When I was a kid, I tried to read
Jane Eyre. It was hard for me, so I would read as far as I could and then set it aside for a couple months. Then I would pick it up again and read from the beginning and get maybe a chapter or two further than last time. This continued for years. Finally, I got all the way through the book, which remains one of my all-time favorite novels.
All that to say I'm beginning
Norms and Nobility again. I got maybe two chapters into it last time. I have now thought more and learned more. I am ready to go again. I don't know if I will make it to the end this go round, but I will try. I want to understand what he is saying.
I will post my short chapter summaries (short in comparison to the actual chapters). This is more for my own benefit than anyone else's. I looked back at my last attempt to narrate Norms and Nobility and can see many failures of understanding. I expect I will fail to understand again. But I'll be further down the road than before. :)
Preface Summary:
David
Hicks, a young teacher interested in educational (esp. curricular)
reform, wrote the book in 1980. For the next ten years, he read much
commentary on the subject and refined as well as validated his ideas.
If he had written Norms
and Nobility ten years
later, he would have been more balanced in his claims regarding the
wisdom of the ancients. However, we should remember the author's
topic is not “ancient education”, but an ancient ideal known as
“classical education”, against which the modern educational
establishment is weighed and found wanting. The author wishes to
acknowledge the work of other writers such as Mortimer Adler, whose
discovery of classical principles is not limited to personal
experience.
Hicks
promotes learning in context, especially the answering of the
question, “What should one do?” as the key to delightful and fit
learning (as opposed to memorization of lists of facts). Education
being more than the mastery of thinking skills and traditional
intellectual ideas, right thinking should lead to right acting.
Education must encompass the spiritual and emotional sides of the
student as well as the rational, tending toward nobility. Other
writers, including Adler, object to this idea of dogma, saying it
turns education into indoctrination and puts too great a burden on
the teacher.
But
skepticism and analysis taught too soon kills the moral imagination
and leads to the belief that all ideas are relative. The
great books of the Western tradition are worthy, not just because
they teach basic intellectual ideas, but because their emotional and
spiritual content inspire people to transcend self-interest and act
nobly. Hicks believes today's moral relativism and hedonism is the
result of educators placing modern scientific principles at the heart
of the curriculum, which, while feeding the technological needs of
our age, spiritually starves the student.
The modern empirical model fails to address the ideal, neglecting
urgent moral and ethical questions.
Norms
and Nobility focuses
more on curriculum, but the author now believes the teacher ought to
be the focus of reform. If teachers continually learn and grow
themselves, they will motivate students to learn. The general
principles outlined in the book (called “normative contextual
learning”) are universal, and can be used to develop effective
practices specific to the school, the teacher and the student.
In
seeking specificity, however, American teachers must be careful not
to exclude studies that unify us. We need that common culture in
order to properly frame debate between specific groups within the
United States. Respect for truth, not regrets or hopes or a desire
to build up our students' self-esteem, ought to guide us. As a
nation, we have become uncertain of our ideals (“norms”) and
abandoned education's ennobling purpose. Without these two things,
we cannot bring up free and responsible people.
