My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 8

At first these five works seem like they almost can't be compared. That they shouldn't be talked about at the same time. But, they fit together perfectly.

'Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down' by Laura Sandefer 2017

Jeff and Laura Sandefer are a classic power couple. He has an MBA, founded a successful oil and gas company, founded an investment firm, and got involved with business education. She was successful in the insurance industry, then got an education degree, and taught fine arts. Then, they founded a private school and grew the organization to hundreds of locations in dozens of countries.

It's a unique organization. Instead of teachers they have guides that allow the kids to do a lot of organization and leading in school, and guide the kids through questioning. They have a student contract that the kids commit to. They do some online academic work. They do a lot of projects that the students give exhibitions on to prove their learning. The kids are considered heroes on quests.

In 2007 they started a children's business fair in Austin, Texas. In 2009 they started their school with their kids and few other families in a house they rented. In 2012 their first affiliate location started in California, and another in Guatemala, and expansion kept going after that.

An appendix from the book lays out their principles:

"OUR MISSION:

We believe each person who enters Acton Academy will find a calling that changes the world.

OUR PROMISES:

We promise through Socratic guiding and experiential learning to encourage each member of our community to:

Begin a Hero’s Journey

Discover one’s own precious gifts and a commitment to mastery

Become a curious, independent, lifelong learner

Embrace the forging of a strong character

Cherish the arts, the physical world, and the mysteries of life

Treasure economic, political, and religious freedom

OUR BELIEFS:

We believe each person has a gift that can change the world in a profound way.

We believe in learning to learn, learning to do, and learning to be.

We believe in a closely connected family of lifelong learners.

We believe in economic, political, and religious freedom.

OUR EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY:

We believe clear thinking leads to good decisions, good decisions lead to the right habits, the right habits forge character, and character determines destiny."

They charge just under 10,000 dollars per student per year, and generally have around 36 students of mixed ages per class with two adult guides.

This book brought home for me that the education industry is ripe for disruption by good educational and business models, and that's true around the world. It also brought home for me that it's not just about the education, it's also a business that has to have numbers that work, and it's no coincidence that a business couple started one of the most successful private school chains.

'The Education of Children', in 'Moralia' by Plutarch 100 to 200 AD

It's amazing to read something almost 2,000 years old, and realize that humans haven't improved. This essay from Plutarch isn't very long, but it would literally work better than modern government schools. You can see him deal with the problems that have always been problems, and will always be problems which each generation must tackle anew.

He highly emphasizes the importance of education at multiple points.

"For how small is man's strength compared with the power of other living creatures! I mean, for instance, elephants and bulls and lions.⁠ But learning, of all things in this world, is alone immortal and divine. Two elements in man's nature are supreme over all — mind and reason."

"For to receive a proper education is the source and root of all goodness. As husbandmen place stakes beside the young plants, so do competent teachers with all care set their precepts and exhortations beside the young, in order that their characters may grow to be upright."

People think things like this are modern, but some of the ancients were more modern than the moderns.

"This also I assert, that children ought to be led to honourable practices by means of encouragement and reasoning, and most certainly not by blows or ill-treatment, for it surely is agreed that these are fitting rather for slaves than for the free-born; for so they grow numb and shudder at their tasks, partly from the pain of the blows, partly from the degradation. Praise and reproof are more helpful for the free-born than any sort of ill-usage, since the praise incites them toward what is honourable, and reproof keeps them from what is disgraceful.

But rebukes and praises should be used alternately and in a variety of ways; it is well to choose some time when the children are full of confidence to put them to shame by rebuke, and then in turn to cheer them up by praises, and to imitate the nurses, who, when they have made their babies cry, in turn offer them the breast for comfort. Moreover in praising them it is essential not to excite and puff them up, for they are made conceited and spoiled by excess of praise."

This should strike home considering IQs in the US and Europe are now going down.

"Above all, the memory of children should be trained and exercised; for this is, as it were, a storehouse of learning; and it is for this reason that the mythologists have made Memory the mother of the Muses, thereby intimating by an allegory that there is nothing in the world like memory for creating and fostering."

As modern parents turn their kids over to the nearest government school and hope for the best, Plutarch makes a similar criticism of some parents 2,000 years ago.

"It is right to rebuke some fathers who, after entrusting their sons to attendants and masters, do not themselves take cognizance at all of their instruction by means of their own eyes or their own ears. Herein they most fail in their duty; for they ought themselves every few days to test their children, and not rest their hopes upon the disposition of a hired person; for even those persons will devote more attention to the children if they know they must from time to time render an account."

