“I’m actually a fan of putting ‘appreciation’ at the center of all subjects. The motivation to do those boring phonics lessons is increased when it becomes apparent that achieving that competency opens up a world of desirable opportunities.
“We’re moving in the opposite direction of this in the education system writ large.”
John Warner’s point in the above quotation is that, as standardized tests have required adjusting lessons so that students are able to perform well on those tests, there has been a loss of understanding about the importance of learning.
In his linked article, Warner explains, “What we were learning [in music appreciation] is that we possessed the powers to observe (listen to) the world and interpret that world for ourselves. I’m confident we made no discoveries not already known by many before us, but we were being taught to believe in ourselves as creators of knowledge, self-knowledge above all. We were learning a lesson about rigor, namely that a course is as rigorous as you’d like to make it, and that the rigor which lives within the person is much more powerful than that which we attempt to impose from the outside.”
Everyone loves simplicity, and it is easy to think about education as being about getting a job, but education is more than that. It is more than passing a simple test to prove “adequacy” or “proficiency” in a subject. Education is learning how to use the facts to passionately pursue one’s direction in life.
I have previously written about how important Aristotle’s work was in breaking things down to understand how they work; but how specialization in those smaller things has led to a loss of understanding of the whole. We need to understand the bigger picture as well as how all the smaller pieces fit together.
It is that need to understand that makes conspiracy theories so interesting. In a fragmented society, when there seem to be random things happening all around, we like to understand what it all means, and a good conspiracy theory can provide that meaning. The important thing is to retain a bit of skepticism when considering a conspiracy theory. In most cases, there is no evil plot behind what happens; merely human stupidity — or, more charitably, human error.
Human error becomes more likely when education fails to instill a need for more information. Not only has education moved toward “teaching to the test” and away from teaching an appreciation of learning; it has become a political tool for those who want to censor inconvenient facts. Facts are important, whether or not they fit a particular political agenda. They are neither good nor bad; they just are. It is what we do with those facts that is important.
Thus it is wrong to censor books in which authors of the past have expressed views that we no longer hold or which we now view as harmful. Instead, we need to put those views in the context of the day they were uttered and in today’s context, and discuss how to move forward. It is wrong to censor history and ignore the painful or damaging acts out of fear that it will undermine our belief in all that is good in the past. Without understanding the past, there is nothing upon which to build a future.
So education is about learning all that we can in as many areas as we can, whether we are fans of a particular discipline. Without at least a rudimentary understanding of those things, we will not have all the pieces we need to understand the bigger picture. Appreciation, if not outright passion, is something we should be focusing on, whether in education, politics, or human relations. Only then can we move ahead.
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