“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” — Socrates
“Public education has not produced an educated public.” ― G.K. Chesterton
“The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.” ― Henry Ford
“Loyalty, spirit of sacrifice, discretion are virtues that a great nation absolutely needs, and their cultivation and development in school are more important than some of the things which today fill up our curriculums.” — Mein Kampf
Incredibly interesting article, thank you for sharing it. Have you read Culture Against Man? I think you’d enjoy it—it’s a 1960s ethnography of American high schools (as well as nursing homes and, if I remember correctly, workplaces as well).
On our (arbitrary? unnatural?) separation of work, play, and learning—it’s interesting and telling that as adults trying out something new, we often don’t give ourselves permission to play and learn as we go. We insist that we don’t have a “right” to start painting and “be painters”through action if we don’t at least take a class, if not get a whole masters degree, first. We could do well from observing the kids and taking note.
I believe I have come across this book before but I've not ever read it no. One for the list!
Yes, I am actually about to publish an essay on beginnings, one of which argues that the most important thing for a beginning is how we frame the end, as that dictates everything in between. I think what you might be driving at is that adults and children frame ends very differently and so begin from a completely different place. We would, as you note, do well to learn how the multitudinous imagined possibilities of the future that the child envisions are so much healthier for progress than the vision of "A painter looks like this and hopefully I will be a painter one day."
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.
Very interesting and thought-provoking. I'm not sure that didactic teaching and learning through play are mutually exclusive though. I think it depends on context. For example, one of the big problems I have with so-called discovery learning is that in some contexts it's a massive waste of time. Also, and I feel I have to say this as an ex-teacher (schools: I still teach adults), although the summer break was nice, it wasn't exactly what I would call a perk. I always spent the first week or so overcoming my exhaustion from the previous term, and the last two weeks preparing for the new term, so in effect I had just two weeks. I realise that was better than most people's experience, but when I worked in a shop, and now working for myself, I don't need any more than a week's holiday at the most!
Hi Timothy. I can't promise a completely cogent reply at the moment because it's gone 9pm and my brain is a bit fried, but here goes. For me it's mainly about context, and cost-effectiveness, where the cost is measured in terms of time and effort. For example, when I was an ICT adviser, which involved visiting local schools and supporting them in their use of technology, I sat in a geography lesson where the teacher was asking the kids to work out how to put the data they had inputted into Excel into a graph. The lesson was a complete shambles, because half of the kids hadn't finished entering the data, and half of the ones who had were floundering over the charting options. Now, maybe that would have been ok in a computing lesson (though I doubt it), but the whole point of the lesson was to get the kids to see the relationship between certain climactic variables. So in that context it made a lot more sense in my opinion to either set up all the charting area first, or to provide clear instructions (step-by-step on a worksheet) on how to do it. That would be the didactic part. Then the focus of the lesson would be to play around with the data: what happens to rainfall if the temperature exceeds X? What conclusions could you draw about the relationship between temp and rainfall -- if there is one? In this scenario, my working assumption is that getting the kids to discover how to create a graph in Excel would be a complete waste of time because that wasn't the point of the lesson, and it wasn't on the geography syllabus. On the other hand, getting them to play with the data would give them the opportunity to examine cause and effect and so to make hypotheses about what was going on under the hood so to speak. So that's how learning through play and didactic teaching are not incompatible: it's about choosing the right tool for the job. I hope that clarifies my rather off-the-cuff original comment
I know that play has quite a broad suite of similar definitions in contemporary society and whilst I might use it in ways to describe the above situation "playing around with the data", for example, in the real world when I am comparing it to didactic teaching here, and in fact in all my writings on this substack, I am using the evolutionary anthropological definition of play. I would say that play is an activity directed by the players themselves, motivated by means rather than ends, has strong element of rules (though they are often have to be flexible), and is often highly imaginative. Therefore, I don't think that I would describe the above situation as play. I would say that it is still didactic teaching but there is a obviously a certain degree of freedom in the choice of how the tasks are to be approached by the children but the framework within which all the tasks are set is teacher led.
Nice work, Friend!
