. Besides being able to earn his living, he'll
be able to truly live.
Private schools do this. Various
pg 122
career fields have their share of men who enrich their profession, and
who sacrifice their free time and money to serve their fellow man as
local judges, church board members, committee members, peace officers
when needed, and as politicians. They consider it an honor to be of
service, and are proud to wear those titles. The hours of voluntary
service throughout the country as well as services done for very little
wages, justifies the vision of private schools. In fact, training men
to serve is important because many of the duties done by volunteers
aren't interesting enough for anyone to aspire to do for money. Our
great politicians, church leaders, civil servants and government
workers have gone above and beyond the call of duty.
How can we interest men of all classes in this kind of service? We know
it can be done because, during the war, we saw it happen all the time.
Any soldier had the potential to be a hero. The Army became a kind of
private school, offering our soldiers more knowledge, broader views,
lofty visions, duty, discipline and wonderful physical culture. Our men
made so much progress in personal growth that, rather than picking up
where we left off, we need to be careful that those men don't regress
physically, morally or mentally in a retrograde movement. The downward
slope is steep and slippery. We all know how easy it is to slip
backwards down the path of least resistance. We can't afford to have
another great war just to educate our people, but we need to find some
way of instilling private school elements in our youth. Mr. Fisher's
Education Act of 1918 provides a perfect opportunity. His act gives
four more years to schools to work with students, and four years is
long enough to educate them. It gives enough time to influence them
with goodness and light. But we need to limit this education to our
ideal purpose of making broad-minded men. Specialized vocational skills
should be off-limits.
pg 123
Special training for engineering, textile work, etc. is unnecessary.
After all, every company knows that a responsible, promising student is
easily taught whatever he needs to be a good workman. Look at the women
who worked during the war. Technical and vocational schools aren't
esteemed all that highly by companies on their technical merit.
Students hired out of vocational schools are usually hired, not because
their technical skills were so impressive, but because they showed some
intelligence and potential to be trained to make a good worker. This is
a good reason to make adult continuing education schools more like
private schools. They should avoid teaching money-making skills.
Denmark and Scandinavia have both tried educating their youth to
satisfy their natural curiosity to know and their inborn desire for
knowledge, instead of training them for some specific trade. They teach
history, poetry, science, art, which every man instinctively does, and
for the hundred years they've been doing this, their system has been so
successful that they've become a good example for the rest of the world.
But Germany has gone after a different vision. Germany has been driven
by the ideal of utility, placing value only on what's profitable. WWI
has shown us just how useless an education is when is doesn't uplift
the moral and intellectual part of students. Germany's education had no
higher purpose than using students' skills to their best wage-earning
advantage, and
to benefit the State. So the country became morally bankrupt
(temporarily, we hope) not just because they were in the war, but
because their educational system ignored the spiritual needs of the
students. If they addressed the spirit at all, it was only mentioned
vaguely
in a curriculum designed solely to make students useful employees. We
should enlarge our vision and make our Continuation Schools more like
private schools. We should strive to have a broad-minded People's
University with thousands of campuses, all called Continuation Schools
(the name is actually very inviting) so that, no matter where you live,
there's one close by.
pg 124
But some will protest that private university schools educate with dead
languages--Latin and Greek. Our own criticism is that, no matter how
wonderful ancient Greek and Latin literature might be, it shouldn't
displace our own English literature. Whatever lessons might be learned
from Sophocles, Thucydides, Virgil can be learned just as well from
Milton, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Bacon and other great English literary
thinkers. Knowledge communicated in our own common language is more
easily accessible than knowledge that has to be discovered among a text
in a dead language. This fact will help us make more efficient use of
the short time we have. If students apply themselves with perfect
attention, then more can be learned in 400 hours per year. But that can
only happen if we're convinced that students really do have an inborn
craving for knowledge of humanities, and if they read with total focus
so that they really absorb what they read. Narrating will help them
prepare for public speaking, which is a skill that everyone should have
these days.
