Sound Child Education

Learn about good ways of educating yourself and your children, and avoid any beckoning sect school for the children's sake.

Sayings

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. [Somehow attributed to the Earl of Rochester, 1647–80]

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. [Aristotle]

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell . . . - Dr Martin Luther

If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous. [Desmond Bagley]

Despise school and remain a fool. [German proverb]

Education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. [Sir Bertrand Russell]

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? [Erich Fromm]

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. [Edward Everett]

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. [Henry David Thoreau]

What if man were required to educate his children without the help of talking animals. [Robert Brault]

A little on Waldorf Education

The quotations above suggest there are different opinions on education and different avenues too. It is because there are different sorts of education; different sorts of teachings; different people and different curriculums (books to read). [A synthesis]

The words 'compulsory education' says that some sort of education is forced on the pupils. Most forms of public schooling is rooted in it.

Being forced to learn instead of learning with interest, is not good. Results may be forthcoming, but they are told be less than ideal for men and women. It is much like forcing plants to flower without much concern for the ideas that development is rooted in what comes from inside, and depends on readiness and much else. The conditions are to be right for a plant to set flowers and seeds in time too.

The Waldorf Education movement seeks to embody such principles and many others. Its originator, Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) has a lot to teach parents and teachers in Kindergartens and schools. As for Kindergardens, he said the best for children to be taught at home until they are about seven. However, if the conditions are difficult or strained, maybe a Steiner Kindergarden may be a good alternative, depending on how well it is run. At home, parents are - at least hopefully - fit persons for small children to imitate and learn from. The principles of Steiner Kindergartens and schools are summed up in several books. Books for parents are not as many, but Barbara Patterson and Pamela Bradley has written an "absolutely wonderful and beautiful" book, to quote a book reviewer. The book: Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Nurturing Our Children from Birth to Seven (2000).

Home schooling may be good

If you learn at home, it is home learning. It may go on your whole life if your natural interests are not killed. If your children are taught at home, it is home schooling.

Reasonably structured home schooling can offer better control over the overriding learning conditions so as to favour one's little ones as long as it lasts. It may be an alternative to menial conditions in public schools. On academic tests, homeschoolers typically outperform children who have got a public education. Homeschooling yields better grades in average and may cost a tenth of public schooling. Much else than a family's good money may be wasted through public schooling. [Home schooling is advocated] — [Study the facts]

Three basics

It could, further, be fit for good guys to ignite the first few links in a so-called chain reaction of interests that lead to learning. These are the basics: Learning outcomes is the main aim, interests fuels it, as does calm study without great pressures. The term "being in the flow" suggests that sort of interest-glowing learning. (Gross 1999)

If you don't apply salient points on education they may not do much good. One traditional way to draw benefits from sayings is to meditate on selected phrases to your ability. [Lojong is for that]

Apart from this one does oneself a good turn in learning a good study strategy. [Study to remember]

This is to say, "Find key points and fuse some of them as well as you can and thereby get something savoury out of learning, and apply it too, and check well as you venture on. Monitoring feedback may be helpful and valuable."