The Tuttle Twins and Educating Our Children to Think

I've been out of the blogosphere for quite a while, orienting myself around having a few new businesses, and two junior high students in our homeschool. But I did want to take some time to tell you all about some fabulous resources I've found lately.

 Whether your kids are private schooled, public schooled, or homeschooled, these should be a help to you. First is a new book series that helps educate your young children on free market principles.

 The first is this book which takes some of the principles in Bastiat's The Law and makes them accessible for young children:

The same company has produced another book, available here:

Next, I'd like to share with you a truly inspiring, informative, and helpful book.  Again, this resource will be helpful to you no matter the educational path you've chosen for your child.

Available here, this book will provide a deep and rich understanding of what a liberal arts education looks like in your home and how to walk that out in a realistic way.  There is also a companion manual for at-home uses and a book for teens.   

I am personally working on a project for junior high ages and up and will keep this blog updated as things develop.  In the mean time, remember that education is the doorway to the next generation of voters, politicians, and leaders.  Let's make it count for liberty!  

Sexting, Socialism, and Studying History

Here I am simply going to encapsulate a facebook post that I was referred to and commented on.

The initial post was about this lesson on "sexting."

My commentary on facebook was a response to a few people saying that they understood why schools had to teach on such things.

I want to tell you about a woman named Frances Wright. Bear with me, here, while I explain a little. She was a social reformer in America in the 1830s. Along with Robert Owen, Jr., son of the Scottish father of socialism who emigrated here circa 1800, they set about to ensure universal public education which America did not have at that time (that is a separate story).

First, you must understand that all of this was based not only in the hatred of God and Christianity but also of the family. The Owenites wanted children taken from their parents at age TWO and placed in state boarding schools where the parents could "visit at suitable hours" but never "interfere or interrupt the rules of the institution."

Here is a quote of Owenites: "In these nurseries of a free nation, no inequality must be allowed to enter. Fed at a common board, clothed in a common garb, uniting neatness with simplicity and convenience; raised in the exercise of common duties, in the acquirement of the same knowledge and practice of the same industry, varied only according to individual taste and capabilities; in the exercise of the same virtues, the enjoyment of the same pleasures; in the study of the same nature; in pursuit of the same object-their own and each other's happiness-say! would not such a race, when arrived at manhood and womanhood, work out the reform of society-perfect the free institutions of America?" (Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary, p. 72, available free online)

Now, 150 years later as we discuss the state teaching our children moral values, do we see any connection? How did we get here? Was it an accident? Will capitulating and enabling this system make it go away? What is the state trying to accomplish? What is coming out of our current administration regarding education and equality? Is UNESCO spouting the same ideals? Are these ideals American, based on our founding principles or are they rooted in something else?

And has anyone bothered to ask the question, "This lesson is teaching SELF CONTROL in reference to "sexting" but, if we allow the state to instruct our children in moral issues, who is to say if the next teacher will do so in an appropriate way or not?" In short, we trust too much. We abdicate too much. We do not know our own history. We must educate ourselves on how we came to be in the mess we are in with finances and families if we ever hope to correct it. Digging a deeper hole will not make the next generation more free or moral.

An example of the grammar stage of learning

Sometimes it's easier to see something to understand it, rather than just listening to someone talk about it. Here I'm posting my eleven year old reciting one portion of this year's memory work. She has also memorized around 400 other facts including information on: math, geography (including locations and names), science, Latin, English grammar, Presidents, and history sentences.

As you can hear in the video, we are reciting in a busy house with kiddos. Don't let that distract you...she didn't!

Math. What Gives?

I've been looking over mathematics recently as I'm puzzled by the curriculum of my local school district, CSCOPE. It appears that in second grade they are: teaching addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, and common denominators of fractions. You should know that in a CLASSICAL educational sense, this makes no sense.

Mathematics has classically begun very slowly, firmly rooted in concrete principles and word problems using real life objects. My daughter's second grade mathematics text, Ray's arithmetic, covers: addition and subtraction. Period. That's it. Yet by the time she's in twelfth grade, she'll be learning calculus from the same series.

