narration of book 1, chapter 5
It’s easy to slip into the mindset that education is about academic achievement. That the goal of studies is to attain high grades, receive scholarships, gain power, or even maintain a place in society. These are all natural human desires—approbation, emulation, avarice, ambition, society—and these desires must be trained and cultivated in their own rights. But should they be the central motivating factors of an education?
The majority of schools and curriculums are now designed in such a way that a child learns materials predominantly for the sake of getting a gold star on his chart or a high grade on his test. This encourages approbation, the desire to please and be looked well upon. Some teachers or parents encourage children to do well in school so that they may receive a scholarship. Indeed, scholarships can be helpful tools for students with little financial means. However, if the scholarship is the main focus, it diminishes education to a form of avarice. Many children are encouraged to learn by the ideas that education will give them power or friends. Their natural desires for ambition and society become the key factors in stimulating their education.
These five desires are powerful in human beings, and easy for teachers and parents to direct and use as motivators in education. However, when education is based on and motivated by these desires, it does not help a child to develop the love of learning and delight of knowledge which is the main goal of education.
A sixth natural human desire, the desire for knowledge, is commonly overlooked, but just as powerful in a child as the desires for approbation, success, power, or society. Every child has this hunger for knowledge, it is their sense of curiosity. It is the natural desire to learn and to know. In and of itself, this hunger for knowledge is a sufficient motivator for learning. Sadly, when the other natural desires are brought into undue play in the educational process, the pure desire for knowledge can be subdued and left abandoned and undeveloped at the back of the child’s mind.
An incorrect stimulation of natural desires seems to be one of the saddest and yet most prevalent mistakes in the schoolroom today. We encourage learning through grades, prizes, prestige, and friends rather than through the pure and simple delightfulness of knowledge.
Learning is enjoyable, delectable. The attainment of knowledge is a delightful thing. It satisfies our natural curiosity, fills our mind with nourishing ideas. Children and adults alike hunger for it. Yet in our school, we make learning a burden and knowledge a chore through improper direction of the natural desires. We take away the joy of learning by not acknowledging the hunger for it, and leave our students with emaciated minds.
Why and how does this happen? It seems to be mostly caused by an incorrect view of children. They are overlooked as being incapable of wanting to learn, and thus it is thought necessary to harness the other desires in order to motivate and stimulate their minds. We have not so much a need for better educational materials, but a desperate need for a correct view of the child; a view that respects his active mind and the sanctity of his status as a person.
quotes
“Our crying need today is less for a better method of education than for an adequate conception of children.”
“Have we considered that in the Divine estimate, the child’s estate is higher than ours; that it is ours to ‘become as little children’ rather than theirs to become as grown men and women.”
“It so happens that the last desire we have to consider, the desire of knowledge, is commonly deprived of it’s proper function in our schools by the predominance of other springs of action, especially of emulation, the desire of place, and avarice, the desire of wealth, tangible profit.”
“This atrophy of the desire of knowledge is the penalty our scholars pay because we have chosen to make them work for inferior ends.”
“We believe children regard knowledge rather as repulsive medicine than as inviting food.”
“It must be borne in mind that in proportion as other desires are stimulated that of knowledge is suppressed.”