Al-Ghazali on Disciplining the Soul & on Breaking the Two Desires

Al-Ghazali on Childrearing
Translated by: T.J.Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

KNOW that the way in which young children are disciplined is one of the most important of all matters. A child is a trust in the care of his parents, for his pure heart is a precious uncut jewel devoid of any form or carving, which will accept being cut into any shape, and will be disposed according to the guidance it receives from others. If it is habituated to and instructed in goodness then this will be its practice when it grows up, and it will attain to felicity in this world and the next; its parents too, and all its teachers and preceptors, will share in its reward. Similarly, should it be habituated to evil and neglected as though it were an animal, then misery and perdition will be its lot, and the responsibility for this will be borne by its guardian and supervisor. For God (Exalted is He!) has said, Ward off from yourselves and your families a Fire. A father may strive to protect his son from fire in this world, but yet it is of far greater urgency that he protect him from the fires which exist in the Afterlife. This he should do by giving him discipline, teaching him and refining his character, and by preserving him from bad company, and by not suffering him to acquire the custom of self-indulgence, or to love finery and luxury, in the quest for which he might well squander his life when older and thus perish forever. Rather should he watch over him diligently from his earliest days, and permit none but a woman of virtue and religion to nurse and raise him; her diet should be of permitted things, for there is no blessing [baraka] in milk which originates in forbidden food, which, should a child be nourished on it, will knead his native disposition in such a way as to incline his temperament to wrongdoing.

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Provisions

As parents who are educating their children, how do we reconcile the reality that our life in this world is transitory, and that true realization will be accompanied by understanding when the veil has been lifted (i.e. when we depart from this world)?

No sensible individual would avail themselves to the dangers of travel without provisions and preparation, so why then do we (as the responsible agents of our children) repeatedly send them forth unprepared to the appointed meeting with their Creator?

Indeed, secular knowledge has its benefits; there is no disputing this point. But we must contemplate the following question: “are we preparing our children with the provisions required for the journey that is infinitely more important than their present travels”?

Every individual bares a Divinely legislated responsibility, as made clear by the following Prophetic tradition: Ibn Umar (may God be pleased with him) said that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: "Each of you is a guardian, and each of you will be asked about your guardian-ship. The leader is a guardian, and the man is a guardian over the people of his house, and the woman is a guardian over her husband's house and children. So each of you is a guardian, and each of you will be asked about your guardianship". (Bukhari, Muslim)

As parents we need to transcend the myopic approach of adhering strictly to academic issues and testing based solely upon compulsory educational standards. With regard to our children it is imperative that we return to the primary objective of education-- providing the tools and opportunity for students to develop into complete human beings who can engage the world with integrity, virtue and compassion, and who will be well informed and comprehend the transitory nature of this abode.

Thus, I remind myself of this timeless advice: “the knowledge which secures salvation and felicity in the Hereafter is immeasurably more significant and useful than any science whose purpose is mere immediate physical well-being”. “Knowledge, then, used appropriately becomes wisdom…wisdom is the force of penetration and discernment of the mind, the ability to place everything in its precisely appropriate location, in the precisely appropriate manner, at the precisely appropriate time. It is also the ability to put first things first, never to allow the ephemeral to obscure the path to the eternal, nor the contingent to take priority over the essential”. [1]

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[1] Badawi, Mostafa, trans. [Fusul al-‘Ilmiyah wa-al-usul al hikmiyah], Knowledge and Wisdom. Chicago: The Starlatch Press, 2001

Spelling Review

When I began homeschooling our daughter this fall, I chose to commit three days per week to spelling. We have been using seven words per spelling lesson from the "Explode the Code" book series. The progression in the books has been very appropriate for our daughter, and she really enjoys the work.

An important point that should be mentioned is this: anytime you feel that a younger child--typically before the age of seven indicates (whether physically or verbally), that they are no longer interested in studying, you should respond to their feelings and end the lesson. Trying to push through it will only have negative affects, in that, disdain begins to grow in the child with regard to studying. Once this happens, it is as if a trust has been violated and then studying becomes a chore rather then an activity which they enjoy.

