My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 3

In this article I include two short fictional works, one memoir and advice book, one letter, and one speech. The crazy thing is, each of them has excellent lessons for education, teaching, and learning.

'The Best Christmas Pageant Ever' by Barbara Robinson

This is a 1972 book that was made into a movie in 2024. In 2025 my mother saw it and highly recommended it. It didn't sound that good, but during the 2025 Christmas season I watched it a few times. Then, when my mother and I were driving across Michigan to the airport when I was leaving to Costa Rica we listened to the audiobook, and it was good too.

The story is about a horrible family of kids that are bullies and force themselves into the Christmas pageant at a church. Being interested in the pageant, first for food, and then because they get to live out stories of other's lives, they're interested in learning about the Christmas story. They even go to a library and research. It's a good example of how school often pushes kids away from learning because of the compulsion, and lacks learning in the things that kids would actually choose to learn. That interest and engagement makes all the difference.

For instance, at first the kids were more interested in Herod wanting to kill a baby than the rest of the story, so that's where they started. Here's a small taste of the book:

"They went in that afternoon, all six of them, and told Miss Graebner that they wanted library cards. Usually when anybody told Miss Graebner that they wanted a library card, she got this big happy smile on her face and said, 'Good! We want all our boys and girls to have library cards.'

She didn’t say that to the Herdmans, though. She just asked them why they wanted library cards.

'We want to read about Jesus,' Imogene said.

'Not Jesus,' Ralph said, 'that king who was out to get Jesus . . . Herod.'"

This book and movie helped reinforce my ideas about interest being needed for engagement, and how when you follow it good things can happen, even when the path seems kind of odd.

'Excellence Wins' by Horst Schulze

Schulze co-founded Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, and later Capella Hotels and Resorts. When he was a kid in Germany he read about hotels, his town didn't even have one, and he decided that's what he wanted to do. His parents didn't approve at first. His mother didn't like the idea, and everyone in the area looked down on that type of work. It took him three years to convince his parents, and when he was 14 he went to learn the hotel industry at a six month boarding school. Then he did an apprenticeship. He worked in all aspects of a hotel, as well as doing academic work one day a week. In one of his essays during this time, as a teenager, he coined the phrase that became associated with Ritz-Carlton, and guided his work for the rest of his career, changing the hotel industry, "Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen." That's the only paper he ever got an A on. By his 18th birthday he was working in the industry for various companies in various countries at a high level, and never looked back. It's a great example of study led by interest, and apprenticeship combined with academic work focused on a specific subject area. This helped reinforce my thoughts about the usefulness of mixing work and academic study, and the idea of learning subjects based on a core interest.

'Harrison Bergeron' by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This is a wonderful and horrifying, because of its truth, short story about the future. I'll include the first three paragraphs. See how intelligence is limited by interruption, and think about if that applies to our technology today. This is from 1961, amazing how he could see the philosophy of the future.

"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the

law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better

looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was

due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing

vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy

by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and

Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a

perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short

bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap

radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government

transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep

people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains."

This story helped me realize that there are people that have seen the destructive force of a bad philosophy of equality coming, and how interruptive technology would limit intelligence.

'In Defense of Public Education', a letter to William Taylor Barry by James Madison, 4 August 1822

Usually I quite like the thoughts of James Madison, but I think he made an error here by supporting government schools. The state of Virginia had a system in place, and Madison was advising Kentucky on theirs. Many Founding Fathers pointed out that the American Republic could not stand with an ignorant or immoral public. So, they saw the necessity for education.

Madison made the case that private funding couldn't support the necessary schools, but this had been proven wrong at the time. The reading rate was high, as seen in the success of newspapers, which is how Benjamin Franklin made his wealth. Franklin had also helped found schools with private funds from himself and others. Yale University was founded in 1701 with private donations from the religious community and later donations from Elihu Yale, Harvard University was founded in 1638 by Puritan minister John Harvard with half from taxes and half from private funds, Princeton University was founded in 1746 by Presbyterians with private funds.

Madison saw, and states in this letter, that educational institutions will protect against tyranny. He didn't realize that the same institutions could be captured and used to instill tyranny if they were under government mandates and funding. At the time, in the early US, the Bill of Rights also didn't apply to the states, only to restrictions against the federal government. Each state constitution was more important at the time and needed to have similar government restrictions which could be different. Before the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, a state could even have an official state religion, and some did. So the federal government couldn't establish schools or churches, but the states could. Almost no one knows that important part of history, but it does mean that the times were different. This letter helped me to realize that even Madison didn't see how open to corruption a system of government schools would become, and that it would be a danger to, rather than a protection of, liberty.

'Lost Tools of Learning' by Dorothy Sayers

This is a speech from 1947. Sayers points out that education is being taught in a more shallow fashion. Kids are taught to read, but they are no longer taught logic. They end up with the ability read corporate advertisements and government propaganda, but they can't think about them. They know some things, but they don't know how to learn a new thing. She proposes that the classic trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric taught students how to reason and learn, and that education should return to that tradition which made Europe great. Here is the last paragraph of her speech:

"But one cannot live on capital forever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And to-day a great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits—yes, and who educate our young people, have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.” What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilisation that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain."

This speech helped me to realize the downward slant that Wester Civilization has been on for quite a long time. I have students in college that struggle with reading, writing, and arithmetic. They often have a very low understanding of how to learn. Not only do many people not know how to use capitalization and punctuation in a sentence, but many students don't even realize that if they want to understand what they read they need to know what the words mean, and that it's easy to look up the meaning of words. I've astounded students by telling them that they would understand what they read if they look up the words they don't know. Starting from that point as adults, it's unlikely that they'll ever get to the basic ideas of logic. It bodes poorly for the future.

Conclusion

Great insights can, and often do, come from unexpected sources. They're often easy to access, but it's difficult to know what to look for. Which is why I've explored so much.

Find more at JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com