“True father. We encourage our people to see all of the wonders of the world. Without experiencing nature's marvels we may forget to preserve the world that they adorn. Just look at the wonders of your country. I think that the main valley in Yosemite is my favorite view of nature. But Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon are certainly things that everyone should see. My favorite natural site in Europe is the Sognefjorden on the west coast of Norway, but the views of the Alps or from the Alps are also breathtaking.”
”My idea of a wonder of nature has me sitting on a beach in a lush tropical paradise of Polynesia, mai tai in hand, marveling at the thunderheads shattering the sun into splinters of rainbows across the Bruin blue sky. The shifting kaleidoscope never duplicates its aesthetic wonder --as ‘old sol’ sinks slowly in the West for a well-earned rest.
“Amen to that, Con. But I'm getting ahead of myself because this is all part of our education, which we expect to continue throughout our lives. So I might as well talk about our education now.”
EDUCATION
-"I assume that you have a national curriculum. That's what we need in the US. I know that about 15 years ago, in 2011, some educators, business leaders, labor leaders and politicians from both parties began a move to have a common school curriculum nationwide. We had been beaten so bad by so many countries using their national curricula and our local school leadership was so backward so often.
“By ‘curriculum’ I mean a coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn. I don't mean performance standards, textbook offerings, daily lesson plans or rigid pedagogical prescriptions. The national curriculum that was proposed was to account for 50 to 60 percent of a school’s available academic time, with the rest added by local communities, districts and states.
"We seemed to be trying to compromise between a curriculum set up by experts who are knowledgeable and our local school board control which often is a brake to real education.”
“Like most countries, here in The Colonies we have a national curriculum in terms of what information should be passed on. But learning information is only a part of a real education. Developing an attitude of wanting to learn and wanting to be a good citizen is equally important. From what I understand in your country your schools try to pass on information, then when students go home they may or may not have homework but they always have television or video games to entertain them. In our country our education system is geared to wanting the students to learn because it is exciting.”
-" I hear you Tyler, I had one truly great teacher at UCLA, he was considered the best teacher in the whole University of California system, and I would guess he was probably the best teacher in the US, if not the world. His lectures stimulated me to want to travel and to study philosophy. When I finally did travel to Europe I felt that in my first day I had learned more than I had learned in college, except for that professor's course and a few tidbits from other courses. My traveling in Europe as a young man stimulated my long time major hobby, which is world history. I don't know how you can walk the roads of the ancients and not wonder more about their arts, philosophy and politics.
“But how do you do it in practice?”
"Well there are some things that just must be learned by rote. How to write the alphabet, how to add and multiply, how to use effective grammar and so forth. For these we use robots, computer programs and video games. Interactive lessons in these areas requiring rote memory are made as enjoyable as possible. Let's face it, the people who develop video games and cartoons are very creative. We use that creativity to stimulate interest in a study area and the desire to learn. Our video games are educationally directed. The objective is not to shoot as many aliens as possible, as it is in so many of your games. Our objectives are to learn and to accomplish while we are having fun. So one game might be about traveling through ancient or modern Greece. Another might be showing a Civil War battle. Another might be understanding how engines work. Another might be designing a bridge or a building or an airplane. Certainly history, science, advanced mathematics, logic, geography, Shakespeare, Bible history, music appreciation, the history of art, and every other area of academic interest can be made more interesting when the various media are used and interactive learning is possible.
“While the teachers have age-appropriate curricula for their students they must also evaluate the best path for each student to learn it. We have clear learning objectives and specific tasks that must be mastered for each objective. And we have criterion-referenced tests to determine whether or not a student has mastered an area or needs more work. This is where the teacher is essential. As I said, we learned much from the way the Finns teach. Every teacher in elementary school keeps the same students for six years. During that time the teacher should have a pretty good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each student. There may be personality plusses and minuses. There may be academic pluses or minuses.”
-“That all sounds very idealistic. But where do you get the money for developing such projects?”
Book 9 A Libertarian Paradise Page 6
