Estimated reading time: 5 minute(s)
I’ve had education on my mind again recently. There are certainly many ideas that word conjures up… some good, some bad. But I think we might have a skewed—or even wrong—understanding of it.
As you may have read in yesterday’s post (and noticed from the time of day of today’s post), I am focusing on some other stuff at the moment, which is limiting my writing time. That doesn’t mean that the mental gears are not still cranking. They are. But, unfortunately, I can not develop “on paper” the thoughts which seem to continue to churn out, despite the need for focus elsewhere. (Many “elsewheres”, actually…)
So for now, have a look with me at an article I wrote way back in 2009. It’s titled Different View of Education. Here’s a snippet from that post:
Academic learning is great, and has a place. But it is not education. I still feel that is the bonus. Get the other stuff right, and then the academic stuff is icing on the cake. Build character and integrity into your kids, and even just the confidence of knowing they are loved and accepted, and the rest of the stuff will come as it needs to. And, ultimately, we don’t want our kids to just learn facts and details they can parrot back to us, we want them to learn how to learn. That will serve them much better.
There are lots of ways to see it, and none are necessarily right, or wrong. (Though they are almost certainly all incomplete.) I’m definitely not locked into one way of helping our kids get an education, nor my own, for that matter. But I definitely am convinced that education is much more than academic learning. So much is much more important than that, it seems.
More thoughts to come on all this, but for now, please read (and respond to, if you are so inclined) Different View of Education.