Which leads me to ask: What the heck? How is it that 100 years ago, we knew how to take it easy on little minds and have them all wind up in calculus and today we're shoving way too much difficult stuff into their heads and they wind up not able to do much math at all upon graduating? What has gone wrong? What is the problem?

The problem is, in my opinion, that nobody reveres history as they should. How much effort would it really take for the TEA to say, "You know, Ray's Arithmetic worked for generations of Americans. We're just going to go back to that. It's free, it's proven, it just works." How difficult would it be to simply assign a Ray's text to each grade level and align the TEKS standards to IT? What could we possibly lose? Every kid doing calculus by 12th grade? As opposed to functionally illiterate mathematics students?

The same thing could be said with reading instruction and the McGuffey readers. The same could be said for writing instruction and the IEW curriculum (Institute for Excellence in Writing). These are SUPERB programs used by home schoolers and private schools nation-wide. They produce accelerated readers, writers, and thinkers. Furthermore: they are cheap, they're simple, and they're effective. There's nothing to lose there. Seems too easy, doesn't it? But in order to use those programs, you'd first have to: know about them, which would involve research and a little humility, and two: you'd have to actually want kids to learn something. Which, honestly, doesn't seem to be high on the priority list of any state administrators or local ones, for that matter.

In conclusion, I urge those reading this to investigate the claims I'm making here. Bring them up to your school boards, teachers, administrators, state reps, and the TEA. Let's be the ones who make positive changes for our kiddos.

Psyched.

Well I simply can't believe it took me this long to come to this realization, but....I know exactly what is wrong with education and exactly when it began. I know, right? I should've seen this earlier. The issue is, in short, that problems began when we started trying to fix what wasn't broken.

Education stayed pretty static from the time of Pythagoras up until the 1700s. And even then it really didn't change all that much until John Dewey and his ilk came along. And they haven't left it alone ever since. Even the social engineers didn't do the damage that Dewey and his behavioral scientist cohorts managed to precipitate upon public education.

What am I talking about? I'm saying that up until the 19th century, with few exceptions, teachers were in charge of education. True, we didn't have universal, compulsory schooling but what schooling we did have was mostly run and managed by parents and teachers.

In the early 1800s, however, that began to change. Well-meaning social do-gooders began to lobby for public schools where none were needed. They saw public schooling as an opportunity to put forward their own ideals for society. In other words, these social pioneers wanted to use the funding of the entire community to EXPERIMENT on everyone's children. You can read more about this in Blumenfed's work or John Taylor Gatto's tome (see my Recommended Resources).

Well that wasn't too terribly bad until. Until the insidious "science" of behavioral psychology arose out of the Germanic lands in the form of Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt went on to influence almost every major educational thinker for the next century and then some through the likes of Skinner, Dewey, Bloom, Piaget, et al.

In fact, to this day, these behavioral psychologists are still running the educational show paying little regard to what teachers and parents think or want. In fact, don't you know, they are the EXPERTS in research and learning and you, my friends - my wonderful public school friends - are their guinea pigs. They have many theories that need testing. And the best place to do this is, clearly, in arenas where they don't have to acquire grant money or foot the bill and where they will find little resistance - public schools.

Now before all this high-handed social engineering and psychological training, we were doing all right. We produced the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Galileo, Jefferson, Washington, Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the like. We built pyramids, hanging gardens, palaces, produced the Roman civilization, mapped the stars, and even managed to write several religious texts which are still revered today. It seems that we were managing all right.

Now, however, thanks to the psychologists who are hell-bent on "fixing" everything and instituting the latest and greatest in educational theory, we are a mess. Our kids are now functionally illiterate (we once had almost universal literacy with no public schools), cannot located oceans or continents on a map (they could once draw and label the entire world), and cannot perform basic mathematical functions without calculators (who needs those pesky math facts anyway?). Yes, we've clearly made huge strides in education. Mmmm-hmmmm. Thank you, social engineers and psychologists for turning what was once the shining star of pedagogy into the crippling quagmire it has become.

One more thing. If you inquire of these psychologists, even the ones who claim to be experts in "educational history," you might very well find that they are quite knowledgeable on everything which occurred after Dewey. They seem to be wholly ignorant, however, on what, exactly, schooling looked like BEFORE Dewey. They might also be hard-pressed to explain why we don't go BACK to school the way it once was considering that, despite all its purported flaws, it actually managed to produce highly educated students who could read Latin and Greek and write impressive governmental documents that still inspire the world.

