I want to teach my boys how to think and how to learn, much more than simply how to past a test or about a subject. How good it is to learn the humility of a submitting oneself to the subject matter. This is perhaps one of my greatest desired outcomes in this venture!
“Is it not the great defect of our education today that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized “The Harmonious Blacksmith”, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle “The Last Rose of Summer.” Why do I say, “As though”? In certain of the arts and crafts we sometimes do precisely this requiring a child to “express himself” in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observeit is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to “give himself the feel of the tool.” – Excerpt from The Lost Art of Learning by Dorthy Sayers
ANGELA BLYCKER 