Have You Thought About Our Schools Lately?
Primary and secondary schools are not only places where children go to learn. They are events where the world drafts its future leaders.
Primary & Secondary Schools
In education institutions around the world, millions of children gather to receive instruction in mathematics, science, language, literature, history, and the arts. They are given assignments, asked questions, and tested on each of the subjects they are taught.
Our School’s Secondary Function
One of the goals of this process is to evaluate and observe the child’s learning progress. The other goal is to identify bright and gifted students. The school’s administration, acting on behalf of the world at large, look for students with high Intelligence Quotients (IQs). They want the students who are veracious readers and are capable of handling heavy workloads.
The Great Conversation
Once they identify these children, they separated them from the others; they introduce them to what is called ‘The Great Conversation’. The ‘The Great Conversation’ is where the children read and discuss what is known as ‘The Great Books of Western Civilization’ or ‘The Harvard Classics’. The thinking being, as Descartes stated, “The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.”
It is an opportunity for the children to become better thinkers by interacting with the “best thinkers”.
The Goal
From these hardworking, intelligent, and diligent students, society hopes to select its local, national, and global leaders for our businesses, civilian-government, and military.
The Other Students
The less talented, non-gifted, and gifted-underachieving students, on the other hand, are excluded from ‘The Great Conversation’. They are deemed as not interested, unwilling, or incapable of handling the conversation and or the workload. So, they are given a synthesized version of The Great Works. Instead of reading Locke, Hume, and Swift, they read summaries of their works. The summaries provide the reader with the general idea…enough to make him/her useful in society.
Conclusion
Looking at the world from this perspective, you can see that our sports leagues and beauty pageants are not the only institutions recruiting students. What do you think?
