From Their Springboards of Knowledge, True Teachers Will Vault Us from Our Present Pools of Ignorance

On Friday, 14 October, I conducted a highly rewarding academic session with [data privacy pseudonyms] sisters Carla Ramirez, Maria Ramirez, and Felicia Ramirez.


We are reviewing my Psychology chapter from Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, which they covered with me last spring; we are now conducting a second read for full retention of factual content and energetic discussion.


On that 14 October we finished a review of the Psychoanalytical School of Freud; and went through the fundamentals of the Skinnerian Behaviorist School.


I get so excited when I teach this material:


Just think how much fascinating discussion can flow from consideration of Id----Ego---Superego. the conscious---unconscious---subconscious, the Oedipal complex----Electra complex; and then positive reinforcement---punishment---negative reinforcement, fixed and variable schedules of reinforcement, and the acquisition and extinguishment of behavior.


Then imagine the responses that I get when I push my students to consider that nothing that they do in a given day occurs because of free will--- but rather because of deterministic forces of either the Freudian or Skinnerian kind.


Wow--- the stuff of life.


But I am just as interested when going over any of the other fourteen major subject areas covered in the book.


I can tell that Carla, Maria, and Felicia--- and indeed all of my students--- have rarely if every experienced this kind of knowledge base or enthusiasm from a teacher.


They have such a hunger to know and to be taught in this way.


To inspire an excellence of education that is founded on the knowledge and desire to communicate is the goal that I will pursue until the end of my days.


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But for at least four decades, those low-level functionaries in departments, colleges, and schools of education known as education professors have fostered the idea of teacher as one who need have no specialized knowledge but rather should be skilled as a "facilitator" who guides students toward knowledge.


Along with the advocacy of education professors for constructionist ideology and other ideas that are "progressive" in name only, this notion of teacher as primarily a "facilitator" has left our students knowledge-poor and accrued consequences far from "progressive."


I truly chafe when I receive accounts of teacher lassitude, minimal competence, and knowledge-poverty.


And I receive such accounts with great frequency from my students.


I encourage my students to stay in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). They can get meals, socialization, and extracurricular activities while they get most of their real education in their two hours a week with me.


In the meantime, as an expanding part of my activity in the New Salem Educational Initiative, I am assiduously pressuring decision-makers at that school district to generate a knowledge-intensive curriculum; thoroughly retrain teachers capable of delivering that curriculum; develop a well-articulated and cohesive approach to skill acquisition for students now languishing far below grade level; put in place family outreach workers who will connect with parents and guardians right where they live; and greatly slim down the bureaucracy so as to focus resources on students and teachers.


While I am pressuring officials to do what they should be doing, my students can get most of their real education with me in two compact hours per week, as we move through my new and nearly complete fourteen-chapter Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education (see snippets close by and also farther along as you scroll down this blog).


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The true teacher is a person of great knowledge, intent on passing that knowledge on to students who seek the particular information and wisdom that the teacher has to impart. Think Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius; and, indeed, the renowned scholar in many a field to whom serious graduate students flock for seminal guidance.


We've lost so much of that sense of teacher as a person of knowledge, whose pedagogical art lies primarily in the intense desire to communicate on the foundation of a treasure house full of reading, research, reflection, and writing.


We'll have advanced from this ignorance in which humanity is now mired when knowledge and those who possess deep learning are valued. I am one given to facing brutal reality, the harshest truth, but I am also an inveterate optimist who envisions a future stage at which we will achieve a breakthrough of consciousness allowing us to overcome the limitations of a 100,000-year sojourn on an Earth 4.5 billion years old.


True teachers will lead the leap from a springboard of knowledge