On our Yahoo! International Support Group, I was asked why 1st Step is needed if Connect The Thoughts covers the educational ground. The questioner posed a hypothetical -- that we should not be teaching children much before age ten. Here's my answer:
Let me see if I can answer your question. First, I'd like to take the hypothetical away - the law requires we educate our children from a young age. Perhaps in the best of all possible worlds this would not be the case. But like you, I live in this world. We are required to provide education to our children, generally starting at around age six. This means we are required to determine what it is we're going to do to educate our children from age six. The options are public school, private school, home school, and a life fleeing the truant officer and Child Services. 1st Step courses were in part authored because I'm all too aware of this unavoidable reality.
So, given that we must educate our very young, what should that education accomplish?
For ages 4-6, I decided a number of things were important enough to create curricula. First, it's a tough world. Children that young can be easily made the victims of their own ignorance. It is a parent's first and most important job to keep their children safe until their children can do so for themselves. So, I wanted to author some courses that would help teach the youngest children how to be safe, and how to best survive at their age in this world we live in. The value of the "Living Your Life" courses for ages 4-6 (Starter) is contained in this idea. At this level, these courses are intended to add survival factors and make the child and parent's life easier and saner. I'll get into ages 7-8 a little later.
If you read a lot of the posts here (I've read all your lovely posts), you know that there are many ten year olds and older who are struggling in terms of literacy. Too many. I first encountered this phenomenon when I taught High School for Los Angeles Unified School District, some 27 years ago. I encountered a perfectly bright and intelligent 17 year old who simply could read nothing, and could not sign his own name. I thought at the time that he was an anomaly. He wasn't. Read the posts on this site and you'll see, lack of literacy is an epidemic and one of its most crucial symptoms in the United States is a drop-out rate in our public schools of over 50% across the country.
To start Connect The Thoughts Lower School, a student must read moderately well for their age group. I think the most important educational assignment we have with children up to age nine is in the area of literacy, period. I've tutored and taught too many 10 year olds who simply couldn't read Story Of Mankind without effort. Literacy should be solved by age nine, and all the Elementary courses (ages 8-9) are constructed to do exactly this. Elementary was built to improve literacy. It is the primary goal of 1st Step Elementary curricula. Elementary's secondary goal is to educate in the areas each course specializes in (history, science, etc), on a level acceptable to the child. It's third (and critical) goal is to validate the young student's ability to think and work and have ideas and opinions. Schooling almost always thoroughly invalidates a student. After an eight year old has taken enough tests, been told he was wrong a thousand times, been informed his ideas were uneducated and even unwelcome...well, why should such a child keep trying when they're going to be slammed down repeatedly? Few children have the resilience to survive such an emotional and intellectual pummeling. Few adults, too. 1st Step is constructed to encourage the student to have ideas and express them. (Starter/Elementary Creative Writing is there to help the student express his/her ideas, and is constructed uniquely with limited literacy in mind.) We need to reverse the results of current education in our children, and let them know their ideas and opinions are valued. Doing Lower and Upper School Connect The Thoughts successfully absolutely depends upon this!
Our world says "no". It says no to adult and child alike. You want more money, more work, more R&R, more love, and the world says "no", or "maybe later", or "ya' got to work for it"...and you work like a dog and most of the time the world still says no. It takes a special type of toughness to keep creating and expressing one's self after being told no often enough. "No" is a pretty soul-killing word.
The world says no to our children every day. "You're too small to...", and "maybe when you're older...", and so on.
Education should say YES. YES, dive in, have fun, use that thing above your shoulders and see how far it will take you, express those clever buzzings in your brain and let's see how they might change your world. Education (and families as much as possible while keeping a child safe) should say YES YES YES!
We want strong-souled children that can do a little bit of spitting in the world's eye when needed. That's survival. It's also people who can see and think and express for themselves their own observations and ideas that change things for the better. History teaches nothing if not that it is the hard-working, inspired INDIVIDUAL who comes up with the world-changing invention or idea or work of art. Contrary to some moron's ideas, Shakespeare clearly authored his masterpieces alone. Bach wrote as much as 45 minutes of music a week alone, and then orchestrated and performed it. Science is a parade of individuals who did not accept common "wisdom". If this had not been the case, we would still blindly accept Aristotle's conviction that the heavens above were painted on glass globes revolving around the Earth, and we'd be dying by the many more hundreds of millions of diseases long since conquered.
I simply think that we have drastically underestimated two things:
- What a four year old or six year old or eight year old CAN learn and is capable of; and
- What they need to know to keep their eyes on the horizon every time the world says "no" to them.
There is a lot to be said for the child who is what schools used to call "self-starters", yes. I was one. I read voraciously when I was young and wanted to know everything without limits. I still do. But I'm kind of gnarly and mean-spirited and have never taken "no" for an answer. I think most children need some aid in that area. For a self starter, 1st Step will provide ample opportunity and tools to express their ideas and develop them, perhaps the second best thing we can do for this age group - provide opportunities to successfully explore - after generating literacy. I believe this approach will help build children and young adults who have faith in their own vision. This civilization is going to need a LOT of people like that if it's not to collapse of its own weight and bizarre inertia over the next fifty years.
On a deeply pragmatic level, today's educational environment is far more complex than when I went to school. The amount of information floating around out there is multiplying very rapidly. Study skills for the young are essential by age nine, as they simply have so much to learn! "Living Your Life" Elementary (ages 7-8) is constructed to help the student manage essential life skills, including basic research skills. It's almost too late by age nine to start teaching a child how to study or learn today. It also teaches basic survival skills like how to handle money. Today, kids eight years old have money in their pockets! (I used to carry a peanut butter sandwich. And I didn't even like peanut butter...) It's probably a good idea to teach them what money actually is (something most adults don't really understand) and how to handle it, as an example of the sort of thing covered.
Now, why teach a very young child history or science? They'll learn these thoroughly in Connect The Thoughts . Well, honestly, I'm less interested in teaching history or science to children ages 4-8 than in teaching them the relevancy of history and science, or the value of their own ideas.
It has been said that "All history is prelude". America's greatest historian, Will Durant (I think the greatest historian of all time) certainly felt that an understanding of history was necessary to any kind of an understanding of today or tomorrow. I use history and science at the 1st Step Level to accomplish a few things;
- Make the student read read read;
- Demand that the student think through issues and develop viewpoints and opinions unique to them and relevant to today's world and their own lives; and
- To get the student by degree to take over their own education.
I believe that these are three noble goals for the age group, and I believe they are educationally optimum for the age group.
1st Step simply has different goals than Connect The Thoughts , and sets up the student to succeed in Connect The Thoughts or in whatever they study next. Its methodology is not the same as Connect The Thoughts . In fact, Starter methodology is very different in certain respects from Elementary. They're "specialized" to generate specific, targeted results, as described above.
Well, I think that's probably enough! I hope this answers your question. I would only ask that we leave hypotheticals out of any discussion about education. We need to solve the problems of education in this world, right now and as things are.
Thanks for the tough question!
Steven Horwich
