An interesting thought occurred to me this morning. It’s all about the “teaching a man to fish” aphorism. I thought about this in context with the way I’ve been homeschooling my kids.
Basically, as you know, the aphorism goes thusly:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Well, that’s nice and all, and demonstrates the importance of education with regards to self-actualization and a lot of other goodies. But it seems to be lacking something, something that is embrolied in the approaches I have been using to homeschool my kids.
You see, I always thought that the love of knowledge actually more important than the knowledge itself. A person can be”taught” anything, but if the person has no love for it, no passion, no desire to embrace what has been taught, then the teaching will only go so far.
The goal with the teaching of anything is not only to teach a thing, but to somehow inculcate a love for the thing. When you desire a thing, you are more prone to go out on your own to learn more about the thing. Of course, inculcating desire is not always possible in the typical teaching situations, but as a parent, I have an avenue open to me that few other would be able to travel.
By example, by being passionate myself, by openly showing my own love and thirst for knowledge, I can inculcate that desire for knowledge and understanding in kids, and have done so. And actually, any good teacher can do much of the same. Though, as a parent, my kids see me everyday, so I can be much more effective.
You don’t even have to be perfect as a parent, either (but you do as a teacher! 
) For instance, I have shown a desire and love for learning foreign languages to my kids– and most notably French. Today, after 10 years, I still struggle with French and would probably have a hard time asking for where the nearest drugstore is in Paris, but I did learn something, and the kids saw that.
Their young minds are much more able to pick up languages than my 40-something brain is, and so one daughter has taken it upon herself to learn Japanese and German. The other daughter is starting to pick up an interest from her sister and — I estimate — will increase in her interest soon. Perhaps she’ll pick different languages to learn apart from her sister or her dad. Or maybe some of the same. Who knows?
So, getting back to that aphorism, I thought to add an additional line. So now it becomes:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Give a man the desire to fish, and he’ll start a whole fishing industry that will teach and feed thousands.
Yes, that is the distilled essence of my approach to homeschooling, and how I approach life in general. Find a way to create desire, and you have found a way to create something disruptive. Something with the power of changing the world, something that will have a ripple effect that will reach many people in ways you would never have thought of.
A good question to ask is how we can accomplish that small feat in not just the homeschooling environment, but with any teaching establishment in general?
The answer is simple and plainly obvious. Alas, the devil’s in the implementation. The answer is, of course: find those passionate teachers and put them in front of students. But where do you find enough passionate teachers to kick something of this magnitude off? Something that will take the US school system from being ranked 18th in the world back to number 1?
There are those who blame the poor performance in the educational system on the heterogeneous composition of the United States. To that I say, hogwash. The link above indicates a few possibilities as possible causes, including how subjects are taught here in the US, which tends to focus more on procedure than concepts — something I have personally noted myself, which is part of the reason I elected to homeschool my kids. But to teach concepts, rather than procedure, the passion of the teacher will have a strong bearing on how well those concepts are taught, and how eager the students will be to learn them and use them.
It is my strongly held opinion that the nature of the bureaucracies surrounding the teaching establishment in the US has a lot to do with how poorly the US ranks in the world. Teachers are not as free as they should be on how they create their lesson plans and chose the materials to be taught. Too many subjects are thrown at the students all at once. And there also seems to be an over-emphasis on homework that eats up more of the kids’ time away from school which takes away from the time the kids have to just be kids, to explore their own interests, or even to allow their parents to do supplemental schooling.
When I was homeschooling my kids, I only spent 2-3 hours with them on a couple of subjects, and we would focus on different subjects over the year, one or two at a time. I would also incorporate the homeschooling into our general lives, constantly introducing them to new concepts and ideas in a very informal way. In many respects what I did — and still do — would not even look like homeschooling to the average person. Currently, I had to enroll them back in public school and they do very well, so my approach obviously worked.
But I digress. Where I spent 2-3 hours a day, the public school system spends 6 hours, plus they also give the students an additional 1-2 hours of homework every night.
The homework, in my state at least, counts as a major part of the grade, and if you don’t do it, you may be dropped one or two points on your letter grade. Your “A” may become a “B” or even a “C”. In some cases, it could get even worse.
And from the homework I’ve seen, it seems to focus much more on doing rote procedures than learning new concepts. It seems to be much more about “busywork” than about actual learning and exploration of the subject. It seem to be much more about generating paperwork for the bureaucratic engine than it is about giving the desire and thirst for knowledge to our kids. If anything, it may serve to burn many kids off from the notion that education can be fun and rewarding.
In essence, it would appear the the US school system is geared and design to accomplish the exact opposite of my goals. It would seem that our public schools deliberately set out to destroy the natural and innate curiosity that our precious kids are born with.
If creating the desire to fish could feed nations, what effect would destroying the desire to fish have? Or worse, even creating a resentment of fishing? What effect would destroying the desire to learn have on our individual kids and on the nation as a whole? In a world of increasing globalization, where would it leave this country financially? From a social standpoint, where would it leave this country? What kind of a future we could possibly hope to have with a nation of today’s knowledge and education-hating youth becomes tomorrow’s adults and the society at large?
We already are beginning to see some signs of this degradation in the overall quality of our nation. Look at what’s been going on with politics for the past couple of decades. Witness what the media chooses to focus on and report. Note how the strong trend to “dumming down” the details of the coverage is. Or the interest in science and mathematics. Or appeals to “just believe” rather than “gaining understanding”. Look at the quality of what’s available on the hundreds of channels on Cable and Satellite TV.
When you look at all of these fine elements and put the picture together, you begin to see the “big picture”. You begin to see where society as a whole is already headed, and you can also see what some of the causative factors are. It’s all there in front of your eyes, so look for yourself. Don’t take my word on it.
But before you lapse into a state of perpetual despair, ask yourself the question of what can be done to fix it.
It all boils down to individual action. It all boils down to focusing on what’s in your own backyard first. The old adage of “think globally, act locally” is close to the mark, but not quite spot on. Let me modify that adage a bit:
Watch Globally
Think Locally
Act Locally
Solve Globally
Think about it for a moment. What influence do you have? Most of us only have local influence, so it really does not make much sense to spend too much time and effort on the global situation unless you have the power to affect global change. But if you have that kind of power, you are most likely already part of the problem rather than the solution.
But in thinking locally, you see real things that you can do something about. However, we still have to keep an eye on what’s going on globally, so we stay informed with information that may even effect how we think locally.
Most of us only have the power to act locally. So, if you have local focus with some input of the global situation, you can be much more effective locally.
And finally, the last part — Solve Globally. This is where the collective effects of our individual local actions results at changing the global landscape. No government can stand against individuals taking local action. Governments typically don’t have a grasp on the whole notion of emergent systems and would be caught off-guard, which is the whole idea. We don’t wait around for the government to fix the problem for us, because, frankly, it never will. I mean, think for a moment. How many decades has it been where you’ve heard politicians promising a “fix” to the education problem in the US, yet we’re worse off than ever before? What was the whole “no child left behind” rhetoric all about, besides a sneaky way for the armed forces to get a mailing list on our kids for purposes of turning them into cannon fodder?
I leave it to you, then, to take action locally and solve the mess we are currently in globally.
currencies and economies that are immune to the economic geopolitical hedging, speculation, manipulation and control. Indeed, it would be a good thing to have stable economies free of government control and exploitation. It would be a good thing to have some means of currency backed by something other than fiat.