Counting The Cost of Self-Education
Education must not be done by whims and fantasy
Enough with the fluff. Let’s get to business. It is time to do something.
Education is a sensitive matter. It is crucial to both the individual and society. Hence, it must not be done on whims and fantastical thinking. If you are going to travel a road less taken, it is good and right to survey the roads that are most taken. A little rigour into what you are leaving behind—in order to determine where you are going—will not hurt you. If anything, it is the best.
If you are going to lament about how schools have not done you so much good, I suggest that your lamentations be well-informed. You will thank me for that.
But before then, I must clarify who can get the best of LIAM’s objectives. If this describes you, you are welcome.
You are a highly-motivated person, characterised by curiosity, and the need to exercise agency; you take responsibility for your actions and you insist upon your freedom to act.
You are a school leaver who is deeply dissatisfied with how your learning went in school. Perhaps you knew you had the appetite to learn. Upon going through school, you felt this appetite die. But upon leaving school you regained the appetite to learn.
You are a passionate hobbyist.
True to number 3, you have specific areas you wish to apply your curiosity to: it could be a traditional school subject or a non-traditional subject (something we refer to here as a thesis—could be fashion, business, literature e.t.c)
You wish to explore an alternative to traditional learning methods for yourself and possibly your loved ones.
You experience intellectual loneliness.
You comply with all 6 above but you need the discipline and other benefits of a like-minded community to escape reading yourself into oblivion, screaming into a void, and you need to find accountability and refinement for your ideas.
Everyone agrees on the need to educate children and society. But that is all about that. We do not all agree about the methods—or better yet the philosophy—that should undergird how children ought to be educated. Nevertheless, I think all camps are up to something. They might not get it right entirely, but it will be conceited to say that they have missed it entirely. That is where I come in.
So, I fooled around and found some of these various philosophies guiding education. I have presented those I found most potent so that you may start looking from there to find what works for you.
My recommendation is for you to survey and steal the parts you need to improve your self-directed learning experience. As I stated earlier, they have their strengths and their weaknesses. So do not hastily accept everything within them. Take your time to rightly determine which elements meet your demand.
Here are resources for a great start. The deep dive is up to you (if it weren’t, you wouldn’t be described as highly motivated).
Montessorium:
The article linked is from Matt Bateman, a philosopher at Higher Ground Education and Montessorium. Matt is a philosopher who has adopted Maria Montessori’s philosophy of education. Although an Italian physician, Montessori is best known for her philosophy of education and pedagogy. She authored several books including The Absorbent Child, The Secret of Childhood, and Education for a New World.
A quote from Montessori to motivate you:
“The education of today is humiliating. It produces an inferiority complex and artificially lowers the powers of man. Its very organisation sets a limit to knowledge as well below the natural level. It supplies men with crutches when they could run on swift feet.”
That’s a scalding quote; whether you believe it or not. You should really dive into what she has to say. If you are up for it, you may use Matt as your guide or read the books.
Classical Education:
This is an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers on The Lost Tools of Learning. You could get the book if you want but the essay is a good start. And you may carry on from some of the considerations she offers.
Part of her critique in that essay which I hold on dearly to is the comment on a prolonged adolescence:
“When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to the University in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day?”
My answer is no. I am not comfortable with that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence. The stench of that effect remains on the breath of people who utter the absurdity that a 23-year-old (mostly women) is a child because the brain does not mature until you reach 25. This they use to evade taking responsibility for their actions, infantilising adults. Just awful. At least if you do not like the essay (because of its Christian bent), you should ponder that question and provide yourself with an answer.
A Modern School:
In a detailed work by Abraham Flexner, he presents his vision of a modern school. He does so on the back of a well-executed critique of the traditional curriculum. But here I simply share an excerpt to spark your interest.
In this excerpt I shared, he bulldozes one of my favourite arguments for learning the dead languages—the argument from mental discipline and elegance:
“The disciplinary argument fails because “mental discipline” is not a real purpose; moreover, it would in any event constitute an argument against rather than for the study of Latin. I have quoted figures to show how egregiously we fail to teach Latin. These figures mean that instead of getting orderly training by solving difficulties in Latin translation or composition, pupils guess, fumble, receive surreptitious assistance or accept on faith the injunctions of the teacher and grammar. The only discipline that most students could get from their classical studies is a discipline in doing things as they should not be done.”
I do love Latin. I loved, for instance, when reading Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy quotes Horace to describe people’s comments about him: difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti. Se puero, castigator, censorque minorum—which refers to a “defender of the past.”
VanDamme Academy:
Established by Lisa VanDamme, she recounts her motivation for this education project on the school’s website. She, like you and I, went through school and returned feeling uneducated. However, the link in the subheading contains the philosophy of the VanDamme curriculum.
From what I gathered, her programme is based on Ayn Rand’s philosophy and she has done a fantastic job of running through the arguments of classical education proponents (Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins, Dorothy Sayers). She took the progressives (John Dewey) head-on and did not spare Immanuel Kant in her efforts. This she said of Kant: "The philosopher Immanuel Kant assaulted education on an even more fundamental level.”
If you have the time to read this, you are in for an exhilarating ride. And consequently a deep dive. The link right above will always be here if you eventually settle to read it. But the link in the heading should provide a tickling start.
The Project Method
I don’t know any methodology in education that receives more heat than the project method. Or better known as the “Child-centred approach” which asked teachers to position each child at the centre of the learning process by focusing activities around the interests of the pupil. Nonetheless, it has generated a lot of sympathy and acceptance for the reason that when anyone sees traditional schooling as it becomes a creaking ceiling board with water leaking in, the project method reflexively comes to mind.
Kilpatrick has this to say:
“Here was in fact the age-old problem of effective logical organization. My whole philosophic outlook had made me suspicious of so-called ‘fundamental principles'.”
Once the seed to doubt the ‘fundamental principles’ of the classical/traditional methods drops into your thought, the project method instantly begins to look more alluring. Yet, it has its shortcomings, which its opponents are proud to display.
However, I recommend you look at it and start deciding.
And that my friends, is a good start to examining the route you wish to take in self-education. The only problem with freedom—like the one that comes with self-education—is that it comes with all the responsibility. Total freedom means total responsibility. I want you to count the cost.
Something Trivia
Here is my favourite playlist at the moment. Of course, it has been compiled by a kind stranger. It is every soundtrack in the first two parts of Marvel’s Guardians of The Galaxy. I recommend it for doing casual reading. You might tune in for some Mozart or Hans Zimmer when you choose to do some heavy lifting. Until next time, thanks for reading.