Over the holidays I have been reading Washington: the indispensable man.
I was interested to see that although not much is known about his education, one of the two subjects he is known to have learned about is astronomy. I occurs to me that one could make quite a good case for astronomy as one of the subjects that should be studied at primary schools. (I think it is sometimes included in science lessons but only to a minor extent.)
What could be more fundamental than to learn about the universe in which we live? For millenia, people have struggled to understand the nature of the world we inhabit and what is in - or beyond - the sky. Now, at last, we understand more about the extraordinary universe than ever before. We know we are a planet in a vast solar system which is, in turn, a small part of a much bigger galaxy which is one of many, many galaxies.
Yet while knowledge about this is far more extensive than it was in Washington's time, he learnt about it whereas children today do not.
The subjects that children are told to study at school have developed in a haphazard way. In the 19th century, religion was the main thing. Currently, the government decides the curriculum and thinks that the main purpose of education is to promote economic success - a rather grim idea
IT and CDT have become fashionable and now take up plenty of time in the curriculum. Languages take a back seat. And so on.
In addition to astronomy, there are cases to made for studying geology, industry and agriculture. I am sure other people could make cases for other subjects, too.
We should not allow ourselves to be trapped into a fixed idea of what children should study.
As I mentioned in the additional chapter in the paperback edition of the book, I was impressed by the way a secondary school in Miami was teaching aviation. The subject involved plenty of science and gets otherwise disenchanted boys interested.
(I will be away for a while, so please do not be offended if I do not get round to approving comments for a time.)
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education
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Oh - and the big one for today that I completely forgot was vernacular architecture - the why and the how and the influences like local materials and dealing with environmental circumstances - what houses were built in hot climes and cold climes and so on...
Posted by: Jock Coats at August 7, 2006 11:55 AM
I completely agree with you here! I don't think I even had the opportunity to study astronomy until I was in college. Before that, there were a few grade school projects concerning our solar system, then a huge lapse in junior high and high school when the subject was barely mentioned at all. Let's get back to it!
Posted by: TheBizofKnowledge at August 7, 2006 02:44 PM
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And, probably most importantly, all of the ones you mentioned can be made FUN!
I think it was geography lessons in primary school where we did projects on how settlements developed, including stuff like the open field system, why and how it changed at enclosures and what effects that had on the settlement's economy, how to spot those patterns on maps, how to draw maps. I seem to remember a couple of years that I spent much spare time drawing pretty good OS style maps of utopian lands with all the right circumstances for good economic and social development.
The number of disciplines rolled into those simple maps...economics, history, social history, geography, development of agriculture and why (the rotation system and so on) was fantastic.
Thank you Mr Taylor! I still remember it today!
Posted by: Jock Coats at August 7, 2006 11:54 AM