Education: What Is Required?

Dear Ms. Understanding:

I’m a high school student. I want to be an educator. I’ve started a list How do we know what is educative and what is just school?

· School offers an inexhaustible supply of old fish that fails to please the senses. Education teaches us to fish so we can catch our own fresh ones.

· School runs on modified monologue. Students speak only by permission. Education cultivates intelligent conversation, dialogue and “polylogue.”

· Schoolchildren face the teacher. Educated students face each other.

· Schoolchildren attend by requirement. We must choose to be educated.

· School herds students into small spaces, the better to supervise them. –Educated students have space to think, move, and reason.

· School treats teenagers as overgrown children, the better to convince them that they have a continuing need to be herded into classrooms. Education treats children as becoming-adults and teens as adults.

· School is authoritarian, telling students what to think and when to deliver it. Education is authoritative. Useful information and perspective come from knowledgeable people, and students relate new information to old.

Educator Wannabe

Dear Wannabe:

We need the “old fish” as information “bait” for our own fishing. Do you want all talking at once? If they faced each other, we’d have chaos. Without required attendance, we’d have mass ignorance. Discipline breaks down when students are too spread out. Teenagers are still children and must be treated that way. Good teachers are authoritative, but authoritarian responses are sometimes needed. Any more questions?