= For just about the same money you can walk down the street in Bath to the Apprentice Shop at the Maine Maritime Museum and sign on for a one-year course (no vacations, forty hours a week) in traditional wooden boat building. The whole tuition is eight hundred dollars, but there’s a catch: they won’t accept you as a student until you volunteer for two weeks, so they can get to know you and you can judge what it is you’re getting into. Now you’ve invested thirteen months and fifteen hundred dollars and you have a house and a boat. What else would you like to know? How to grow food, make clothes, repair a car, build furniture, sing?
Those of you with a historical imagination will recognize Thomas Jefferson’s prayer for schooling — that it would teach useful knowledge. Some places do: the best schooling in the United States today is coming out of museums, libraries, and private institutes. If anyone wants to school your kids, hold them to the standard of the Shelter Institute and you’ll do fine.
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In 1926, Bertrand Russell said casually that the United States was the first nation in human history to deliberately deny its children the tools of critical thinking; actually Prussia was first, we were second. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don’t do that. They let readers actively participate with their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the intellect under the guise of helping it, just as standardized tests do. Well-schooled people, like schoolbooks, are very much alike. Propagandists have known for a century that school-educated people are easier to lead than ignorant people — as Dietrich Bonhoeffer confirmed in his studies of Nazism.
It’s very useful for some people that our form of schooling tells children what to think about, how to think about it, and when to think about it. It’s very useful to some groups that children are trained to be dependent on experts, to react to titles instead of judging the real men and women who hide behind the titles.
With all the money we throw away on bad education for our children... think how wonderful it COULD be...
It’s thought provoking stuff there, GOPJ. Thanks for forwarding this. The Shelter School sounds intriguing, but I wonder how much more you’d learn if you honestly dived deep into that thick, orange, and heavy Home Depot builder’s digest we once owed — and I assume they still sell.
Better yet, give me any topic in home building, and I’ll find a great home-made video I can watch on Youtube - that will explain what you need to know and entertain at the same time.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about schools because I take the bus to the local university library where I set up my laptop, monitor, keyboard and work a few days a week to get out of the house and be among other people studying and thinking.
Scanning the shelves of the library, I found a section devoted to modern politics and took a quick look at the titles on the shelf.
I saw a couple of shelves of academic books explaining the great accomplishments of Boobamba and his cohorts. So naturally, I was curious what the next shelf of Trump books would look like.
My quick scan revealed not a single one of perhaps 40 books had good things to say about Trump’s marvelous accomplishments as President. They are all hit pieces written by academics who are patting themselves on the back for their group-speak and group-thought.
And this is public university. I should think someone could raise a stink about this propaganda. Maybe I will. What’s a good strategy?
In the larger scheme of things, I almost never see a student scanning the stacks! Hardly anybody takes books out of the library. The 200-odd magazines they collect are hardly read by anyone.
And yet, the future generation of business leaders in Georgia will graduate from this school. And a majority will vote Republican. Oh, and Brian the unKempt and corrupt Governor gave a talk to the College Republican club just a week ago.
I agree with the premise: academics divorced from practical application in real life are raising a bunch of dummies.
Yet people learn to learn in college. They are asked to dedicate themselves to learning and memorizing something, and they apply their mind to that problem.
They learn to socialize, drink beer, and take their first baby steps to earning a living above and beyond coffee brewing and hamburger flipping.
Yes, the library is mostly a mausoleum to pre-digital education. Although there are splendid large books of pictures and artworks that still out-wow the best of education on the web. You can find giant volumes of books on heraldry and coats of arms — and get lost in the trivia of medieval times. Now that’s worth something!