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” — Socrates
“Public education has not produced an educated public.” ― G.K. Chesterton
“The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.” ― Henry Ford
“Loyalty, spirit of sacrifice, discretion are virtues that a great nation absolutely needs, and their cultivation and development in school are more important than some of the things which today fill up our curriculums.” — Mein Kampf
Incredibly interesting article, thank you for sharing it. Have you read Culture Against Man? I think you’d enjoy it—it’s a 1960s ethnography of American high schools (as well as nursing homes and, if I remember correctly, workplaces as well).
On our (arbitrary? unnatural?) separation of work, play, and learning—it’s interesting and telling that as adults trying out something new, we often don’t give ourselves permission to play and learn as we go. We insist that we don’t have a “right” to start painting and “be painters”through action if we don’t at least take a class, if not get a whole masters degree, first. We could do well from observing the kids and taking note.
I believe I have come across this book before but I've not ever read it no. One for the list!
Yes, I am actually about to publish an essay on beginnings, one of which argues that the most important thing for a beginning is how we frame the end, as that dictates everything in between. I think what you might be driving at is that adults and children frame ends very differently and so begin from a completely different place. We would, as you note, do well to learn how the multitudinous imagined possibilities of the future that the child envisions are so much healthier for progress than the vision of "A painter looks like this and hopefully I will be a painter one day."
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.
https://nordicresistancemovement.org/what-is-cultural-marxism/
Very interesting and thought-provoking. I'm not sure that didactic teaching and learning through play are mutually exclusive though. I think it depends on context. For example, one of the big problems I have with so-called discovery learning is that in some contexts it's a massive waste of time. Also, and I feel I have to say this as an ex-teacher (schools: I still teach adults), although the summer break was nice, it wasn't exactly what I would call a perk. I always spent the first week or so overcoming my exhaustion from the previous term, and the last two weeks preparing for the new term, so in effect I had just two weeks. I realise that was better than most people's experience, but when I worked in a shop, and now working for myself, I don't need any more than a week's holiday at the most!
Thanks Terry. I'd be interested in what your definition of learning through play is to see how it can intersect with didactic teaching.
Hi Timothy. I can't promise a completely cogent reply at the moment because it's gone 9pm and my brain is a bit fried, but here goes. For me it's mainly about context, and cost-effectiveness, where the cost is measured in terms of time and effort. For example, when I was an ICT adviser, which involved visiting local schools and supporting them in their use of technology, I sat in a geography lesson where the teacher was asking the kids to work out how to put the data they had inputted into Excel into a graph. The lesson was a complete shambles, because half of the kids hadn't finished entering the data, and half of the ones who had were floundering over the charting options. Now, maybe that would have been ok in a computing lesson (though I doubt it), but the whole point of the lesson was to get the kids to see the relationship between certain climactic variables. So in that context it made a lot more sense in my opinion to either set up all the charting area first, or to provide clear instructions (step-by-step on a worksheet) on how to do it. That would be the didactic part. Then the focus of the lesson would be to play around with the data: what happens to rainfall if the temperature exceeds X? What conclusions could you draw about the relationship between temp and rainfall -- if there is one? In this scenario, my working assumption is that getting the kids to discover how to create a graph in Excel would be a complete waste of time because that wasn't the point of the lesson, and it wasn't on the geography syllabus. On the other hand, getting them to play with the data would give them the opportunity to examine cause and effect and so to make hypotheses about what was going on under the hood so to speak. So that's how learning through play and didactic teaching are not incompatible: it's about choosing the right tool for the job. I hope that clarifies my rather off-the-cuff original comment
Thanks Terry.
I know that play has quite a broad suite of similar definitions in contemporary society and whilst I might use it in ways to describe the above situation "playing around with the data", for example, in the real world when I am comparing it to didactic teaching here, and in fact in all my writings on this substack, I am using the evolutionary anthropological definition of play. I would say that play is an activity directed by the players themselves, motivated by means rather than ends, has strong element of rules (though they are often have to be flexible), and is often highly imaginative. Therefore, I don't think that I would describe the above situation as play. I would say that it is still didactic teaching but there is a obviously a certain degree of freedom in the choice of how the tasks are to be approached by the children but the framework within which all the tasks are set is teacher led.
I suspected you might say as much :-)