Thoughts on Education Inspired by John Stuart Mill

[outtamyshell]

I was reading the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill in the Gateway to the Great Books series that I picked up at the library book sale recently, and he's giving me all kinds of things to think about. I'm beginning to rethink my educational goals. Or perhaps I am just rationalizing why it's okay that my daughter got a C in her Pre-Calculus Trig class at the community college last semester.

John Stuart Mill had an incredibly robust academic education. It doesn't sound like his childhood included much else. But it did open my eyes to what it is possible for a child to learn. Obviously I could never come close to providing this education to my child if for no other reason than because my own was far too lacking. And because there was no balance at all... just academics in his life. Taught by his father and exposed to almost no one and nothing else.

One thing was clear from this essay though... his father did not follow the trivium. He expected rhetoric level work at a much earlier age than would be expected in classical education. At one point Mill describes being exposed to all of this information and not being able to make sense of it. And that his Dad was angry that he wasn't able to do what was expected of him. But the information stayed with him and made more sense to him later in life. He also talked about how he started his adult life 20 years ahead of his peers because of the quality of his education. I got the impression that he benefited from the exposure to advanced thinking, but disappointing his father caused stress.

I think I am drawn to classical education because I know average kids are capable of doing so much more - of understanding so much more than what our society expects. But I find myself influenced by today's standards. Inflated GPAs mean my daughter needs As to get into college and have a chance at any scholarships. I sometimes just make her work at something until she earns an A. But I guess John Stuart Mill made me rethink my position. Perhaps she's better off being pushed to do more and learn more and be exposed to more - even if she doesn't master it.

To put it mathematically... If I expose her to 100 units of iinformation and she masters 95% of it, she earns an A. But if I expose her to 500 units of information and she master only 50% of it, she's still learned 250 units. Which option provides a better education and which one provides a better grade? Perhaps this is the rationalization for those that don't provide grades.

I suppose my thoughts are nothing new. It's the same old struggle between providing the most robust education I can give my child and jumping through enough hoops to get her credentials. But reading this essay gave me a different perspective on how this plays out in real life. My junior in high school took her first college classes and got a C in her math class. She enjoyed it, did well on the final, and wants to continue on to calculus (and calculus based physics) next year even though she already has four math credits and currently plans to be a lawyer. That should be considered a homeschool success story. And yet I find myself worried that her low GPA is going to make it difficult to get into the college of her choice.

I've decided that the best education to me is measured by what she learns. And I am going to try not to worry about grades. So if I push her into too many classes again next year, or she signs up for a class that is a stretch for her, I will try to take a deep breath and pay more attention to the girl I'm raising rather than the resume we are building.

[Jane in NC]

To put it mathematically... If I expose her to 100 units of iinformation and she masters 95% of it, she earns an A. But if I expose her to 500 units of information and she master only 50% of it, she's still learned 250 units. Which option provides a better education and which one provides a better grade? Perhaps this is the rationalization for those that don't provide grades.



We come back to definitions. Here is the rub with the scenario you have painted: My definition of "exposure" and "mastery" may not be yours or my neighbor's.

We see this regularly in our conversations on math. For many "mastery" of math means an ability to work with algorithms. For others it means the ability to prove. Hence, my son's A in geometry is not another student's A--the two may both have "geometry" listed on their transcripts but the courses are very different indeed!

Further, how do we measure "units" of information? Breadth or depth? My problem with AP, I have admitted, is its focus on the former. Most students who take even beginning courses at the college level do not have an equally broad exposure to the subject. All instructors bring their biases to the table. Hence, my son's Western Civ II prof at the CC admitted to the class that political history is his interest and will be his lens in the examination of the material. A social historian would approach the subject differently.

So the point that I would raise is that education is more than exposure to material, it is also a process of learning how to think, how to research, how to make connections--while being aware of the lens through which the subject is viewed. This is where I see the Trivium having great relevance in its stepping stone approach.

The broad exposure method has merit. For example, if students never hear symphonic music or the opera, never attend a dance performance, never do hands on science or take a walk in the woods for that matter, they can be at a disadvantage. It is sort of like exposing our children to various foods at an early age. A child may not like spinach at age three, but because spinach is regularly on his plate, he grows to accept it, then enjoy it. But he may always hate peas...

Musing along with you...
Jane

[Gwen in VA]

Two interesting posts!

One thoughts about grades -- you can define a grade any which way you want!

For example -- in some of the online classes my kids took, a 80% was an A, even in the AP version of the course! The course was VERY demanding, demanding that a student know a huge amount of material well. Often average grades were in the 60's. The teacher scaled heavily, realizing that even an A student couldn't necessarily earn a 95! (My kids loved the class!)

Another example -- I took a thermodynamics class in grad school where the course average of my class was around 50%. Did everyone flunk? NO! The teacher recognized that she was asking above and beyond mere wrote understanding and even above and beyond fairly complex applications of the material. So while a number of people in the class DID get C's, the teacher taught with great breadth and depth and then scaled to get more "realistic" grades.

A friend of mine is a organic chemistry prof at a presitigious LAC. She says that she HATES making tests, because her department forbids scaling grades. She needs to make tests such that the top students can get a 95 or even a 98, that solid understanding of the material will result in a grade in the 80's, and that there is even some differentiation between those who are a little lost and those who are completely lost. She says that she could easily make a test where almost everyone gets over a 90% or a test where almost everyone gets under a 50%.

My ds's advanced microeconomics prof last semester scaled the class in a bizarre way -- the top grade was scaled to 100%, and all other grades were scaled as a percentage of that score. Clearly, some student in his classes ALWAYS gets an A+!

So if the grade depends in part on the test, and the test depends on the teacher's expectations, then grades depend at least in part on teacher texpectations.

For example, my ds just finished a chapter on fungi in his bio textbook. If I wanted him to flunk, I could give him a test requiring him to know the names and attributes of all the various fungi mentioned in the chapter. If I wanted him to get a 100%, I could give him a Mickey Mouse test where he was just supposed to mention two of the attributes of fungi. I think you get the idea!

I think the strangeness of grades is why some colleges take homeschooler's test scores fairly seriously.

So you teach the way you want to......

P.S. I also think the depth/breadth thing depends a bit on student personality. Some kids are perfectionists who need to master the material. For them always going above and beyond would be torture. Other kids love hearing about new ideas and new approaches, even if they can't/don't understand them.

[Nan in Mass]

This is why I don't give grades. To give grades, I would have to be good at testwriting, since I can't scale when my class size is 1 or 2. Or I would have to rely on something like using the excersizes, which would mean that my children had to be able to do them before they had practised doing them, which wouldn't work since they learn by doing, mostly. Or I would have to grade by effort, which wouldn't really be fair to colleges, who are probably expecting the transcript grades to be based on mastery of a certain body of material (don't ask me what body). And I would worry about what their transcripts would look like if I tried giving them material way over their head. I decided it was way too complicated, and that I would just concentrate on education and not worry about assessment. It doesn't put lots of pressure on the CC class grades, though.