Minor Heinlein YA Observation

[jeriendhal]

After recently reading/listening through my holy trifecta of RAH Young Adult novels, The Rolling Stones, Space Cadet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel I noticed a common theme concerning school and learning. While only one of them, Spacesuit actually goes into an outright Pournellian condemnation of public schooling [1], one theme in all of them is that a properly trained student can teach themselves subjects with more efficiency than they ever could with the help of an actual teacher. Which is rather odd, I think, given it's a teacher's job to teach students so they don't go rolling down dead ends and help them with concepts they can't comprehend on their own.

There's nothing really insightful in my observation, I've just never really noticed it before.

[1] Has there ever been a time in American history where public schools have actually been praised instead of getting a universal condemnation as "learning warehouses" and giving social security to under-qualified teachers?

Comments

[aberrantangels]

Has there ever been a time in American history where public schools have actually been praised instead of getting a universal condemnation as "learning warehouses" and giving social security to under-qualified teachers?

Not to my knowledge. And it's not just in American history; Wordsworth once waxed poetic about how lucky he and Coleridge were to have escaped public schooling:

Where had we been, we two, beloved Friend!
If in the season of unperilous choice,
In lieu of wandering, as we did, through vales
Rich with indigenous produce, open ground
Of Fancy, happy pastures ranged at will,
We had been followed, hourly watched, and noosed,
Each in his several melancholy walk
Stringed like a poor man's heifer at its feed,
Led through the lanes in forlorn servitude...

(Confession: I discovered that passage through Finkle-McGraw quoting it to John Hackworth in The Diamond Age.)

[lacousteau.livejournal.com]

Sure there was a time. When the community itself pulled together and built the school house, advertised and interviewed the teacher at the town meeting, then paid and provided for the teacher to live and work at the school house. There were no superintendents, no State mandated benchmarks, no PTA's, no section XI athletic standards.

The town couldn't bitch about the state of the facility, because they built it; couldn't complain about the teacher's salary because it was voted upon by the town. They didn't have no child left behind crap because all students were in the same room and learned at their own pace. If they were slower, they stayed until they got the concepts, if they were fast learners, they graduated sooner. There was no pissing and moaning about the quality of school lunches because the students ate the lunch their parents made for them. Everybody got a slate and a piece of chalk. The school owned the books. No one had to whine about not being able to afford school supplies. No one had to fund sport teams or buy phys ed supplies. Kids exercised at home on the farms, working.

Primitive? maybe. But public education was welcomed and wanted.

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

The purpose of public schooling has been to try to get everyone to a necessary minimal level in a reasonably efficient manner. To give some opportunities to children of less knowledgeable parents. We're not there yet, but my own experience was good.

I don't think we want to design public schools that would suit, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge. One: we probably couldn't, and two: folks of that capability will always largely educate themselves, hopefully with helpful guides.

[allah-sulu.livejournal.com]

I think Heinlein's idea is that schools should teach children how to learn; which is true, but it's not their only purpose, and some guidance is certainly required. Heinlein is merely repudiating one extreme (which may or may not exist) by advocating another.