Temples of Learning

Schools are not places for indoctrination. That's better left to indoctrination camps and at the discretion of the parent. What our schools should be are temples of learning - a place where the student is made aware of the chronological order of knowledge that is, how knowledge has been painstakingly gained during mankind's existence on earth and the major discoveries made along the way that led us to where we are today. Learning the story of the history of knowledge is crucial for a child in order that he may understand how one goes from the particular to the abstract or from observation to a principle.

But today's schools are not much more than babysitting centers that basically throw a massive text book at the kid and command them to study and regurgitate. Today there is an added twist. Students must sit there and listen to their teacher's political diatribes and rantings.

Thomas Sowell in an article written on March 13, 2006 pointed out this disturbing trend.

"Governor Bill Owens of Colorado has cut through the cant about "free speech" and come to the defense of a 16-year-old high school student who tape-recorded his geography teacher using class time to rant against President Bush and compare him to Hitler….

"Unfortunately, there is much confusion about both free speech and academic freedom. At too many schools and colleges across the country, teachers feel free to use a captive audience to vent their politics when they are supposed to be teaching geography or math or other subjects.

"The public occasionally hears about weird rantings by some teacher or professor, what seldom gets any media attention is the far more pervasive classroom brainwashing by people whose views may not be so extreme, but are no less irrelevant to what they are being paid to teach. …

"Nowhere else do people think that it is OK to engage in politics instead of doing the job for which they are being paid. When you hire a plumber to fix a leak, you don't want to find your home being flooded while he whiles away the hours talking about Congressional elections or foreign policy." (Read)

Indeed I don't. I want my children to LEARN HOW TO THINK. I want them to know the history of man's challenge to know the world around them and the discoveries the great men of the past made to tame it. For that you have to have teachers who KNOW HOW TO TEACH, in a chronological and orderly fashion, the big ideas that were discovered in the past in such areas as physics, biology, math, history and art.

Our schools today are nothing more than holding grounds or prisons...prisons of the mind...for our children where their potential is stunted by the unbearable boredom of listening to "teachers" who don't know how to teach. VanDamme Academy seems to be a school where the mind is considered sacred and to be carefully nurtured and developed through a rational curriculum. Certainly, I've never heard of a school taking this approach to learning. (View) Maybe there's hope for a better school.