Primary School

The Child is the Father of Man

As Wordsworth rightly points out,

''The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.''

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold (l. 7-9)" .
In his next posting, Yakkity Yak ruminates on the signficance of a balanced childhood education in the intellectual, emotional and moral growth of a person.
 
Those Primary School Days: The Classroom Years
 
Yakkity Yak
 
                                        “What ails education?”


                                               

Childhood games and the out-of classroom activities have an often-slighted educational value. Sadly enough, there is still, a not insubstantial number of people who erroneously regarded ‘education’ and ‘literacy’ as mere semantic twins. And how wrong! Obviously they are not the same thing-in as much as the nit-pickers distinguish ‘education’ from ‘training’. These out of classroom activities may be activities outside the curriculum. Further, they may even not fall within the official extra-curricular-activities. But they still form part of the ‘hidden curriculum’, helping to shape and mould minds and attitudes. For the reason that attitudinal training is educational, the moguls, the nawabs and the sahibs of our present day educational system have now renamed extra-curricular activities as ‘co-curricular’ activities. I ask if there is anything wrong stretching things a bit further and re-designate them as ‘co-educational activities’? “Co- curricular” suggests that they are part of the curriculum, co-existing in a compatibly comfortable fashion with one another. Isn’t it true then, that anything that is part of the curriculum must further the larger educational objective? Co-curricular, therefore, is all at once, co-educational as well.

I know I don’t sound compelling. So, I feel compelled to turn over, the yellowing pages of my silverfish infested collection of essays to track down Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Apology for Idlers” to support my case. This classic was beyond my full comprehension when I was first introduced to it as a bumbling, wide-eye, wet-behind-the-ears and ignorant Sec 2 student. It certainly makes more sense to me now, in my more matured years. Robert Louis Stevenson said it all when he declared:

“Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all around about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them--by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose.”

So you can clearly see that contemporary educational-policy has turned full circle. “Apology for Idlers” was first published in the Cornhill Magazine, in as early as July 1877. That was a good 133 years ago! Apparently, the views held were as valid today as they were then.

For far too long, classroom education tended to be a laborious and incessant process of downloading knowledge into our cerebral-void; and needlessly so, too! Often, the process takes a preachy, didactic route. Just as often, the process involves knowledge assiduously transferred by the teacher and voraciously sponged-up by the students. Once again, it will be apt for me to quote R.L .Stevenson as he, more than a century ago, lamented that:

“A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope.”

But don’t get me wrong! I am all for education and the good that it brings. I am all for “education for education sake”. I am equally comfortable with those who champion the utilitarian value of education and its by-products. The upshot of all these is that I am an advocate of scholarship and learning and everything pedantic! Yet much of my account of the classroom years shall dwell on the less pedantic aspects of the classroom scene.