Although he meant it for education in general, Emmanuel G. Mesthene’s idea has home schooling in its sights:
The challenge to education is indeed staggering. Teachers who have been brought up to cherish the stable must take the children of parents who have been brought up to cherish the stable, and try to teach them that the stable, the unchanging, is unreal, constraining, a false goal, and that they will survive in an age of change to the degree that they become familiar with change, feel comfortable with it, understand it, master and control it.
(Quoted from Emmanuel G. Mesthene’s essay, “Learning To Live With Science,” Saturday Review, July 17, 1965, page 17.)
As a professor, most of my students don’t shine at mathematical subjects. Shouldn’t we all be angry at the thought of some of them later becoming home-schooling parents, making a mess of teaching their children mathematics and physics, and tacitly promoting a stable view of the future? And often home-schooling parents are religious, believing that prayer works, that if the human race gets in a tight spot, as with global warming and the population bomb, what they call God will bail us out. As hard as it is to get pseudoscience out of the class room, getting it out of home schooling is hopeless.
For a brief biography of Emmanuel G. Mesthene, click here.
The challenge to education is indeed staggering. Teachers who have been brought up to cherish the stable must take the children of parents who have been brought up to cherish the stable, and try to teach them that the stable, the unchanging, is unreal, constraining, a false goal, and that they will survive in an age of change to the degree that they become familiar with change, feel comfortable with it, understand it, master and control it.
(Quoted from Emmanuel G. Mesthene’s essay, “Learning To Live With Science,” Saturday Review, July 17, 1965, page 17.)
As a professor, most of my students don’t shine at mathematical subjects. Shouldn’t we all be angry at the thought of some of them later becoming home-schooling parents, making a mess of teaching their children mathematics and physics, and tacitly promoting a stable view of the future? And often home-schooling parents are religious, believing that prayer works, that if the human race gets in a tight spot, as with global warming and the population bomb, what they call God will bail us out. As hard as it is to get pseudoscience out of the class room, getting it out of home schooling is hopeless.
For a brief biography of Emmanuel G. Mesthene, click here.
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