On our Tenth Blogaversary: We are not just aggregate data

It's ironic that the tenth anniversary (blogaversary) of Dewey's Treehouse falls on the same day as the first U.S. Common Core-based standardized testing.

It's ironic partly because this blog has never been all about education, but, in another sense, yes, it is. It's about the past ten years of watching our children experience different sides of home and government education. It's about the growth and changes of the AmblesideOnline curriculum in those ten years, and the ongoing discussions of Charlotte Mason and "subversive teaching." Even when I'm posting about what's for supper, it reminds me that "education is a life."

Last night I finished reading Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, by Martha C. Nussbaum. (Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago.) In vocabulary and in some of her suggested solutions to education issues, Nussbaum does not run along all the same tracks as Charlotte Mason or the Circe Institute. She spends a lot of time discussing the Socratic method, and she has a surprising amount of respect for the current U.S. president, although (even in 2010) she said she did not entirely trust his educational outlook. I think that she's not totally into "dead white (Protestant) guys"; she would prefer a more global and inclusive curriculum. She believes in democracy, in spite of what "Uncle Eric" says about it.

However, when it comes to the need for a more humanizing education, and the consequences if it's lost, I'm right in there with her. Charlotte Mason warned against utilitarian education. Nussbaum warns against allowing education to be controlled by economics. This week, the Truth in American Education website posted this:

"Then the vice-chair of the NGA Education and Workforce Committee said something peculiar.

 “'The Elementary and Secondary Education Act will allow states to align our needs through early education to higher education with the needs of our innovative businesses, developing a stronger workforce development pipeline, expanding opportunity for all of our people and ensuring that students are prepared for success in all phases of life,' said Governor Maggie Hassan (D-NH).

"There you have it.  They believe education is about the needs of our business and not the needs of our children and their families.  It’s not about teaching kids to be well-educated, well-rounded citizens.  Instead education is to be a pipeline for the workforce.  That’s the shift from classical education to workforce development."

A word that Nussbaum uses throughout Not for Profit is "sympathy." In a list of abilities that citizens should have (page 25), she includes "the ability to have concern for the lives of others, to grasp what policies of many types mean for the opportunities and experiences of ones fellow citizens, of many types, and for people outside one's own nation." Next on the list is "the ability to imagine well a variety of complex issues affecting the story of a human life as it unfolds...in a way informed by an understanding of a wide range of human stories, not just by aggregate data." (emphasis mine)

On this day when the success or failure of Common Core will be tested...by computer, no less...let's celebrate sympathy. Let's hold up the failing hands of imagination. Let's have some fun that is funny.

Happy Blogaversary. Climb on up, share some stories, have some cake.