At the age of five, after five months our daughter is producing work like this (i.e. the above scanned page) consistently. A main point for us has been to listen to what our daughter is telling us. And most of the time we know when she has reached her limit--by observing her actions--not by her telling us.

Built upon the success that we have found pertaining to this spelling process, I have been inclined to try some short sentence dictation with her. In the next post I will--In sha Allah--scan a page of that work.

wa salam.

Dictation

I have been homeschooling my daughter (5 yrs. old) using a series in English--(spelling and writing)--named "Explode the Code". It has been fantastic! After four months of daily "spelling reviews" and short sentence writing, I wanted to try some dictation work with her. The above notebook page was her dictation for today.

Witnessing her development has been, and still is, completely therapeutic. I encourage every parent to become pro-active with regard to their child's education.

The rewards are beyond description!!! The love that is born out of this parent-child relationship is something that we are all in need of.

Information and Knowledge

The difference between information and knowledge is the application of those facts, or discerning reality from conjecture. Truly effective education develops the minds of thinking and articulate students who are able to process facts into arguments and communicate those arguments clearly and persuasively. Therefore, for education to be effective, it must go beyond merely conveying facts.

The Disappearance of Childhood

I recently read a book titled--"The Disappearance of Childhood"--by Neil Postman. In the last chapter of the book , he changes his format style to Q&A, and in the last question he asks:

Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening? I do not want to speak on behalf of the author about what is meant by, "what is happening," so I will share his answer, and allow you to deduce the meaning.

He states:

"The answer to this in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that the children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this . The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they have exposure to, and provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the a same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business , the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service."

Extending Childhood

By: John Taylor Gatto

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people in history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks".

By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."

At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be extinguished, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren’t conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents.

Only by a massive psychological campaign could the menace of overproduction in America be contained. That’s what important men and academics called it. The ability of Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed. Certain writings of Alexander Inglis carry a hint of schooling’s role in this ultimately successful project to curb the tendency of little people to compete with big companies. From 1880 to 1930, overproduction became a controlling metaphor among the managerial classes, and this idea would have a profound influence on the development of mass schooling.

I know how difficult it is for most of us who mow our lawns and walk our dogs to comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley’s Public Education in the United States is explicit about what happened and why. As Cubberley puts it:

It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking...[is] opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor. [1]

The statement occurs in a section of Public Education called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory system" has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering march of machinery"), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.

Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. According to Cubberley, with "much ridicule from the public press" the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad." That last mysterious reference to a new psychology is to practices of dumbed-down schooling common to England, Germany, and France, the three major world coal-powers (other than the United States), each of which had already converted its common population into an industrial proletariat.

Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 Social History of the Family notified the nation’s academics what was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He offered a significant forecast, that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit." Three years later, Mayor John F. Hylan of New York said in a public speech that the schools had been seized as an octopus would seize prey, by "an invisible government." He was referring specifically to certain actions of the Rockefeller Foundation and other corporate interests in New York City which preceded the school riots of 1917.

The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling as well as for the stock market. In 1928, a well-regarded volume called A Sociological Philosophy of Education claimed, "It is the business of teachers to run not merely schools but the world." A year later, the famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced, "Academic subjects are of little value." William Kirkpatrick, his colleague at Teachers College, boasted in Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.
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[1] This is the same Ellwood P. Cubberley who wrote in his Columbia Teachers College Dissertation of 1905 that schools were to be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

Al-Ghazali's View on Children's Education

Amongst the many Muslim scholars who wrote on the education of children, are Ibn Sina, Ibn Khaldun and Al-Ghazali. Here focus is placed on the latter. Al-Ghazali, known in Europe as Algazel, is one of the most illustrious Muslim scholars, who wrote many works, and became renowned for his learning. In his thirties, he became the principal teacher at Madrasah Nizamiyyah of Baghdad, the most renowned institution of learning in eastern Islam (Cordova in the West). His ideas on education dominated Islamic educational thought for centuries after his death. Here, the focus is how he saw the education of the child and the role of the master. The sources for this brief account, other than the original source itself, are C. Bouamrane-L. Gardet; A. Tritton, and A. Tibawi.