Oh, the Humanity!

My background and training in classical education has predisposed me to see education a bit differently. In my mind, we must have a destination in mind before we depart. When I ask, "How do I want to educate this child?" my next question must be, "What is the purpose of education?"

A classical pedagogical mindset (to be distinguished from a traditional one, but more on that later) tells me that educating a person is about humanity itself. What does it mean to be human? How are humans different than animals and other creatures? Clearly, from a Christian or religious perspective, we see humanity in terms of divinity and, thus, in a special light.

When I determine that man is to be brought up to be especially human, I must ask, "How do I best produce this humanity in him?" Clearly since humanity is somehow linked to divinity, I must cultivate in the student a love and respect for divinity. If he is ever going to respect himself or his fellow men, he must learn to revere the divine.

And this is where modern education is falling painfully short. The Enlightenment eschewed this type of thinking (called scholasticism) and insisted that this new secular education could take place and even surpass classical thought. This boat is sinking and yet we rearrange deck chairs. As we look around, we see the result of a society brought up to believe the secular humanist ideal that man is the ultimate measure of truth. There is nothing above to check or balance his will or whims. He is an end unto himself. Ironic, isn't it? Man placing man on the highest pedestal somehow actually DEhumanizes him and causes his society to crumble.

C.S. Lewis wrote about this truism in his book The Abolition of Man. It is a very short logical argument against what Lewis calls "men without chests," an admonishment not to forget the humanity of humans. It is an exhortation to call out that thing in mankind which distinguishes him from the rest of creation. I recommend that you read it (take your time, it's very academic) and ask yourself how you can best call out the humanity in your students.

My suggestion for parents and teachers who are not quite sure what to do first is to expose your children to great literature, art, and music (the "humanities"). Librivox has a marvelous library of audio books and poems. Printing and hanging famous paintings around your home or classroom can also instill a respect for humanity and divinity. Something as simple as listening to a classical radio station for a few minutes each day can help expose young minds to the wonder and beauty around us, staving off the dreadful empirical gloom that comes from a modern worldview. Finally, I recommend exposing your little ones to scriptures. Even if your family is not religious, students will need to have an understanding of scripture in order to evaluate great literature as those books often uses Biblical themes or allusions.

The great fight we have in front of us is rescuing humanity from itself: regaining what we have, through our own folly and self-righteouness, lost.

Flak. I'm getting it.

I think I could be described as "outspoken." This can cause a few problems. For instance, when discussing educational issues in the realm of public school teachers.

While bandying back and forth about CSCOPE (click here for more information on this curriclum) with a few other educators on facebook recently, I was taken aback at the outright hostility I got from one teacher when I asked how much she knew about the history of education.

Clearly, I've touched a nerve here. We all want to feel like our college degree makes us experts in a field. But, sadly, our teachers' colleges are based on the same progressivist model as are our public schools. And just as vital history is being omitted from our young students' days, the same can be said at the collegiate level. Indeed, I have yet to find an educator who received ANY information on who John Dewey really was and what he really believed. Bloom? We use his taxonomy but we couldn't tell you much about his philosophy or WHY he was taxonomizing the brains and thought processes of young students.

Look at this quote from Samuel Blumenfeld's book Is Public Education Necessary?:

"An institution for this purpose (a teaching college) would become, by its influence on society, and particularly on the young, an engine to sway the public sentiment, the public morals, and the public religion, more powerful than any other in the possession of government."

That was written by a man named James Carter, a public education activist in Boston in the early 19th century, a time when Boston didn't NEED public education nor want it.

So we have a problem. We have a huge hole in the body of knowledge which is supposed to equip us to be good teachers. I say let us leave behind the practice of defending an institution which is rife with collectivism, socialism, and behavioral psychology. Let us move forward and educate ourselves in order to better serve our students.

You will find a list of recommended resources to begin your journey here on this blog. Be you a teacher, a parent, a concerned citizen, a statesman, or a student, this is the beginning of your journey. I wish you well and wish you a lack of flak.