A Finishing Schooling for All Youth

Contemporary education should, I am asserting, have a basic curriculum and certain processes essential for installing the fundamentals in the curriculum. A need for improving education for youth in the United States is heard frequently in many places. I may have something to offer that will alleviate some of those concerns.

My framework is not based on my criticism of current practice. I have not recently been in classrooms. I have been in classrooms as a student through graduate school. I also have been in classrooms as a supervisor of student teachers for a college of education in a major university. In methods of teaching, I have a graduate-level education in a major-university school of communication.

Curriculum: Fundamental Subjects

Codes

• A micro-inductive approach to learning the concept of “codes”.

Numbers

• A micro-inductive process toward learning the concept of “numbers”.

History

• A micro-inductive process toward learning the concept of “history”.

History, as I Wished I Had Been Taught

Not history from a text! Text-history is mostly political history. History should be taught at an early age in late elementary schooling, AND IT SHOULD START WITH THE IMMEDIATE HISTORY OF THE CHILD’S FAMILY HISTORY, living history, immediate history, a sense of individual personal-time history.

One of the Great Regrets of Your Life May Be—

—when very young, coming into your intellectual maturity, you did not sit down at the dining-room table with your mother and/or dad, together or singly, and, with pad of paper and pen, conduct a formal interview with them about those lives. You would, in all probability, if you have any basic intellectual curiosity, wish to have known them more intimately.

You would have taken your mom’s hand and studied it, and asked, “Mom, what is the most memorable thing you have done with these hands? I know you have prepared, how many meals for us kids? What is your favorite recipe? Where did it come from? I know it had a Dutch name. Could you understand Dutch? Could you speak Dutch? What do you remember of your mother and dad? Your grandfather and grandmother? Can you go back farther than that?

“Can you recall all the places, the houses where you lived?

“What games did you play? Who were your best friends? How and how much did you date?

“Where did you go to school? You have said that you only completed the sixth grade. Why did you not go further? What did you do then?

“I want to learn what you might have thought to be your successes and failures. What were some of your aspirations and what do you believe are your biggest disappointments?

“What kind of a child was I? What scares did I give you? How was I in school? What do you think I did well? What could I have done better?”

And so you are off, exploring your mother’s life and kin, and yourself through your mother’s or dad’s eyes. Through a wealth of questions.

BUT, if I had only had the hint, to do it! If only!

Now it is for me one of the great regrets of my life.

That hint? I know exactly where it might have come from. It did not come from my mom. “Son, sit down. I want to tell you all about my life.” No! It could not ever have happened that way. Because she was always so self-effacing. Modest. Dedicated to her kids. She had seven of them. That hint should have come from—

It’s history, isn’t it? What better way to begin a child’s education than to get the child engaged in one’s own history! None better than to ask the child, at the beginning of his or her intellectual curiosity, or even to awaken for the first time an essential curiosity, TO PREPARE A NARRATIVE OF HIS OR HER OWN LIFE? History begins at home. It might be surprising how much of contemporary history is contained in those who have lived it, up close and personal.

It would be a communication experience of the formal interview. It would be an education in data-gathering and verifying and reporting in writing. Then to give an oral report to the class about family origins. And to generalize with the whole class about the experience of history making and studying.

Do you remember your required history classes? When did they begin? What grade? Didn’t it seem, for the most part, to require memorization of facts to be mastered and tested on? Of course that is not to be denigrated. However, after this micro-inductive process, a greater appreciation of facts and their generation may be better appreciated.

The pupils may have to distinguish between facts and fancy in the interviews with parents. You know how Dad likes to say he walked two miles to school up-hill both ways.

Some pupils may not be living with either a father or a mother. If there are no other relatives available, perhaps they could find other adults to interview. That might be a good discussion, of good substitutes for the purposes of the assignment.

And I regret I did not have that imaginative history teacher who could have taught us history INDUCTIVELY, not deductively by lecture or text-reading.