According to Al-Ghazali, `knowledge exists potentially in the human soul like the seed in the soil; by learning the potential becomes actual.'

The child, Al-Ghazali also wrote, `is a trust (placed by God) in the hands of his parents, and his innocent heart is a precious element capable of taking impressions'.
If the parents, and later the teachers, brought him up in righteousness he would live happily in this world and the next and they would be rewarded by God for their good deed. If they neglected the child's upbringing and education he would lead a life of unhappiness in both worlds and they would bear the burden of the sin of neglect.

One of the elements Al-Ghazali insists upon is that a child should be taught the words of the Creed in his earliest days and be taught the meaning gradually as he grew older; corresponding to the three stages of memorising, understanding and conviction.

The way the child relates to the world at large occupies a large concern in Al-Ghazali's mind. In concert with Ibn Al-Hajj, he stresses amongst others that a child must not boast about his father's wealth, and must be polite and attentive to all. He should be taught not to love money for love of it is a deadly poison. He must not spit nor clean his nose in public. He must learn to respect and obey his parents, teachers and elders. As he grows older, he must observe the rules of cleanliness, fast a few days in Ramadhan, avoid the wearing of silk, gold and silver, learn the prescriptions of the sacred law, fear thieving, wealth from unclean sources, lying, treachery, vice and violent language. The pupil must not be excessively proud, or jealous. He should not tell off others. He must avoid the company of the great of this world, or to receive gifts from them. He must act towards God as he would wish his servant acted towards him. He should treat every human as he would like to be treated himself.

The perspective of Al-Ghazali is centered upon personal effort in the search for truth; and this presupposes, he insists, a received education and the direction of a master. Education (tarbiya), Al-Ghazali states in Ayyuha l-walad is like `the labour of the farmer, who uproots the weeds, trims wheat so as it grows better and gives a better harvest.' Every man needs a teacher to guide him in the right direction. To try and do without leads to worst illusions. In Ayyuha l-walad the pupil's outward respect for his teacher is evidence of esteem for such in one's heart.

He who undertakes the instructions of the young, points Al-Ghazali, `undertakes great responsibility'. He must therefore be as tender to his pupils as if they were his own children. He must correct moral lapses through hinting… above all he himself must set an example so that his action accords with his precepts.

The teacher should never criticise the subject taught by another. He must adapt his teaching to the pupil's capacity and ability, and not to overburden the pupil's capacity, nor give him fright. He must respect the less gifted pupil, who might if lost, leave safe foundations for standards he would never reach. And after school, Al-Ghazali insists, the pupil must be allowed to have recreation. To prevent play and insist on continuous study leads to dullness in the heart, diminution in intelligence and unhappiness. Even more on this matter, in ‘Ihya ulum al-din', the teacher, Al-Ghazali holds, carries eight duties.

1. First and foremost he is a father for his pupils.
2. He must teach for the sake of God.
3. He would advise the student with prudence,
   
4. He would advise the student to fight the excessive urge to learn too quickly, and to overtake his peers.
5. He would reprimand with moderation, in private, discreetly, not in public.
6. To blame too much is to make the pupil too stubborn in his way of seeing and doing things.
7. And one other duty of the teacher is to make sure that what he teaches he pursues in his life.
8. And that his own acts do not contradict what he is trying to inculcate.

This article was taken from Muslimheritage.com

Problems in The Early Years

Sue Palmer 2004
(TES Opinion piece, 2004)

Problem: many children entering primary schools today are not well-equipped to learn. Both the Chief Inspector of Schools and the Director of the Basic Skills Agency have recently voiced concern about the poor language, behavioural and social skills of five-year-olds coming into reception classes. Further problem: according to the teachers I meet on my inservice travels, there’s no time to sort out these linguistic and social handicaps, because the poor kids have got to knuckle straight down to literacy and numeracy. Key Stage 1 SATs beckon.

