I will soon be in responsible for educating a teenager, and I’m a little intimidated by this prospect.
The image to the right? That’s out of a science textbook. My science textbook. When I first went to that school, I was a gifted child with serious ADHD. I don’t know what possessed anyone to think that was a good environment for me. The best teacher I had in my time there was my first grade teacher, who realized she could make me shut the hell up by giving me high school-level math problems to do. She was the only teacher to figure that out, and by the time I had this textbook in fourth or fifth grade I was already resigned to believing that the purpose of school was to deprive young minds of stimulation. As you might imagine, I found it quite a waste of time.
It wasn’t all bad. I mean, most of the class curricula were purchased from Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College, and they were uniformly terrible. But junior and senior year, we had one great class, aptly named “Great Ideas.”
Great Ideas was a survey of mostly philosophical literature deemed culturally important. The textbook was a three-ring binder filled with selections from writers like Plato, Voltaire, Locke, Burke, de Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and Marx — although the favorite was Huxley’s Brave New World. The assignments were simple: Each weekend we’d read the selection for that week. Each day the teacher would present a short news article and we’d discuss it in the context of that week’s reading. The homework for each class was a one-page paper about the article or the discussion.
The purpose of the class was to give us the skills to understand and defend the dominionist worldview the rest of the school imparted upon us. I consider it the first seed of my liberalism.
Of course, I sent my own kid to public school.
By high school, she found it as oppressive as I found my own experience. So last week was her final week in traditional high school. The local school district took over the virtual school from the K-12 scammers, so technically she’ll still be a public school student, but from home. And I want to expand her education to help her reach the infinite potential I see in her.
So that’s where I come to you, dear friends. I’ve long since lost that three-ring binder and I wouldn’t want to exactly duplicate Great Ideas anyway. As you might imagine, it was seriously lacking in discussions of race, gender, and oppression. That leaves me with an interesting conundrum: I view these as indispensable topics for developing a coherent worldview, but I do not have much of a bibliography for where to start to teach someone else.
What belongs in the progressive liberal’s Great Ideas class? Since it’s not the 1990s we’re not limited to books, although if I can also teach reading for pleasure I’m eager to.