One Major Function of History Teaching

Each child will have illnesses and disabilities arising from a genetic inheritance. The disabilities and illnesses will have started somewhere along the genetic line the child has received from far back in the child’s ancestry. It is commonly stated that we all at present have been affected by the Neolithic diet. One source says, “If for the past 50,000 years, your particular genetic expression and signature did well on a specific type of diet, will it do as well today on the very different approaches to foods?” The young learner should (must) inquire of the family elders about the nature of health and nutrition and occupations so that the child is aware of some potential causes of his or her personal health history. The child must understand where health or lack of it may come from. Therefore,the interview protocol should include questions probing the child’s elderly relatives along the lines of work habits, diet and so forth. And it is not all food based. Certain body movements required for work over generations may have influenced certain tendencies in bodily strengths and weaknesses being carried forward to the the child. Health is time (history) based.

How the Micro-inductive Process Works

1. Send two pupils to the chalk board, pupils who have a good “hand”. (I have had the habit of distinguishing between “pupils” and “students”, hinging on grade level. That may not be the fashion today.)
2. Instruct the pupils in the class to put on their imagination caps.
3. “We are going to all cooperate in making a list of all the questions that might be asked of the father and the mother regarding their lives.” This will be called a “protocol” for the interviews.
4. Those pupils at the chalkboard will write the questions there.
5. Everyone will write the questions on a page in the notebook.
6. All questions will be written.
7. No evaluation will be made of any question. Only clarifications will be asked for when necessary.
8. At some point the chalkboard becomes full, and questions seem to have been exhausted.
9. All pupils should be encouraged to submit at least one question.
10. When the list is complete and copied by everyone, a second phase of the micro-inductive process begins.
11. The pupils are now asked to find groupings of the questions, and descriptive labels for each grouping. Which questions appear to have some close relationship, or similarity by some descriptive label?
12. Start with one pairing of two of the questions that seem to go together.
13. Ask them to supply a label for that group.
14. Have the students rate the question-groups by establishing a priority along some line of significance, importance for the history of the mother and father.
15. “Mother Questions” are separated from “Father Questions”, perhaps.
16. The key thing the teacher does is— stand clear! Let the learners do it; it is their listing, their project. If you did the same thing in a second class, some results may duplicate, but results in the second class may be different. Interesting, huh? I do not think the teacher should foist off on one class the results of another class.

What that process does is TAKE THE LEARNERS FROM WHERE THEY ARE, the benchmark for assessing growth in subsequent behavior.

Timelines

• (More to come on this, later.)

Communication Fundamentals

1. Voice and Articulation

Every young person needs to hear the quality, distinctiveness and clarity of their own speaking voice.

2. Culture

Defining and understanding culture is a fundamental of citizenship.

3. Group Communication

The simple elements of group involvement are fundamental for social interaction in working groups.

4. Interpersonal Communication

Some interpersonal issues in everyday social interaction are important skills for young people.

5. Freedom of Speech

Issues in freedom and responsibility in communication need discussion to improve awareness.

Literature

This is a great enhancement of the learner’s understanding the English language, running the words in these books through the learner’s mind. I do not recommend the books I have listed for any but the most advanced high school class. That was my first college class. I did not have a background in reading any such, what I might call, “highly literate” books. The second I started reading the first, I recognized the serious challenge I had taken on, to read each week one of them in the order given. But I recognized the book was introducing me to a new vocabulary and my consciousness craved that kind of learning, but it was tough. However, a list of very challenging books might be the ticket to an advanced competence in language.

A Course in Reading: The English Novel

1. Daniel Dafoe: Moll Flanders
2. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
3. Samuel Richardson: Pamela
4. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
5. Tobias Smollet: Roderick Random
6. Lawerence Stern: Tristram Shandy
7. Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield
8. Jane Austin: Pride and Prejudice
9. Sir Walter Scott: Quentin Durward
10. Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
11. William Thackeray: Vanity Fair
12. Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
13. Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers
14. Charles Reade: The Cloister and the Hearth