We’ve always had a very early start to education in this country – and these days the tests and targets culture that pervades primary education means even less time is being devoted to developing speaking, listening and social skills in the early stages. Children are coming to school unready – perhaps unable – to learn and instead of doing something to help them, we’re doling out reading books and worksheets.

Contrast this with the situation in most European countries, where formal schooling doesn’t start until children are six or seven, but where there’s a strong tradition of pre-school education, starting at three, with structured attention to the development of oral language, attention span and social skills. In a report last autumn on the education of six-year-olds in England, Denmark and Finland, Ofsted pointed out that the Scandinavian children exhibited considerably better behaviour, language and listening skills than their English counterparts, and “teachers were not preoccupied by discipline and control to the extent that many were in England”.

The answer to the problems therefore seems obvious. We should raise the age at which children start formal schooling to six or even seven, and provide a rigorous pre-school curriculum based on the most successful European practice. This would help us sort out any lack of social and linguistic graces, and develop children’s attention span, self-control and ability to concentrate so that they’re able to benefit from education when it starts.

It seems clear that a later start doesn’t ‘hold children back’. European children soon catch up with and, in many cases, overtake us. Indeed, I believe a later start would lead to a rise in standards. At present, too many children fall at the first fence, and we waste a fortune on catch-up programmes which, sadly, don’t seem to make much difference. If children were better prepared for literacy and numeracy, we could prevent much of this early failure. We might also go some way to solving the ‘gender gap’ – international statistics show that in countries where children start school later, there is far less difference between girls’ and boys’ academic performance in later years.

So why in the world don’t we do it? It’s not as if experts in early years education haven’t been recommending it for years. It’s not as if we aren’t capable of putting together a good solid pre-school curriculum – indeed the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage to which schools must by law ‘have regard’, is generally excellent and could easily be the basis of another one or two years’ practice (although, since it was written in a regime where reading and writing start in reception, it needs a bit of beefing up in terms of oral language and listening skills).

Perhaps it’s because we’ve become so obsessed with testing that we can’t think straight. When life revolves round a pencil and paper test, pencils and paper rule. So we dole them out to five year olds who can’t talk, listen, concentrate or sit still for more than a millisecond. God help them, poor little souls. And God help the rest of us, when they grow up and take their revenge...

What is Classical Education?

By: Susan Wise Bauer

Classical education depends on a three-part process of training the mind. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the Trivium.

The first years of schooling are called the "Grammar Stage" -- not because you spend four years doing English, but because these are the years in which the building blocks for all other learning are laid, just as grammar is the foundation for language. In the elementary school years -- what we commonly think of as grades one through four -- the mind is ready to absorb information. Children at this age actually find memorization fun. So during this period, education involves not self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts. Rules of phonics and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the facts of mathematics -- the list goes on. This information makes up the "grammar," or the basic building blocks, for the second stage of education.

By fifth grade, a child's mind begins to think more analytically. Middle-school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking "Why?" The second phase of the classical education, the "Logic Stage," is a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships between different fields of knowledge relate, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework.

A student is ready for the Logic Stage when the capacity for abstract thought begins to mature. During these years, the student begins algebra and the study of logic, and begins to apply logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph construction and learning to support a thesis; the logic of reading involves the criticism and analysis of texts, not simple absorption of information; the logic of history demands that the student find out why the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading its story; the logic of science requires that the child learn the scientific method.

The final phase of a classical education, the "Rhetoric Stage," builds on the first two. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with force and originality. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses his conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language. Students also begin to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge attracts them; these are the years for art camps, college courses, foreign travel, apprenticeships, and other forms of specialized training...
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Malcolm X on Education

Malcolm X is a fascinating person to approach as an educational thinker - not because he was an academic or had any scholastic achievements but as an example of what can be achieved by someone who engages in 'homemade' or self-education.

