Teaching Children to Learn

*Based on the Principles of Education originally put forth by Ralph Waldo Emerson*

In a modern educational environment, where smart-boards and laptops revolutionize the way children are taught, many people are beginning to realize that the school system of old is fundamentally flawed. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said many years ago, public education attempts to do for the masses what cannot be done for the masses, not all students will fit the same mold. What is needed is a period of the classical Trivium, (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), followed by an “introductory curriculum” that would touch on many topics, then letting students go out and learn on their own. The final goal of this system would be to produce a student who can motivate and teach himself, instead of students led like sheep through a repetitive and deficient system.

The Trivium, Latin for “Three Roads”, is the classical foundation for an education. It consists of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The goal of using this system as the base of an education is simple – one wants to teach the student to teach themselves. Logic teaches them how to think, grammar teaches them to express that thought, and rhetoric teaches them to communicate it. Once this is mastered, any new idea can be tackled and understood with ease. As Robert Harris once said, “the mind is like a muscle, exercise makes it stronger and more able to grasp ideas and do intellectual work.” His research has shown that studying the Trivium improves concentration, increases the ability to argue ideas, gives the student presence of mind to tell what is important and not, and helps them to understand new concepts. Put simply, it teaches students how to learn. This general education helps one see what they are lacking, so they can then go out and educate themselves. In his speech on education, Emerson reinforces this point: “He can learn anything which is important to him now that the power to learn is secured, as mechanics say, when one has learned the use of tools, it is easy to work at a new craft.”

Once the power to learn has been secured, there is no reason to force all students through the same system. No two people will go on to do the same things in their lives, so the same education will not benefit all students. Emerson believed that you should take a student, “keep his nature, and arm it with the knowledge in the very direction to which it points.” An introductory curriculum would serve to introduce students to many different areas, once they find something of interest; they could pursue it on their own with a solid background in learning.

The advantages of the old system, however, should not be ignored. It saves time for teachers, allows them to focus on multiple students at once, keeps energetic and bad natured children in line, and can be performed easily, by any teacher straight out of college. Sadly, it results in useless topics being forced on students who will never make use of them. Occasionally, students have to sit through the same ideas being presented year after year. Over emphasis on a single idea can distort a person’s perception of reality, especially vulnerable in the schooling age. An anonymous scholar once stated that “When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” A broad education designed for all, or over-emphasis on ideas irrelevant to student’s occupations, will simply not cut it in today’s world. Students need education for their specific careers, and who better knows what the path they will take then the student themselves? In his education lecture, Emerson remarked that “it is curious how inter-meddling we are, and at what cost and pain we continue doing wrong.” It is a common misconception that students will not motivate themselves to learn. When forced through classes they have no interest in, this is true. But when free to pursue their own hobbies and careers, they will diligently work to succeed.

It is human nature to want to learn. Denise Oliveri, feature writer for Suite101, once remarked that “Children have a knack for teaching themselves things that are not forced on them.” Everyone should be able to relate to this, one of the first remarkable things a child does is teach themselves a language and begin to speak it. The Hole-in-the-Wall project, conducted by Sugata Mitra, demonstrates this idea. In an Indian village with no English teacher, he left a computer with no internet access and some game CDs – all in English. Three months later he returned to find the natives kids speaking 200 English words in their everyday language, playing games on the device formerly foreign to them, and they understood how manipulate it and use different functions. No one taught them, they had to teach themselves. When asked, a small girl said that they had found this machine Mitra left that spoke only in English, so they taught themselves to speak the language of the machine. When children want to teach themselves, the possibilities are endless.

Giving children the foundation for an education, and then letting them pursue it on their own, is the best course of action. As the renowned American Scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the machinery is broken, the system defunct, and forcing unwanted classes on a student only pushes them further from a good education. Another advocate for the combination of drill and introductory curriculum is John Gardner, a renowned educator for many years. He once made the remark that “Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often, we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.”