Can you mimick a prep school curriculum in college freshman year?
October 7, 2015 5:31 PM Subscribe
Say you grew up in a rote-learning/memorization oriented educational system and thus ended up not knowing the high school content really that well except in terms of concrete facts. Then you went into college in the united states. Can you genuinely recreate the prep-school education experience say, by combining courses in writing, philosophy, english literature, science courses and so on, or is the interactive, socratic and experiment-based learning so unique that it can't me mimicked?
I myself took a shot at it and took philosophy courses and writing courses but in the end found that the academic pursuit of philosophy wasn't for me, because what I needed, so I found, was a more rudimentary and intimate, personal level of philosophy(or critical thinking, in general) that the academic and stand-offish way it is taught in college couldn't offer me unless I applied it to my own situation. Am I wrong about this impression?
A more broader question would be : what is the value of teaching, in high school, via means of principles and books rather than via means of textbooks that list facts even for topics like ethics? Is the former approach not replicable by self-study or academic study as opposed to intimate instruction :
i.e.
"Kant said this and this, fill in the blanks" (not exactly rote learning if you understand the vocabulary of what Kant said, but still not fully making the knowledge accessible at a deep, personal level)
as opposed to
"Kant said this and this which can be applied to everyday experiences as the ones we see in these examples; do you agree with Kant et cetera? You should argue in the following lines"
Or for mathematics, even :
"we calculate derivatives like this, solve"
as opposed to
"mathematical concepts have such and such history, they have applications in such and such situations, solving problems is only one part of mathematics"
Or for writing :
"some piece of art symbolizes such and such, so use that symbolism and describe what the picture talks about"
as opposed to :
"some picture is said to symbolize such and such, but why do you think this interpretation is so? can this picture be evaluated differently, and what is your personal significance in it?"
I know these are caricatures, but the gist of the examples is that one system discourages individual thinking and the evaluation of personal experience, replacing them with the concept of "correct knowledge", while the other encourages free association, even if the end-result of that free thinking would result in more or less the same conclusions about some question or topic that is being learned.
I myself took a shot at it and took philosophy courses and writing courses but in the end found that the academic pursuit of philosophy wasn't for me, because what I needed, so I found, was a more rudimentary and intimate, personal level of philosophy(or critical thinking, in general) that the academic and stand-offish way it is taught in college couldn't offer me unless I applied it to my own situation. Am I wrong about this impression?
A more broader question would be : what is the value of teaching, in high school, via means of principles and books rather than via means of textbooks that list facts even for topics like ethics? Is the former approach not replicable by self-study or academic study as opposed to intimate instruction :
i.e.
"Kant said this and this, fill in the blanks" (not exactly rote learning if you understand the vocabulary of what Kant said, but still not fully making the knowledge accessible at a deep, personal level)
as opposed to
"Kant said this and this which can be applied to everyday experiences as the ones we see in these examples; do you agree with Kant et cetera? You should argue in the following lines"
Or for mathematics, even :
"we calculate derivatives like this, solve"
as opposed to
"mathematical concepts have such and such history, they have applications in such and such situations, solving problems is only one part of mathematics"
Or for writing :
"some piece of art symbolizes such and such, so use that symbolism and describe what the picture talks about"
as opposed to :
"some picture is said to symbolize such and such, but why do you think this interpretation is so? can this picture be evaluated differently, and what is your personal significance in it?"
I know these are caricatures, but the gist of the examples is that one system discourages individual thinking and the evaluation of personal experience, replacing them with the concept of "correct knowledge", while the other encourages free association, even if the end-result of that free thinking would result in more or less the same conclusions about some question or topic that is being learned.
This post was deleted for the following reason: This is more a thesis than an answerable question, sorry. -- restless_nomad
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