What's the alternative? A coordinated unit study like the one about
Robinson Crusoe, but based on what some corporation wants. It might be
a
year learning about soap--how it's made, what it's made from, the
history of the soap business, how soap is shipped to buyers, ways to
use soap, how to fill out a soap invoice, different kinds of soap, ad
nauseum. Iron, cotton, nails, pins, engines, buttons--every industry
will offer its own brilliant lesson plans for unit studies. Those who
advocate utilitarian education will be thrilled. The students will be
busy and learn some practical skills and gain some wit. And what will
be the end result? Two hundred years ago, when there was a movement to
educate Europe's youth after the devastation of Napoleon's wars, we
English got in on that. The current of thinking
pg 125
went in two directions from the beginning. One branch favored
practical, materialistic
education. The other favored spiritual education to
develop the whole person. England, already growing in manufacturing,
went with the first branch, favoring utilitarian education. Germany,
France, Switzerland also favored utilitarian education. But the
Scandinavian countries chose something different. They listened to
Denmark's poet, Grundtvig, who earned the title, 'Father of the
People's High Schools.' He said, 'spirit makes strength, spirit reveals
itself in spirit, spirit works only where there's freedom.' Munich
schools are the epitome of utilitarian education, and Germany's army
morale is its crowning glory. But we are slow to heed their lesson. We
have let efficiency take priority over individuality. We obsess over
how a youth might be made most useful to society. But we don't seem to
care whether he's the most that he can be for his own personal
development. We rationalize that, if a person is trained to get a job,
then he will be useful to the world, and isn't that the best thing we
can do for an individual? We forget that Jesus said, 'Man does not live
by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'
Some of those words are the truths clothed in religion, poetry, art,
scientific discovery, and literary expression. These are the things by
which we live, and in which our spirit flourishes. Spiritual life and
growth needs ideas for its food, like the body needs bread every day.
We will find, as one Swedish teacher wrote, 'just as fertilizing the
soil provides the best conditions for growing seeds, a well-grounded
education in humanities gives the best foundation for developing the
person, whether he goes on to be a businessman or a farmer.' But we
don't need to go to Sweden to find an advocate. We have an educational
prophet of our own, Mr. Fisher, in England, and I'll close by quoting
him:
'What about the content in education? What should be taught?
pg 126
I'll answer in the broadest way. During my afternoon reading, I found a
very fitting quote in the letters of John Stuart Mill. It said,
'Whether poor or rich, nobody needs to be taught someone else's
opinions. The individual needs to be taught and encouraged to do his
own thinking. Physical science doesn't teach this, no matter how
thoroughly it's learned.'
'Our country's youth won't be inspired to greatness by learning about
economic doctrine or physical science. They can only be raised to a
higher moral level if they receive ideas that stimulate their
imaginations, inspire their characters, influence their souls. It is
the task of all good teachers to bring those kinds of ideas to their
students.
'Sometimes I hear that you shouldn't teach patriotism in school. But I
disagree, I think that patriotism should be taught in the schools. What
I mean by patriotism isn't blind devotion. I mean an intelligent
appreciation of noble things in adventure stories, both in literature
and in the country's history. Youths should learn to admire what's
great when they're still school-aged. And don't forget that, for poor
people, school may be the only place they learn such things.
'What I want is patriotism, but in a much broader sense than is
normally taught. Of course, no country is perfect, one can find reasons
to criticize any country. It's important that schools teach students to
look with a critical eye. But before they learn the flaws of their
country's institutions, and learn to criticize everything that's wrong,
they should learn to recognize and admire what's good. After all, life
is very short and we only have one chance to live it. In the few years
we have, we should try to fill ourselves with love, admiration and
uplifting pleasures as we can. If education is only used to train
students to be critical and bitter, then they'll lose all of the
sweetness life has to offer. We will have made them miserable for no
good reason. Life has enough sorrow and hardship. We don't need to
introduce it to young people too early.'
Note: Some educational authorities may decide to spend an hour or two
each week on physical exercise or handicrafts. In that case, there will
be that much less school time
pg 127
for reading. I suggest that, with free evenings, communities offer
classes at the local club [or YMCA?]
for military drill, calisthenics, gymnastics, dancing, singing,
swimming, carpentry, cooking, first aid, sewing, weaving, pottery,
acting--anything that will stir up the minds of its citizens. Nobody
would be forced to go. The way clubs are already set up, social
attractions are already in place to motivate people to participate.
They already have things like public recognition and prizes. Students
who have spent part of their day at the adult continuation schools will
bring their new knowledge to these classes, making them more
interesting. Every community should also have outdoor sports on
Saturdays.
I have urged the case for adult continuation schools as strongly as I
know how. But there's one thing even better than continuation schools.
These days, parents are doing well enough that they're able to let
their
children stay in school until they turn 17. Then those students are
fully prepared to go to college, which is really what schools have been
training them for since they were in first grade. If all children
stay
in school, the world will be a much different place. Every person will
have received a broad, varied education. The ideas taught in school
will become relevant to the real world. If, as Plato said, knowledge is
virtue, and that knowledge is enhanced with religious teaching, then we
shall see in our own lifetime how righteousness can exalt a nation.
Paraphrased by L. N. Laurio
Please direct any comments or questions to me by emailing me at cmseries-owner at yahoogroups dot com.
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