My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 6
In this volume we visit pre-WW2 Poland, pre-communist revolution Russia, post-revolutionary war United States, England between the world wars, and modern China. It's a journey.
Belfer grew up in an orphanage in Poland started and run by Henryk Goldszmit and Stefania Wilczynska in the early 1900s. Goldszmit was famous under the pen name Janusz Korczak for a few successful children's books he wrote, including one that's similar to Harry Potter. Korczak was also a medical doctor.
When the Nazis were rounding up Jews in Poland Korczak could have gotten out because he was famous and had offers, but he would have had to abandon the kids, about 200 of them. He and Stefa stayed with the kids, went to Treblinka with them, and died. Belfer had fled Poland for Russia two years earlier when he was 16, kids generally left the orphan school at 14.
Korczak's organization is astounding. He ran the orphanage like a little republic managed by the students. They had an elected student council with real power. They had elected judges. Even Korczak was brought before the student court for being rude to a girl once when she wouldn't leave him alone to write.
I had heard about the doctor with the orphanage that went to a concentration camp before, but I never looked into Korczak. This book helped me realize that he's an amazingly unique person. It also helped me realize that running a unique institution like that is possible, but you need unique people to lead it.
'Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World' by Yong Zhao 2014
China has been a great civilization for a long time. Part of the reason is that it conformed for a long time to Confucian concepts. Part of the way it did that was that the government incentivized people succeeding at standardized tests. They've been doing this for over a thousand years. It started to change when China found out the hard way in the mid to late 1800s that European powers had surpassed them. China's been in a struggle to get their place in the world back ever since.
Ironically, the education system that helped them succeed in previous centuries, geared for conformity and academic achievement, prevents creative thinking for the innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship needed for success in the modern era. In recent decades China has been trying to import this type of creative education from western cultures. But, also ironically, for the last couple hundred years Europe and the US have been fascinated by China and have been working on making their education systems more like China. Now the eastern and western education systems are failing in similar ways, even though they started very different.
This book helped me realize that China will most likely be limited in being able to lead economically and technologically in the world because of these deep and resilient cultural roots and systems which are unlikely to significantly adjust even after massive political changes. By western culture working toward the same system over the last couple of centuries these same types of issues should grow, so that east and west will start to balance out. (Spoiler alert: when major political powers balance out you usually get a lot of war. You can't have the pax regis (the king's peace) with a weak king, you can't have Pax Romana (Rome's Peace) with a weak Rome. With the fall of the west, the rise of the east, increasing wars, and the failure of either west or east to excel, then humans may fall into a type of dark ages again, where humanity regroups and emerges with new institutions that we are not currently aware could exist, like the university system growing out of the middle ages.)
'The Rhythm of Education' by Alfred North Whitehead 1922
Whitehead makes the case that education is a living thing that grows, and therefore it's an organic process with cycles. There are short-term and long-term growth cycles. People have their own individual cycles, but there's also a general pattern, and education has to be adapted to these natural cycles. As he states in his conclusion, "The point of this address is the rhythmic character of growth. The interior spiritual life of man is a web of many strands. They do not all grow together by uniform extension." Learning doesn't conform to starting and stopping when the school schedule says it should.
Whitehead makes an important point about why our education systems often fail. He says, "Education must essentially be a setting in order of a ferment already stirring in the mind: you cannot educate mind in vacuo." This first phase of interest he calls the romantic phase. Next is the precision phase, and last is the generalization phase.
Schools normally just work on precision. This deformed version of growth doesn't work. As Whitehead says, "It is evident that a stage of precision is barren without a previous stage of romance: unless there are facts which have already been vaguely apprehended in their broad generality, the previous analysis is an analysis of nothing."
Whitehead was a logician and a mathematician. He likes things to be ordered, structured, and logical. But, he could also observe reality, and you can't take a theory and press it onto reality, you must adapt your ideas to reality. This speech helped me realize that learning is growth, and growth is organic.
'A Project of a General Plan for the Establishment of Popular Schools' by Leo Tolstoy 1862
Tolstoy is vicious in this work. He goes through the law article by article tearing it apart. I think it's the best thing against a specific government school law I've ever read. There are several interesting patterns here. Private schools were already expanding in Russia. Instead of letting that happen, which is what you would do if you wanted a free and prosperous society, Russia decided to crush those schools so the government could control education. But, not in the most straightforward approach. Technically Russia had an older law that made private schools illegal, but was often ignored. Instead of eliminating that stupid law and letting education flourish, the government passed a law increasing taxes by a lot and establishing government schools across the country. This is a common pattern that we see with governments, they can't allow freedom of education, governments always have to control the minds of youth to manipulate them in the way that serves the government best. By establishing government schools through taxes the people have no choice but to pay, it makes a competing private school rarely possible, helping to eliminate free thought.
There's another interesting patten here. The government said it was setting up the schools to increase the morals and religion of the people, Orthodox Christianity. Within 60 years Russia had the communist revolution. Communists are atheists, and they killed a massive number of Christians in Russia. Lenin spoke about the social democrats infiltrating and taking over the schools. The schools were started to support religion, but ended up being used to eliminate religion. We see this same pattern in US history, schools were originally set up by local taxes so kids would learn to read the Bible, and eventually they ended up being atheist institutions. This is a similar pattern to the UK and Europe, and even China.
This paper by Tolstoy helped me realize some of these common patterns we see in education of how government schools are designed to fail and eliminate private schools, and how once the government establishes itself as the highest authority in education the Christian schools over a few generations tend toward becoming atheist and communist.
'Hints for Consideration respecting the Orphan School House in Philadelphia' by Benjamin Franklin 1785
This is a just a 311 word note from a wise 79 year old man giving advice on trying to avoid the difficult realities of human nature and organizations. It's common that charities become corrupt over time, many charities are even set up from the beginning as a cover for corruption. Franklin was working on tackling this problem way back then. Here's the first line of his note, "Charitable Institutions, however originally well intended, and well executed at first for many Years, are subject to be in a Course of time corrupted, mismanag’d, their Funds misapplied or perverted to private purposes."
This helped remind me that human corruption hasn't grown or shrunk over time, it stays the same because of human nature, but can be managed by changing structures and incentives, as Franklin proposes in this note.
Conclusion
All of this information, from Poland, Russia, China, England, and the US, meshes together in a complex way that makes sense. There are complex patterns that are hard to see, but they are there, and seeing them side-by-side helps us notice their emergence.
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