BY TARU TAYLOR

In print | Published October 21, 2004

Let seven-years-old be the age of reason, when every sane person can calculate cause and effect. Let thirteen be the age when every sane boy or girl becomes a man or a woman. Let seven to thirteen, as the years between childhood and adulthood, be adolescence, which, at bottom, is training and dress rehearsal for adulthood. I beseech the reader to willingly suspend his disbelief regarding these postulates, which are based on thousands of years of accumulated wisdom. The Catholic Church describes seven as the “age of reason.” Jewish “bar mitzvah” and “bat mitzvah”, the rites of passage into manhood and womanhood, take place at thirteen and twelve, respectively. Before the 19th century and John Dewey, children were “little adults.”

Reason pertains to the capacity to calculate cause and effect, to finesse ethical judgment and to take moral responsibility, regardless of cultural and religious context. The Catholic Church defines the “age of reason” as the age when God begins to hold every person morally responsible. Our more general definition is the age when every person is morally responsible because he is capable of logical thought.

Therefore, the seven-year-old is a rational agent to be debated with as with an adult, not condescended to as a kid. Every teacher should treat his students as fellow interlocutors. School should not be a 13- to 22-year socialization process. Teachers should not treat students as a mass of human resources to socially engineer into managers, technicians, mechanics and fast food or department store clerks. School should be voluntary, for the compulsory school is a six-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week, nine-month-a-year prison. Its teachers are prison wardens engaged in classroom management. Even the elite private schools and universities are mostly country club prisons.

Every person should be allowed to pass from grade to grade at his own pace, but no social promotion as if in a factory. If an eight-year-old adolescent can do calculus, why not twelfth-grade math? If a ten-year-old adolescent can read “Hamlet” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, why not twelfth grade English? If a 16-year-old man cannot do basic arithmetic, why not first-grade math? If a 20-year-old woman can not read a front-page article of The New York Times, why not sixth-grade English?

The proper role model for every teacher is Socrates. The test of time has proven the Socratic method as the root of democracy. The teacher who emulates Socrates sees every student as an individual to be persuaded by careful reasoning and disciplined inquiry. He asks good questions and encourages his students to ask good questions and persuade him in turn. The Socratic method teaches students to think through to their own conclusions. Current pedagogy gives students multiple-choice questions that ask them to choose among ready-made conclusions based on propaganda and political correctness.

If Socrates was about developing mental discipline and independent thought, Dewey, the archetype of the American teacher, was about socialization and conformity. Based on the blueprints of the Dewey method, the vast majority of America’s schools, public and private, are about social engineering, not intellectual development. If the ideal teacher is like Socrates, most American teachers are like Nurse Ratched of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

The original university degree was the licentia docendi (“license to teach”) of medieval Europe. To know a discipline well enough to teach it was to know it well enough to qualify for a diploma, whether or not one actually decided to teach. The Middle Ages did not have the sham of education degrees and diploma mills otherwise known as “schools of education.” To understand a discipline deeply is to understand it as a method of inquiry — even math, which has its share of controversies and paradigm shifts. Thus, to qualify as a teacher for a school or university modeled after the Platonic academy is to know a discipline well enough to teach it by the Socratic method. How many of our teachers and professors qualify? Are they and their students fellow interlocutors? Or are they dictators, their students stenographers? Do they respect adolescents as little adults? Or do they patronize them as kids? If democracy is based on the rational agency of the now and future citizen, how democratic are we?

Taru Taylor is a senior. You can reach him at ttaylor1@swarthmore.edu.

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