Now this is not a blog about educational pedagogy, but of course it all relates: I strongly believe in providing substantial content (especially the Gospel to which children cling) to children from the get-go. Sing them hymns, read them stories from the Bible, explore the history of the world and its people and encourage all questioning and curiousity they show about such things…
Of course, try to talk to them about this substantial content in terms that they can relate to and understand, but just do it! It seems to me that if education is all about self-discovery, its doomed to be boring.
In other words, don’t be like the school mentioned in this blogpost:
My children were students at P.S. 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School. Our school enjoyed a reputation as one of the city’s education jewels, and parents clamored to get their kids in. But most of the teachers and principals had trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College, a bastion of so-called progressive education, and militantly defended the progressive-ed doctrine that facts were pedagogically unimportant. I once asked my younger son and some of his classmates, all top fifth-grade students, whether they knew anything about the historical figure after whom their school was named. Not only were they clueless about the military leader who delivered the final blow that brought down America’s slave empire; they hardly knew anything about the Civil War, either. When I complained to the school’s principal, he reassured me: “Our kids don’t need to learn about the Civil War. What they are learning at P.S. 87 is how to learn about the Civil War.”
(from here)
As the author of the post goes on to say: “So when will they actually learn details of the Civil War? When they’re trying to relax in front of the History Channel between specials on UFOs and Nostradamus?”
Very funny but very sad!
theology like a child 