Malcolm X (1925 – 1965) was born as Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. His father was a Baptist minister and a strong devotee of the Black leader Marcus Garvey. Garvey’s message, as many readers will be familiar, was that Black people in America would never be able to live in peace and harmony with white Americans and their only hope of salvation was to move as a people back to their roots in Africa. Malcolm’s father died when he was six and his mother was put in a mental home when he was about twelve. As a result, his many brothers and sisters were split up and put into different foster homes.

Malcolm left school early and eventually drifted North and finally settled in Harlem, New York, on his own, at the age of 17...Read on

Reading Is Fundamental

I do not claim to be an expert in the field of linguistics nor in the field of childhood-literacy, there are people far more committed, and whose personal accomplishments eclipse the infinitesimal efforts I am currently engaged in.

A few months ago I was given a copy of the Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading, the title is self-explanatory and the book is basically a comprehensive step-by-step instructional manual for teaching Phonics-Based Reading.

Within six weeks of using this book, on an inconsistent program schedule (due to my current obligations) my family and I have been rewarded with a priceless gift; the joy of hearing our four year old daughter exclaim; "I read it, I can read. I read that sentence"! What a rush! That little voice-with those few words-penetrated my spirit, stricking my soul with a force of innocence and beauty that still causes it to vibrate with elation.

These words can not convey the feelings that accompanied me during this breakthrough. Her emancipation from illiteracy to literacy has stirred up emotions that lay deep inside cavernous areas of my consciousness; as a child, teenager and even into college; I struggled to read a few books at most!

Now out of college and in the "Big World" what was I to do? After assessing my situation, I felt my only option was to apply the, philosophical teachings of some, "Ghetto Fabulous-Rhodes Scholars" I met, who introduced me to their "collective doctoral thesis"; entitled; "Fake it until you make it"-- to my surprise, it worked, I got out of the situation I was in, and moved on!

I am sure Stephen R. Covey would not agree with my problem-solving approach, but I can not blame him, not everyone is cut out for philosophy.

I feel obligated to share a piece of personal advice: Children, please do not try this at home!

I don't think my "non-reading" was a result of my not wanting to read or a lack of interest in literature, but rather it grew from the overwhelming intimidation I encountered once words were transferred and then compiled into these things we call books.

These "demoralizing monsters" of pulp and ink instilled a fear level in me that numerous threats, personal conflicts and physical confrontations had never reached.

In retrospect, I can identify and pin-point, many factors that contributed to the state of mind I found myself "in" or "out", depending on how you look at it.

Sorry for the tangent, but sometimes they are required, to create "contextual-clarity" for the reader, who then shares in the alchemical-process that produces who we are as individuals.

Anyway, this is about childhood-literacy, and a great book that is founded upon an early tradition (Phonics-Based Reading), a system, which has weathered powerful unyielding storms of criticism to prove its timeless value.

The ability to work with my daughter and help her acquire the tools needed for childhood-literacy has been the greatest form of therapeutical-retribution for myself.

It is my hope, (God willing) that our current efforts will usher in fundamental changes within the lives of my children and their children, enabling them the confidence to firmly grasp and utilize the keys that unlock the treasure chests of analytical reading.

Islamic Education: A Different Look

What We Should Be Teaching Our Children
By Imam Zaid Shakir

When we talk about Islamic education and our children, the discussion usually revolves around strictly academic issues related to technical aspects of curriculum development, testing standards and methodologies, balancing between secular and religious education, and similar concerns. Sometimes we miss the greater objective of an Islamic education. That objective, in terms of what is necessary for the immediate success of our children in this world, and their ultimate success in the next, is nurturing balanced, wholesome, honest human beings who live lives based on principle and who exemplify good character in their dealings with other people...Read on

