Notes on Tutoring Without Curriculum

A couple of weeks ago I had an AI transcribe my thoughts on a new educational model while I was walking.

"It's a common question to pose the question of what should be taught or what should be learned. 'What should be learned' is a better question than 'what should be taught,' but there's an even more foundational level than this, which is: who should decide what should be taught and what should be learned?

Now, in our modern industrial educational system, it is the government that decides what should be taught and what should be learned. But this is a complete negation of reason and history. There are three major stakeholders, and none of them are the government. Now, it's important to governments—we see it in the work of Rousseau saying that The Republic by Plato is not actually a political work, it's an educational work. We see it in Politics by Aristotle in Book 8, where he talks about the purpose of education being to create a good citizenry. And so the government is always concerned with education, but that doesn't mean that if you wanted good kids, good learning, and the development of the person and not the state, you would subordinate everything to the state.

If you wanted the subordination of everything to the state, then the Chinese system for generalized standardized testing into civil service, or the Prussian system of government controlling things based on the Chinese system, or Horace Mann implementing that same Prussian system in America—these are all authoritarian models.

If we want a different model, then the three stakeholders do not involve the government. They involve the student, the parent, and the teacher. Many errors in educational theory and philosophy throughout the ages come from a distortion of this balance. Rousseau is a perfect example where he says either the parent should do all the educating or none of it and give it over to a teacher entirely—apparently why he abandoned all five of his kids to an institution where some of them likely died. There are also completely self-directed student models that don't fully work either. If you just sit a kid down and wait for him to speak, he's not going to come up with a full language on his own. We need a balance between these things.

Part of the reason Socrates was killed was for "corrupting the youth," which shows he didn't get the input of parents in what the children should be learning; it was purely between student and teacher. So if we keep that balance between the three stakeholders—student, parent, and teacher—we correct for government authoritarian control, we correct for a wholly self-directed student making poor decisions, we correct for an authoritarian parent not allowing input, and we correct for an authoritarian teacher who thinks they know best.

In the end, we should incorporate modern educational models to whatever extent the student and parent want within an overall classical framework—something like Quintilian—where the student makes a proposal with the teacher to the parent, both in writing and verbally, and then at the end they produce a final project that has a written work, a verbal presentation, and a verbal defense. This way we combine the best of all possible educational models. That is my theory."

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