Each person, then and now, must conquer the same challenges of being human in society.

"We must now lay down some rules of conduct which the young should follow no less but even more than those previously given. These are: To practise the simple life, to hold the tongue in check, to conquer anger, to control the hands."

I can attest to the limited reading and writing skills in students currently going into college, and here is Plutarch praising books.

"For the corresponding tool of education is the use of books, and by their means it has come to pass that we are able to study knowledge at its source."

Here's something unique. Look at what learning Plutarch places as the highest value.

"Now the free-born child should not be allowed to go without some knowledge, both through hearing and observation, of every branch also of what is called general education; yet these he should learn only incidentally, just to get a taste of them, as it were (for perfection in everything is impossible), but philosophy he should honour above all else."

Notice that the next two things are almost never followed in modern society, because kids go to their assigned government school the parents choose neither the peers nor the teachers of their children.

"Now there is another point which should not be omitted, that in choosing the younger slaves, who are to be the servants and companions of young masters, those should be sought out who are, first and foremost, sound in character, who are Greeks as well, and distinct of speech, so that the children may not be contaminated by barbarians and persons of low character, and so take on some of their commonness. The proverb-makers say, and quite to the point, "If you dwell with a lame man, you will learn to limp."

When now they attain to an age to be put under the charge of attendants, then especially great care must be taken in the appointment of these, so as not to entrust one's children inadvertently to slaves taken in war or to barbarians or to those who are unstable."

It's reasonable to make the case that Plutarch was largely talking about and to the upper class, whereas our failing education system applies to the middle and lower classes. However, it is still amazing that advice from 2,000 years ago is better than most education today. This and Quintilian really opened my eyes to the fact that education hasn't improved. Which seems obvious once you think about the great philosophers, farmers, architects, poets, and others of ancient Greece and Rome, they must have had education figured out to produce those people. The ancients cooked stew with vegetables, spices, and meat in a pot with water over a fire while talking. We cook stew with vegetables, spices, and meat in a slow cooker plugged into a wall powered by electricity that travels from far distances produced from solar panels, nuclear reactors, or coal burning to make steam to turn turbine engines, while looking at social media of people on the other side of the world we're connected to by wifi and cell phone networks. It's the same thing, just with modern technology. Ancient stew is to modern stew as ancient education is to modern education. The stew is the same, just like education.

'On the Future of Our Educational Institutions' by Friedrich Nietzsche 1872

Nietzsche was literally a crazy genius. It's generally accepted that he had one of the highest IQs in history, and later he went to an insane asylum. He became a university professor at 24 of classical languages, meaning he read Plutarch in the original ancient Greek. He was great at seeing problems, he wasn't great at offering solutions, and this work shows that tendency. He's speaking here about schools in Germany, but you can see the parallels in the schools in the US as well because the systems are both based on the Prussian model of mass manufacturing kids' minds.

I like that he points out that no state reform can fix education, which means that politicians can run on fixing education as a campaign slogan for hundreds of years without people ever figuring out that the politicians can't fix education.

"Should any reader demur and suggest that all that is required is prompt and bold reform; should he imagine that a new ‘organisation’ introduced by the State were all that is necessary, then we fear he would have misunderstood not only the author but the very nature of the problem under consideration."

It's interesting that Nietzsche focuses on these two things in this specific way, because I think the problems can be framed different, but he's not wrong.

"Two seemingly antagonistic forces, equally deleterious in their actions and ultimately combining to produce their results, are at present ruling over our educational institutions, although these were based originally upon very different principles. These forces are: a striving to achieve the greatest possible extension of education on the one hand, and a tendency to minimise and to weaken it on the other. The first-named would fain spread learning among the greatest possible number of people, the second would compel education to renounce its highest and most independent claims in order to subordinate itself to the service of the State."

This next piece is a great point because it notes the difference between someone like Plutarch who's pointing out philosophy and virtue as the highest attainment and learning, and what people mostly pursue the attainment of education for, which Nietzsche points to as three not great reasons.

"Thus, wherever I hear the masses raise the cry for an expansion of education, I am wont to ask myself whether it is stimulated by a greedy lust of gain and property, by the memory of a former religious persecution, or by the prudent egotism of the State itself."

Here is an interesting point, because he notes that you can't really succeed in the government schools by being an individual or by conforming.

"Their really independent traits which, in response to this very premature excitation, can manifest themselves only in awkwardness, crudeness, and grotesque features,—in short, their individuality is reproved and rejected by the teacher in favour of an unoriginal decent average. On the other hand, uniform mediocrity gets peevish praise; for, as a rule, it is just the class of work likely to bore the teacher thoroughly."