John Caldwell Holt

John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, one of the best-known proponents of homeschooling , and a pioneer in youth rights theory.
Soon after his graduation from Yale University in 1943, Holt joined the Untied States Navy and served on board the USS Barbero, a submarine that fought in the Pacific Ocean. During the war he came to the conclusion that nuclear weapons were the world’s greatest danger, and only a world government could prevent nuclear war. After his three-year tour of duty, he got a job with the New York branch of the United World Federalists. Starting in the mailroom, he became the executive director of the New York branch within six years. However, he became frustrated with the group’s ineffectiveness, and he left the organization in 1952.
At the urging of his sister, Holt became a teacher. After several years of teaching in Colorado, he moved to Boston. It was here that he met Bill Hull, a fellow teacher, and they decided to start a classroom observation project: One would teach and the other would watch...Read on

School is Out!

The demise of public education combined with unprecedented hyper-consumerism, perverted social behaviour and rapid moral digression, should be the cause of extreme concern and force us (as parents) to re-examine--among other things--our educational alternatives to Compulsory Education.

John Taylor Gatto in his interview, Dumbing Us Down, states:

The primary objective (of a compulsory education) is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people(the religious purpose), to make good citizens(the public purpose)and to make individuals their personal best(the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia (history of the Prussian educational system) in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.

Mass-Education has conceded that intellectual stimulation is no longer the stated goal, but rather a luxury offered to the social elite in preparation for their future "shepherding the flocks" within the "green" pastures of our--rapidly expanding ever shrinking--global village.

Educational faddists relentlessly bludgeon us with their newly acquired instructional techniques and constantly remind us that; "Education can only be provided by professional educators"; and any alternative route will never lead one to the "Educational Promised Land".

Shattering this myth; of the blissful educational utopia; is John Taylor Gatto's critical essay, Against School, where he writes:

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multi volume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

But for those who choose not to offer their young on the sacrificial alter of "Compulsory Education" and refuse to prescribe to the mantra of: "Old lamps for New", an age-old wisdom soothingly reminds them, "that things are not always what they seem".

Jessie Wise one of the co-authors of, The Well-Trained Mind, writes:

"All my teacher education had brainwashed me. I was convinced that parents couldn't possibly teach their own children-certainly not at home. It had to be done in an institution setting, run by professionals, with their resources and specialized training and expertise".

An unfortunate blameworthy mannerism we have collectively mastered, is our ability to present scathing social critiques without offering practical alternatives.

To avoid being guilty of my own claim, it is my opinion that a return to the time-proven success of a Classical Education is the only remedy to restore our health from the current intellectual paralysis that has afflicted us, resulting from prolonged exposure to Compulsory Education. That being said, in my next post (God willing) I would like to define and introduce a Classical Education and the role it can play in guiding this rudderless ship back to port.

Classical Education: An Introduction

Classical education as understood and taught in the Middle Ages of Western culture is roughly based on the ancient Greek concept of Paideia. China had a completely different tradition of classical education, based in large part on Confucian and Taoist traditions. This article concerns the Western tradition.

The overall organization

Classical education developed many of the terms now used to describe modern education. Western classical education has three phases, each with a different purpose. The phases are roughly coordinated with human development, and would ideally be exactly coordinated with each individual student's development.

"Primary education" teaches students how to learn.

"Secondary education" then teaches a conceptual framework that can hold all human knowledge (history), and then fills in basic facts and practices of the major fields of knowledge, and develops the skills (perhaps in a simplified form) of every major human activity.

"Tertiary education" then prepares a person to pursue an educated profession, such as law, theology, military strategy, medicine or science.

Primary Education

Primary education was often called the trivium, which covered grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
Logic and rhetoric was often taught in part by the Socratic method, in which the teacher raises questions and the class discusses them. By controlling the pace, the teacher can keep the class very lively, yet disciplined.

Grammar

Grammar consists of language skills such as reading and the mechanics of writing. An important goal of grammar is to acquire as many words and manage as many concepts as possible so as to be able to express and understand clearly concepts of varying degrees of complexity. Very young students can learn these by rote especially through the use of chant and song. Their minds are often referred to as "sponges", that easily absorb a large number of facts. Classical education traditionally included study of Latin and Greek, which greatly reinforced understanding of grammar, and the workings of a language, and so that students could read the Classics of Western Civilization in the words of the authors. In the modern renaissance of classical education, this period refers to the upper elementary school years.

