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Greatly enjoyed the talk. But, really, taking what he's doing to the limit (he even says so himself) is just re-creating the Socratic method. (Though choosing
by cpr 17y ago
Greatly enjoyed the talk.
But, really, taking what he's doing to the limit (he even says so himself) is just re-creating the Socratic method. (Though choosing the questions is hard work, as he notes.)
And he can't do that, given his large class sizes (one of my classes at Harvard was 700+ people, Ec 101 with Samuelson from MIT), so he uses this peer-teaching approach to work around the limitation that he can't sit down with a small group of them and work through the questions.
That's why we are sending some of our home-educated kids (those that show the interest in and capacity for a rather intense education) to Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, CA.
It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses (each no larger than 17 people), with no electives all 4 years, outside of St. John's of Annapolis/Santa Fe (on which TAC is modeled to some degree).
http://www.thomasaquinas.edu http://www.thomasaquinas.edu for those interested.
(Yes, it's an unabashedly Catholic school, but that doesn't diminish the intellectual rigor in the least. It's also in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, in the foothills of the mountains north of LA, near Ojai, which is where the 50's film "Shangri-La" was made and which is still a spa/resort area today.)
- jbellis 17y ago> It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses nice > each no larger than 17 people good > with no electives all 4 years wait, wtf? I guess if their curriculum works for your kids, great, but one-size-fits-all isn't a straitjacket I would have been interested in post-high school.
- tokenadult 17y agoPhillips Exeter Academy http://www.exeter.edu/ http://www.exeter.edu/ arguably has a more discussion-oriented approach to learning, definitely has smaller classes, and has a rich supply of elective classes. And it's for high school-age students rather than for college-age students. We are also a homeschooling family, but we thought long and hard about sending our oldest son to Exeter (which also has great financial aid) before continuing to homeschool him. We may revisit the issue of how to do secondary education with each of our other three children. Our oldest is now applying for colleges--every college on his application list is a research university with strong programs in mathematics and computer science (and, yes, lots of elective course possibilities).
- stcredzero 17y agoA little exposure to the "Lord of the Flies" might be good seasoning, provided he's been given a few psychic defense lessons ahead of the time. (I was thrown into the boarding school situation with no defenses at all and had to cook up my own. A little guidance would've been worth a lot.)
- zackattack 17y agoCan you please elaborate about "psychic defense lessons" ?
- stcredzero 17y agoI was very sheltered. I didn't know that I was allowed to swear, tell jokes, or disagree with someone else before I got there.
- tokenadult 17y agoWas "there" a school like Exeter or some other boarding school?
- stcredzero 17y agoMilitary Academy
- blasdel 17y agoGoing to Exeter would have taught him more about socialization than anyone could have by homeschooling.
- tokenadult 17y agoThere's nothing invariant about homeschooling as practiced by all families who practice it that guarantees not learning about social interaction. Homeschooling can be a very good environment for socialization. http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html
- ubernostrum 17y agoI'm actually quite a fan of the "one curriculum" approach (and schools which implement it seem to produce more successful graduates, on average). One of these days I even plan to write up why (and then get piled on for suggesting that there were some good things about the "medieval" university system).
- ashley 17y agoI'm more familiar with St. John's College, as I dreamed of attending had not the cost been so prohibitively high. http://www.sjca.edu/ http://www.sjca.edu/ But the one-track curriculum is based off the trivium and quadrivium of medieval education, where you don't have electives but regardless, you get a well-rounded education because they're preparing you to think and inquire. So every student studies Greek, Latin, French, Western classical music, mathematics from the source (like Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia), physics from the source, chemistry, history, etc. No modern textbooks rehashing information, so theoretically, no passive learning. So this curriculum isn't really a straitjacket. The one downside is that you're not getting a very multicultural or contemporary view, given that you're reading the Western canon largely pre-World War II. But it's not such a big problem if you again realize that the idea with this education is that you're being trained not in subjects but in the ability to go out and find what you don't know in the classroom on your own and to discuss these new ideas with other people.
- jerf 17y agoI think there's some significant innovation in scaling the Socratic method here. I do not think it is clear a priori that such a thing is even possible.
- tokenadult 17y agoLaw schools with very large class sizes indeed claim to practice "socratic" instruction, which I found quite enjoyable as a student. Classicists think it's an abuse of language to call what law schools do socratic dialog, but it is definitely much more interactive, even in the largest first-year classes, than what is usually done in undergraduate courses in almost any subject other than modern languages.