Humans have a tendency to do things the easy way. But, when you're trying to mass produce, such as the modern education system, then you also need an efficient system that hammers parts out in the same way. Unfortunately hammering people to conform them to a system useful for the government doesn't work out so great for the humans themselves.

"But we shall find that this observation holds good in every department of pedagogic life: the simpler and more comfortable method always masquerades in the disguise of grand pretensions and stately titles; the really practical side, the doing, which should belong to culture and which, at bottom, is the more difficult side, meets only with disfavour and contempt."

This helped me realize that I can have as much or more insight into problems and solutions as Nietzsche, and that even a genius can see problems growing into the future without knowing how to fix them.

Pliny the Younger, letter 3.3 to Corellia Hispulla 100 AD

Pliny the Younger's real name was Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus. This Pliny (his uncle is Pliny the Elder) was a lawyer, judge, senator, and governor in ancient Rome. He knew all of the important people. He would write letters to emperor Trajan asking for advice.

This letter is Pliny advising the wife of a Roman senator on the education of her son, who would later become a senator himself. Pliny advises her to hire a specific tutor named Julius Genitor who he says is a good speaker, disciplined, and moral. Here are two small pieces of the letter:

"I feel sure that the only way to secure his growing up to be like them in all their good qualities is for him to drink deeply of the honourable arts, and the choice of a teacher from whom he may learn them is a matter of the highest importance. So far, his tender years have naturally kept him close by your side; he has had tutors at home, where there is little or no chance of his going wrong. But now his studies must take him out of doors, and we must look out for a Latin rhetorician with a good reputation for school discipline, for modesty, and above all, for good morals."

"So bid him God-speed and entrust him to a tutor who will teach him morals first and eloquence afterwards, for it is but a poor thing to learn the latter without the former."

This helped me realize that throughout history it's been taken for granted at the highest levels that education by private tutor is the best education. The key was selecting a good tutor. And yet, in the modern world this isn't known by most of the middle and low classes. They've been conditioned to believe that anything other than government schools is weird. It's a cruel trick that government propaganda has played on the people. It also helped me see the timeless tradition of mothers being worried about the education of their kids and asking for advice from someone successful.

'The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club' by C S Lewis 1943

Clive Staples Lewis is quite famous as the writer of 'The Chronicles of Narnia' and a number of books on Christian apologetics. He was a professor at Oxford and Cambridge, and friends with J. R. R. Tolkien. He doesn't have a book on education, but he wrote hundreds of articles, and some of them deal with various parts of education. His book 'God in the Dock' is an essay collection that includes this small article.

Lewis didn't found the Socratic Club, but he was the first president from its founding in 1942 to 1954. The club continued until 1972. It's a great combination of an ancient Greek ideal of open debate and Christian thought. Here are a few key pieces:

"Socrates had exhorted men to 'follow the argument wherever it led them': the Club came into existence to apply his principle to one particular subject-matter — the pros and cons of the Christian Religion.

It is a little remarkable that, to the best of my knowledge, no society had ever before been formed for such a purpose."

"In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say. In the Socratic all this was changed. Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-God weeklies. At the very least we helped to civilize one another; sometimes we ventured to hope that if our Athenian patron were allowed to be present, unseen, at our meetings he might not have found the atmosphere wholly alien."

"We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. No man can tell where it will go. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours. Worse still, we expose ourselves to the recoil from our own shots; for if I may trust my personal experience no doctrine is, for the moment, dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just successfully defended. The arena is common to both parties and cannot finally be cheated; in it you risk nothing, and we risk all."

This is a refreshing sentiment of one of the ideals of western society, open debate, an ideal that is fading in western culture currently. It's a good reminder of the fusion of ancient Greek and Roman thought that merged with Christian thought in medieval Europe to form modern civilization, and how some people are still working to carry that tradition on.

Conclusion

This is an interesting set of works to think about at the same time because they don't seem to go together. However, the moderns and the ancients do go together. Nietzsche and Lewis were well-versed in the classic Greeks and Romans and probably both read Pliny and Plutarch, and Sandefer uses Socratic questioning in her academies. Notice how the The Socratic Club and the classes in an Acton Academy would be understood (ignoring the computers) by Pliny and Plutarch, and that the advice from Pliny and Plutarch applies as much to education today as it did in ancient Greece and Rome. Technology can change quickly, humans much less so.

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