FEE is not quite right on this one

FEE is in my feed of mails, and I find this, with a quote from Carl Sagan given and commented on.

Decades ago, the esteemed American astronomer Carl Sagan talked about how US schools were ruining the minds of our children.

“My experience is, you go talk to kindergarten kids or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. And they ask deep questions. ‘What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?’ These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th grade students and there’s none of that. They’ve become leaden and incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade and it’s not just puberty.”

Sagan doesn’t offer a reason as to why US schools have been failing for so long, but I think the simple answer is that it stems from those in charge of the school systems: the government.

First, I would offer a very different explanation, one which can apply to completely private schools which are not raising teens all that differently.

The raising of people into social beings in some versions involve "peer education" - which can also be considered as bullying, and sometimes takes that exact form.

Having a tutor with your siblings doesn't necessarily have this effect.

Being one of five apprentices of a carpenter - it would depend on the carpenter, just as the effect of the private tutor would depend on the tutor or the parents.

But 12th-graders have been more typically through classes of 25 than of 5. For much of very formative years. A boy of 18 who asks "what is the birthday of the world," is jeered at as an idiot. For not knowing "the answer" that the world has no such thing, since no one was around to record things.

Very unlike the traditional Catholic answer that Adam was made on a March 25, which was the 6th day of the world, making creation itself either March 20th or evening of March 19. If we go to St. Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad Litteram Libri XII, book I, the bishop of Hippo Regia actually deals with the question of time zones (though not under that name) and concludes the creation days have their separateness in the time zone of Jerusalem.

So, however much I'd love to felicitate Sagan to his paedagogic wish of 12th-graders still asking profound questions, I'm afraid his own answer on this and other ones has contributed to silencing of curiosity of the more philosophical bent.

But so has, perhaps even more, the size of classes. It is also a death trap, when school shooters are around. And the amount of time spent in those classes. And - class size again in relation to Carl Sagan's observation - how late that continues in their lives (after puberty).

The mail from FEE had the title "The problem with government schooling" - but apart from them not nailing it, the title suggests there is one problem, rather than very many ones.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre
St. Anthony Maria Zaccaria
5.VII.2023

Cremonae, in Insubria, sancti Antonii-Mariae Zaccaria Confessoris, qui Clericorum Regularium sancti Pauli et Angelicarum Virginum fuit Institutor; atque, virtutibus omnibus et miraculis insignis, a Leone Papa Decimo tertio inter Sanctos adscriptus est. Ejus corpus Mediolani, in Ecclesia sancti Barnabae, colitur.