Monday, November 30, 2009

An Ideal Education (Excerpt from "Philosophy of an Ideal Education" by Yours truly, Gabriel Gethin)

Children begin elementary school at age 4 or 5 and end elementary school with 6th grade. When they graduate elementary school, they are equipped with the most basic tools education can offer, how to read and write, how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, how to show up on time to school, how to raise your hand to answer a question, and so on. Once in high school, 7th grade, the student begins a rigorous liberal arts training in subjects including mathematics, rhetoric, history, government and politics, philosophy, literature, psychology, sciences, and world language. Upon graduating high school after completing 10th grade, the 16 year old is equipped with knowledge of how to learn, interdisciplinary knowledge across a broad range of subjects and, more importantly, has developed enough self-knowledge to know what his/her own talents and interests are. After graduation, the individual decides what path is best for him or herself. The choices are nearly endless. The individual can study marine biology with actual marine biologists at vocational school while gaining real life experience at the same time. The individual can go to junior college to continue with the liberal arts. The individual can go onto college and choose a major he/she knows will both earn him/her a job and will be interesting and pleasing to learn. No matter what path the individual takes, the outcome is an educated human being who has amassed an abundance of knowledge and wisdom and is valuable to society in some way—economically, politically, scientifically, militarily.