Among the more sophisticated commentators on modern education, it is a commonplace yet valuable observation that education needs reform more radical than a bigger education budget, a stronger teacher’s union, smaller class sizes, or more rigorous testing procedures. After examining the nature of classical education, it should be clear that education also needs reform more radical than harking back to a more traditional approach that mouths respect for facts, logic, and abstract thought. Education must be radically reformed in accordance with a proper understanding of abstractions that gives new meaning to the very notion of facts, logic, and abstract thought. It must treat concepts not as automatically-given abstractions to be memorized, toyed with, and shoehorned to fit with religious faith, but as items of real knowledge, grasped rationally, based in perceptual reality, and developed inductively, with the indispensable, practical power to identify reality and therefore give guidance to a man in every decision he faces over the course of his life. As I argued in my essay The Hierarchy of Knowledge, the basis of this educational reform is Ayn Rand’s revolutionary understanding of the relationship between concepts and reality, including the crucial principle of conceptual hierarchy. With Rand’s understanding of concepts, education becomes a process of building conceptual knowledge that begins in perception and proceeds to higher and higher levels of abstraction. The student possessing such an education has the profoundly practical power to gain true, firsthand knowledge of reality, allowing him to make good judgments in every realm of his life, from the most mundane to the most significant. The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child—to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child’s conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life, and thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after. This is a truly progressive education—and parents and students should settle for nothing less. —Lisa VanDamme
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 12:10:00 +0000
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