The "Core Four": A critique of the homogenization in schools
Human beings have a very complex method of communication.
I have been studying languages for about around 16 years of my life (for those of you keeping track at home that is since elementary school). While the concept of becoming bilingual is fairly uncommon at a young age, many schools do not offer foreign language classes until middle school, it is still an experience that I can say I thoroughly enjoyed and lead me to a lot of new experiences that studying a subject outside of what I call the “Core Four” subject areas. I call them this due to the general emphasis that these subjects have in creating a more-or-less mandatory curriculum path that leads from an early age all the way to graduating high school. High school graduation is generally seen as the baseline in terms of evaluating the quality of labor, or the intelligence of a peer.
So what are the “Core Four?”
Generally in the United States, it is math, science, social science, and… English? Reading? Writing?
English may be what most would be tempted to say, and sure most people have fond memories of reading English and American literature, writing papers about the themes of The Tempest or some other Shakespearean work. Schools are probably one of the biggest weapons the modern world has against illiteracy. Yet it is my opinion that the effects of these courses on our youth is a bit underwhelming.
Let’s look at how all the other pillars behave, and then circle back to the last one.
Math
Math education is fairly linear. (If you took that as a math joke then kudos to you.)
Before you can do any operations whatsoever, it is necessary to teach about the nature of numbers. Counting is a good way to do this. Next is adding (two apples plus three apples is five apples), then subtracting (five apples minus four apples is one apple (thanks government)). Usually multiplication is taught as repeated addition, division is repeated subtraction. Then algebra comes in. If you had 5 apples but now you only have one, how many got taken away? Factoring, graphing, fractions galore. Geometry comes in and suddenly everyone says SOHCAHTOA and suddenly coordinates on a unit circle are memorized and angles aren’t written in degrees and there’s a lot of pi everywhere and formulas upon formulas. Eventually there is a split, but given that many people reading this write now forget how to convert an angle from degrees to radians, I think it is safe to say that the foundations of counting are solid and tangible, while for many people there’s a falling out right around the “A” word, both “F” words (along with a lot of reciting of the most popular “F” word in English), and then it becomes a matter of “When am I gonna use this?”
The answer to which may be tackled in another day.
Point is though, if you were told by someone that they didn’t go through math in school, then odds are they didn’t go to school at all.
Science
Ah, the sexy cousin of math. Science is probably the subject that appeals most to the logically inclined due to how it serves the human craving for knowledge very well. Ask a question, make observations, perform an experiment, gather data, tell everyone what you found. People do science everyday, just like how people do math everyday. Science has some bonus points for not being as linear as math. Do you need chemistry to know biology? Sure, it may help if you wanted to be a doctor, but people don’t train to be doctors in high school. Do people need to know chemistry to be good at physics? Again, may be helpful to know chemistry if one was to be physicist, but it is not necessary.
This pillar seems to be rather diverse, and more horizontal overlap exists here than in mathematics. Like running a business, it is helpful to have a lot of different lenses to evaluate how the business is performing, marketing, supply chain, finance, management. In the grand scheme of science, it is just finding out how anything works, chemically, physically, biologically, mechanically etc.
Social Science
Social science acknowledges the uniqueness of mankind and studies how it works. It is difficult to study this from the beginning, though, so it is wise to pick a recent-ish time and start from there.For Americans, it has traditionally been when peoples crossed a land bridge around where the Bering Strait is. Generally though, it eventually gets condensed to a national history course (usually of the home country) and a world history course. Then these classes can get pretty abstract, going into civics, economics, sociology and psychology. These are more of the science in the social science. Sure, there is some horizontal overlap, between these areas, but there’s A LOT of depth within each field as well that is seemingly endless or otherwise contradictory.
This pillar is where things start to become less observation-based and more personally based. Up until now, the education was in understanding the outside world while removing the human aspect from the picture. Humanity is not required for math and science, as two butterflies plus one butterflies is still three butterflies (as a human would interpret seeing), and the melting point of mercury is still below normal room temperature.
Social science still has elements of science in it, but the blur between social science and other subject areas create a large part of liberal arts. But that is a completely separate idea from what it is now, as liberal arts colleges existed since the Middle Ages.
Language
Finally, the titular pillar. Language is entirely human, and it is a stimulus that will always have a bias. It has to have one. Language was created to communicate a wide variety of messages from person to person. The languages that human beings speak are quite variable, and through the study of linguistics one can see just how arbitrary language is.
What is red? Can you name something that is red? Can you describe it? This task is extremely difficult to do descriptively. Most people know what the color red is because we are shown examples of red objects, and are to recognize that apples are red. Blood is red. Rubies are red. But how would I know if you see the same red I do? As of right now, anyway, it is impossible to record what the eye sees and re-create it like a capture card of some sort.