Logic

Logic (dialectic) is the art of correct reasoning. The traditional text for teaching logic was Aristotle's Logic. In the modern renaissance of classical education, this logic stage (or dialectic stage) refers to the junior high or middle school aged student, who developmentally is beginning to question ideas and authority, and truly enjoys a debate or an argument. Training in logic, both formal and informal, enables students to critically examine arguments and to analyze their own.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric debate and composition (which is the written form of rhetoric) are taught to somewhat older (often high school aged) students, who by this point in their education have the concepts and logic to criticize their own work and persuade others. According to Aristotle "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic." It is concerned with finding "all the available means of persuasion." The student has learned to reason correctly in the Logic stage so that they can now apply those skills to Rhetoric. Students would read and emulate classical poets such as Ovid and others in learning how to present their arguments well.

Secondary Education

Secondary education, classically the quadrivium or "four ways," classically taught astronomy, arithmetic, music and geometry, usually from Aristotle and Euclid. Sometimes architecture was taught, often from the works of Vitruvius.
History was always taught to provide a context, and show political and military development. The classic texts were from ancient authors such as Cicero and Tacitus.

Biographies were often assigned as well; the classic example being Plutarch's "Lives." Biographies help show how persons behave in their context, and the wide ranges of professions and options that exist. As more modern texts became available, these were often added to the curriculum.

In the Middle Ages, these were the best available texts. In modern terms, these fields might be called history, natural science, accounting and business, fine arts (at least two, one to amuse companions, and another to decorate one's domicile), military strategy and tactics, engineering, agronomy, and architecture.

These are taught in a matrix of history, reviewing the natural development of each field for each phase of the trivium. That is, in a perfect classical education, the historical study is reviewed three times: first to learn the grammar (the concepts, terms and skills in the order developed), next time the logic (how these elements could be assembled), and finally the rhetoric, how to produce good, humanly useful and beautiful objects that satisfy the grammar and logic of the field.

History is the unifying conceptual framework, because history is the study of everything that has occurred before the present. A skillful teacher also uses the historical context to show how each stage of development naturally poses questions and then how advances answer them, helping to understand human motives and activity in each field. The question-answer approach is called the "dialectic method," and permits history to be taught Socratically as well.
Classical educators consider the Socratic method to be the best technique for teaching critical thinking. In-class discussion and critiques are essential in order for students to recognize and internalize critical thinking techniques. This method is widely used to teach both philosophy and law. It is currently rare in other contexts. Basically, the teacher referees the students' discussions, asks leading questions, and may refer to facts, but never gives a conclusion until at least one student reaches that conclusion. The learning is most effective when the students compete strongly, even viciously in the argument, but always according to well-accepted rules of correct reasoning. That is, fallacies should not be allowed by the teacher.

By completing a project in each major field of human effort, the student can develop a personal preference for further education and professional training.

Tertiary Education

Tertiary education was usually an apprenticeship to a person with the desired profession. Most often, the understudy was called a "secretary" and had the duty of carrying on all the normal business of the "master." Philosophy and Theology were both widely taught as tertiary subjects in Universities however.

The early biographies of nobles show probably the ultimate form of classical education: A tutor. One early, much-emulated classic example was that Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle.

Modern Interpretations of Classical Education

Much of the current and modern renaissance of classical education is owed to the Dorothy Sayers essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning", in which she describes the three stages of the trivium, grammar, logic and rhetoric, as tools by which a student can then analyze and master every other subject.

"The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home," by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer (W.W. Norton, 1999), is a modern reference on classical education, particularly in a homeschool setting. It provides a history of classical education, an overview of the methodology and philosophy of classical education, and annotated lists of books, divided by grade and topic, that list the best books for classical education in each category.

