Give Me That Old Time Education
Apparently it is true that there is “nothing new under the sun” relating to education. Some of the oldest tried and true methods are still among the most effective.
Fundamental Ideas
Our founding fathers believed that education and ethical behavior was vital to the survival of their new nation. Books used for well over a century in the United States embedded moral lessons into the fundamentals of reading, "riting, and "rithmetic.
Somewhere along the way, it became popular to push the limits of acceptable behavior. Ethical lessons using human behavioral examples fell out of vogue, replaced by whimsical stories in flashy readers with lots of white space. After quite a number of years and a multitude of “new” ideas and educational movements, some families find they are gravitating back to methods and books from a century ago.
Available Again
Interestingly, the movement toward homeschooling has helped fuel the momentum of back-to-basics education. Traditional classrooms are banned from all but a few expensive state-approved reading series with accompanying workbooks. Competition for state approval is a high-stakes game played by huge educational publishing houses. Teachers, students, and parents have little influence on what is taught in any given classroom.
Parents who are not comfortable with publishing houses choosing what is taught to their children are dropping out of the game. They just pull their students out of the traditional classroom setting and assume that educational responsibility themselves. In their quest to find curriculum, they have discovered that an investment of about a hundred dollars provides quite an effective K-12 curriculum of language arts and math using old methods and books.
Demand for McGuffy readers and Ray's Arithmetic series has become so intense that they are back in print. Other tried-and-true methods using research-based lessons from long ago, such as Samuel Orton's phonemes, are back in use.
The New “Old”
Diagrammed sentences, phonics-based reading, and moralistic stories completed by students at a kitchen table overseen by parents seems line a scene from bygone days. In fact, it is a scene taking place today in homes all over our country. It's enough to make the Reverend McGuffy proud.
