I believe there was an idea here for a rationalist school that teaches the process of discovery by not teaching children facts about the world but by giving them the tools to learn those facts on their own. I can’t remember if that idea originated in my head or if I read it here first and then told others about it.
I’ve had similar thoughts (I have two small children, so I’m super interested in ideas about education), but on reflection, I think this would be a bad idea. It took the greatest minds of prior generations entire lifetimes to come up with the breakthroughs in science and mathematics that current work is building upon. It would be unrealistic and counterproductive to expect a child to independently replicate the invention of the zero, Mendelian inheritance, Newtonian physics, etc. Even if they were given a lot of hints.
Instead, what I’d like to do with my kids is to put the advancement of human knowledge firmly into its historical and cultural context. So instead of “this is geometry, now memorize the Pythagorean theorem,” we would study the architecture and building methods of the ancient Greeks, learn about the problems that Pythagoras had to solve, learn about the alternate methods and theories that existed at the time, learn about his advancements and insight right along with his crazy numerology and religion, and then learn about how subsequent mathematicians sorted out his important discoveries from his wacky personal beliefs. So it would be not just “this is geometry,” but “this is geometry, this is why and how geometry was developed, these are some false ideas that were initially part of geometry, this is how the truth was winnowed out, and these are the problems that have yet to be solved.” The idea being to teach the process of discovery along with the discoveries themselves.
That sounds like a good educational process, but once they have some grounding in that, I think it would be good to move on to not telling them the right answers, but presenting them with a number of propositions, and telling them
“These are the possibilities that were raised at the time. Can you work out which is actually correct, and how they figured it out?”
I’ve had similar thoughts (I have two small children, so I’m super interested in ideas about education), but on reflection, I think this would be a bad idea. It took the greatest minds of prior generations entire lifetimes to come up with the breakthroughs in science and mathematics that current work is building upon. It would be unrealistic and counterproductive to expect a child to independently replicate the invention of the zero, Mendelian inheritance, Newtonian physics, etc. Even if they were given a lot of hints.
Instead, what I’d like to do with my kids is to put the advancement of human knowledge firmly into its historical and cultural context. So instead of “this is geometry, now memorize the Pythagorean theorem,” we would study the architecture and building methods of the ancient Greeks, learn about the problems that Pythagoras had to solve, learn about the alternate methods and theories that existed at the time, learn about his advancements and insight right along with his crazy numerology and religion, and then learn about how subsequent mathematicians sorted out his important discoveries from his wacky personal beliefs. So it would be not just “this is geometry,” but “this is geometry, this is why and how geometry was developed, these are some false ideas that were initially part of geometry, this is how the truth was winnowed out, and these are the problems that have yet to be solved.” The idea being to teach the process of discovery along with the discoveries themselves.
That sounds like a good educational process, but once they have some grounding in that, I think it would be good to move on to not telling them the right answers, but presenting them with a number of propositions, and telling them
“These are the possibilities that were raised at the time. Can you work out which is actually correct, and how they figured it out?”