Educating for the Prime Directive
Recently, I was involved in a discussion about the things we do and do not teach our children. I’ve already said quite a bit on this subject. But after talking with a few other people about education, and especially secondary education, I realized I approached the subject from the assumption that the purpose of school is to train the mind in skills like reading and manipulating numbers. Which is not at all what I believe. I don’t think head skills should take precedence over hand skills even in this world where head skills are critical to wage-earning. Every child today needs to be learning how to do, how to make, how to take care of themselves and others. In a world that is falling apart, hand skills are essential.
Still, being a writer and a bookseller and a scientist I have many reasons to want to see head skills perpetuated. And even if I did not have these particular values, I would advocate for book learning and mind training. Most head skills are, in essence, how we communicate, how we remember, and how we make judgements. We teach our children to read so that they can take in more information than they can gather from direct experience. We teach them to read so they can know what came before and what they might expect to come in the future. We teach them to read so that the past can talk to them and they can talk to their own descendants. We should also be teaching them to evaluate all this information critically and draw conclusions from it, but that has fallen victim to teaching to The Test. We don’t teach thought; we teach head skills.
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