Modern Education Fails

Please, homeschoolers, teach your children right. You have the option. Please, parents sending your children to schools, please make sure your children are taught rationally and logically or supplement at home after school. You have the option. I’m angered and disgusted at the educational system and culture we have. (Many individual teachers are good people, and many individual schools are trying hard, but they are caught in a bad philosophy of education and a corrupt philosophy of science, which will, sadly, inevitably make them fail., and these bad philosophies sabotage some great teachers.) Some students I am working with in biology are learning about protein, lipid, and carbohydrate chemistry — before they have studied basic chemistry and basic biology!! What a corruption!! What a way to destroy their understanding of, enjoyment of, and ability to use science in daily life! We need to follow the hierarchy of knowledge in education if we are to teach our children to know what they are talking about. And as it is now, students are taught words instead of concepts, empty visual-auditory symbols instead of knowledge. Students are taught like parrots instead of human beings. This arises, in part, because science is taught deductively, as if students could learn broad abstractions that took thousands of years to form and learn, and then deduce facts and reality from them. But we learn inductively, building from the evidence of the senses. We build the broad abstractions by generalization from concretes upon generalization from concretes upon generalization from concretes. (What’s more, deduction is impossible without induction.) We need to follow the methods of Thales, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton; they lead to success, efficacy, happiness. The methods of Plato, Ptolemy, Descartes, Kant, Hegel lead to failure, frustration, and death.  Students are being systematically trained to think they know things about which they know nothing — that is, their minds are being systematically destroyed. The antidote — or, more importantly and more rightly, the way to give and nurture life — is to teach students in an inductive, hierarchical, contextual, and integrated fashion. In biology, a good read is A Short History of Biology by Isaac Asimov. It would just provide a sketch for teaching biology: details about animals, plants, their development, and their characteristics; chemistry; physics; geology and geologic change; the origin of species; the integration of chemistry and physics with each other and biology; all would need to be developed. We need someone to do this! We need someone or some group to develop a rational, inductive, integrated biology curriculum for the first time in history! A good approach would be to study the historical development of biology. Students could read some of the great men of biology (excerpts would be more efficient) — such as Aristotle, Harvey, Darwin — as they are learning.