"The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America," by Lee T. Pearcy (2005) provides a theoretical and historical account of classical education in the United States and suggests the need for a distinctly American approach to ancient Greece and Rome.
Marva Collins has successfully taught a rapid-fire classical education to inner-city deprived children, many of them labeled as "retarded."

Also of note is "A New Trivium and Quadrivium," an article by Dr. George Bugliarello (Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 23, No. 2, 106-113 (2003)). In it, he argues that the scope of the classical liberal education is inadequate for today's society, and that people should also be conversant with the basic facts of science and technology, since they now form a much more important part of our lives than did the tertiary studies of antiquity. He argues for a new synthesis of science, engineering, and the humanities in which there is a balance between what can be done and what ought to be done, between human desires and earthly consequences, and between our ever-increasing power to affect our surroundings and the ever-present danger of destroying the ecological and environmental systems which allow us to exist.

No discussion of classical education could be complete without mentioning Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, both of the University of Chicago, who set forth in the 1930s to restore the "Great Books" of Western civilization to center stage in the curriculum. Although the standard classical works—such as the Harvard Classics—most widely available at the time, were decried by many as out of touch with modern times, Adler and Hutchins sought to expand on the standard "classics" by including more modern works, and by trying to tie them together in the context of what they described as the "Great Ideas," condensed into a "Syntopicon" index and bundled together with a new "five foot shelf" of books as "The Great Books of the Western World." They were wildly popular during the Fifties, and discussion groups of aficionados were found all over the USA, but their popularity waned during the Sixties and such groups are relatively hard to find today. Extensions to the original set are still being published, encompassing selections from both current and older works which extend the "great ideas" into the present age and other fields, including civil rights, the global environment, and discussions of multiculturalism and assimilation.

There still exist a number of informal groups and professional organizations which take the classical approach to education seriously, and who undertake it in earnest. Within the classical Christian education movement, David Hicks, author of Norms and Nobility, the Society for Classical Learning, the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, and the CiRCE Institute, founded by Andrew Kern, co-author with Gene Edward Veith of Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, play a leading role.

In addition to many middle-schools and high schools across the country, there are at present several universities or colleges in the United States wherein such an Oxfordian classical education is taking place:

St. John's College (two campuses, one in MD and one in NM)
Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA
New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, ID
The Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, in La Mirada, CA
Gutenberg College in Eugene, OR

At each of these institutions some variation of the Canon of Western Great Books is used as the primary course material, and tutor-lead "Socratic discussions" are the primary vehicle for ingestion and digestion of the selected works.

A more traditional, but less common view of classical education arises from the ideology of the Renaissance, advocating an education grounded in the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome. The demanding and lengthy training period required for learing to read Greek and Latin texts in their original form has been crowded out in most American schools in favor of contemporary subjects. Latin is taught at some schools, but Greek rarely.

This article was taken from: Wikipedia.org

The Lost Tools of Learning

Dorothy Sayers

That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant people are appointed to highly technical ministries; and plain, blunt men write to the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw. Up to a certain point, and provided the the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable. Too much specialization is not a good thing. There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or another, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing--perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing--our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value...Read on

The Well-Being of Children

Raising Children

Children are extremely delicate and elegant in body, temperature, and tempera-ment. Their temper, as it adjusts to growth, should be kept very balanced and moderate, since it responds quite rapidly and easily to events going on about it. The reason for this tendency to moods and activities is the prevalence of phlegm in large quantities in the child's body, and the shifting weaknesses and softness of the body parts as they undergo growth...Read on

This is Where We Start

A pure Intention is the starting point of any action. We must examine our hearts at the beginning, middle and end of our Deeds, to prevent ourselves from falling into Arrogance, Conceit, Delusion, Ostentation and Love of Prestige and Leadership. The Messenger of God (peace be upon him) said:

How many deeds which bear the image of the deeds of this world but then become-through their good intention- among the deeds of the Hereafter! And how many are the deeds which bear the image of the deeds of the Hereafter but then become-through their evil intention-among the deeds of this world!