Anti-Socialization And Classical Schooling

Regular readers of this blog are well aware of my scorn for "socializing" propaganda. I've slammed Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's push for all-day kindergarten which was justified as a boost to 5 year-olds' social skills. I also have posted that inane commercial that insists playing with blocks will put your toddler on the social fast track. I've even Marginalized a friend who day-cared their dog to improve its "social skills".

So perhaps you'd like to read someone else's articulation on this subject:



In September 1974, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott delivered the Abbott Memorial Lecture at Colorado College. Entitled "A Place for Learning," Oakeshott’s lecture attacked the dominant model of education, a model predicated on the theories of the American educationist John Dewey. Learning, Oakeshott observed, should take place under "conditions of direction and restraint designed to provoke habits of attention, concentration, exactness, courage, patience, and discrimination"; but schools shaped by Dewey had instead become arenas of "childish self-indulgence," "experimental activity," "discovery," and "group discussions." Oakeshott was especially scornful of the notion that education’s purpose was "socialization," which could only turn the child into a compliant little cog in the machine of commerce and industry. "The design to substitute ‘socialization’ for education," he argued, was "the momentous occurrence of this century, the greatest of the adversaries to have overtaken our culture, the beginning of a dark age devoted to barbaric affluence."

In other lectures and writings, Oakeshott elaborated a positive vision of education. Education should initiate the student into a "historic inheritance or 'culture,'" which Oakeshott imagined as a multi-voiced conversation. Scientific, historical, philosophical, and poetic voices contribute, each voice expressing "a distinct . . . understanding of the world and a distinct idiom of human self-understanding." Education enables the student to participate in the "endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure" of that conversation. Liberal education is "above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship, and thus to make our debut dans la vie humaine." Since education is the "distinguishing mark of a human being," replacing education with "socialization" is fundamentally dehumanizing. True education is an initiation into our full humanity. It is not so much a leading-out as a passing-on of the skills necessary to participate in culture. True education is really traducation.



Here's the link to the rest of the article. What I've posted above is most of what's said on "socialization". The rest of the article is more focused on the particulars of a classical education. Make sure you read the whole article. Remember, learning, if it began at all, shouldn't end at age 22. It's a lifelong process.

Retired learners can still function in society, BUT soon enough they'll be discombulated by something as simple as a remote control, a cell phone, or whatever the future analogues may be.

The reason these 'old coots' can't deal with technology is NOT their age - it's their so-called education and their status as lapsed-learners.