The key of that previous paragraph was how language is inherently socialized into us because human beings have a craving to learn to mimic society and have an inherent need to belong (at least as children).
How much of this did you learn in high school?
I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody even gave it a thought, but as was mentioned earlier, literacy is one of the primary reasons why education is seen as commonplace. It is as social of a subject area as one can get.
Language in our schools
If you ever are bored one day, look up state standards for all the various subject areas you are interested in. The one thing that jumps out is the amount of content. Students are to write papers that will be read once and then likely forgotten about. This is a common problem throughout becoming academically integrated into society. An academic knows a lot of things. Being smart means that you know a lot of things.
I can see the view that the reason why schools require young adults to know the definition of situational irony, to know what the powerhouse of the cell is, to know Pythagorean theorem, and to know the Axis Powers in World War II, is to shoot a shotgun of facts and information at children and hoping something sticks so that the person would understand more about themselves to determine what they can develop themselves to become. The reality of shotguns is that most of the time it destroys the entirety of what you were trying to imprint. Schools have become places where people are stamped like:
STUDENT NUMBER 428026 RECEIVES GRADE B+ FOR SUBPAR UNDERSTANDING OF THE SYMBOLS IN TARTUFFE
STUDENT NUMBER 428027 RECEIVES GRADE F FOR FAVORING READING AUTO REPAIR MANUAL FOR ENGINEERING STUDIES WHEN TARTUFFE WAS ASSIGNED TO TEACH SUBJECT ABOUT DARK HUMOR DURING THE AGE OF FRENCH INDEPENDENCE
STUDENT NUMBER 428029 RECEIVES GRADE A FOR MEMORIZING A PERIODIC TABLE WITHOUT A REFERENCE THAT ANYONE CAN CALL UP WITHIN MINUTES USING MODERN TECHNOLOGY
Language Re-explored
As was alluded to earlier, I have been learning more than one language throughout my time in the public school system. I was fortunate enough to not only understand the language I speak in my community, but also another language that I don’t speak regularly in my community. It may seem like that this additional language is just more of the regurgitation that many people experience in school. Yes at times it was, but I also learned something valuable during this time. I learned two languages at about the same time. At one point I had even still started learning a third language, and while I studied it for 2 years, I still understand enough of the fundamentals as to how languages worked to become confident in the main goal of the fourth pillar, communication.
This experience is different from other forms of what I’ll call parallel education due to the social role language has in the lives of people. Sure English was always my strongest language, but I realized more about grammatical structure, how the structures of sentences can convey various messages.
While one can become more of a craftsman and start looking at advanced practices in a field of study, it is difficult to be convinced of the importance to deconstruct the simple things people often take for granted.
Things getting more difficult in the school system is often introducing concepts that require more pre-requisite knowledge to understand. The amount of real learning is ultimately left to the individual student. If they are lucky, the interest that individual holds is within the “Core Four” pillars. What about those who’s main interest is not in the “Core Four”?
Benchmarking
Elementary and middle school teachers usually do not teach more than one grade, so they can adjust their curriculum around the presumption that certain standards were met previously in prior classes. An eighth grade teacher doesn’t have to worry about if a child knows how to add fractions in their class and can operate under the assumption that they can.
Except oops they can’t.
The reality is that people learn at different rates, so organizing a school system in a manner such as age, which sounds intuitive enough, is actually quite boring for the student at best and frustrating at worst. It may be more worthwhile to have some other form of matchmaking student with content pool.
Content Pool’s closed
Any attempt to learn something outside of the main content pool must be considered as “extra work”. Little Jimmy wants to write a novel? That has to be a hobby. Little Susie wants to learn more about the human body? You’ll get to that in ninth grade, for now you need to a project about magnets.
School should be exploratory to fulfill the needs of society.
The age of information has both made information incredibly abundant and incredibly valuable, which is a bit of a paradox. Yet it is true! School is no longer the place to learn a wide variety of content, and while I have pressured in the past the importance of being a generalist, youth no longer need a good portion of what schools offer to thrive in society. What they need to thrive can only be reached at an individual level.
Bare-bones studies like the study of numbers, words, languages, the environment, and current events are not the problem. Foundations are important! But the other areas are severely neglected, like the arts, music, engineering, business, programming and foreign languages.
They are hobbies. Except as an adult they can translate into skills and unique information.
Creating additional obligation around hobbies makes it not seem like work. Then when it becomes work (as is the definition of being a professional), it is surprising how quickly one can burn out and hate what they used to love. That is due to the inherent stigma of hobbies as an escape, or a personal art form.
There is no room for personal exploration in the current school system.
