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It's always interesting to note the whiggish, egalitarian overtones of the origins of the American public education system, as argued by one of its founding proponents, Horace Mann. The system was designed to teach children from all backgrounds the three Rs: reading, 'riting (sic), 'rithmetic (sic). But even here, one wonders what results from diverging from the classical medieval trivium, which were grammar, logic and rhetoric. These were to form the foundational basis for the upper arts, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, and the seven liberal arts combined were to form the basis for studying philosophy and theology. It would be one thing for me to anachronistically pine back to the medieval way of education, but I can't help but be curious about what we lost out on through our own factory optimized, parallel reconstruction of an education system. The system seems now to serve first as daycare and only very distantly second as means to teach foundational thinking skills. As such, I can't help but consider an alternate universe where we actually built such an egalitarian education system that begins with grammar, logic and rhetoric, then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, then philosophy and theology. My college experience involved very small class sizes taught in a discursive seminar style rather than the lecture style, and I really learned to think there. I can't help but wish that we had a system that had similar priorities. And I can't help but wonder if such a system would more deeply resolve issues that surface level fixes (such as plagiarism detection tech) only seem to distract from. |