Educational Philosophy

At this web site I propose an entirely new curriculum for our students. It does away with the traditional 12 grades and has only four levels of education (pre-school, elementary, middle, and high school). Then the student graduates after his or her eighteenth birthday. I propose this curriculum with our children’s education as its first and only goal.

It is a curriculum that I believe will help all our children obtain an education that will be of benefit to them in their adult years. However, this curriculum is only my opinion on how a school ought to be set up. If someone has an idea of a better curriculum, then that is the course we should all follow.

The purpose of education is to prepare our children for their future and to teach them how to find truth and to achieve justice and peace in their world. This preparation should be all encompassing. That is, this preparation should embrace the major educational philosophies that have been developed. The type of knowledge one considers to be most important should be associated with what one holds to be most valuable.

Many people believe that a better life can be achieved through the social and economic structures people formulate. These people place human centered knowledge (a person’s individual experiences and his or her ability to make decisions) as the most important information to know.

Others see life as a process of getting to know the order and structure of this physical world. They give the utmost importance to knowledge centered on the earth and things of this world.

Still others conceive life to be a process of preparing for a life in the hereafter. They assign knowledge related to the after world as the utmost importance.

Thus, a child’s education should follow the path of progressivism and pursue knowledge of the processes that contribute to the effective decision making by people who address the problems of the present.

A student’s curriculum should pursue a reconstructionist attitude and develop knowledge of what a desirable future should be like and how to obtain such a goal.

It should encompass essentialism, which emphasizes the knowledge that is already well established and operating in the present.

A child’s education should include perennialism – the view that knowledge is eternal – and bring the study of the distinguished writings of the past into the classroom.

Finally, a child’s education should embrace educational existentialism and place emphasis on the self as a primary source of knowledge about life and its meaning.

This should not be seen as a hodgepodge of these philosophies all mixed into one. The road to peace is a long and winding one.

Aristotle says in his Ethics that we must take the “middle road,” and that such a course of action depends on the situation, the person, the place, the time, etc.

I say that we must follow a similar course. I believe that the road to truth, to justice and to peace is sometimes left, sometimes right and sometimes it must be a compromise. It is never always liberal, nor always conservative, nor always a compromise. It must sometimes be liberal, sometimes conservative and sometimes it must be a combination of liberalism and conservatism.

That is, sometimes a child’s curriculum at times must follow progressivism. It must embrace reconstructionism at other times. Then sometimes it must include essentialism or perennialism. Still at other times it must edify existentialism. Thus, it is more of a cafeteria style; a cafeteria where our children will eat at throughout their educational lives.

It is like a cafeteria because there are many philosophies we can follow at various times of our lives. But it is not just choosing a particular philosophy we like guided by our own prejudice. Rather, it is choosing only those courses of action and those philosophies that will bring truth and justice and peace to us, to our children and to our children’s children.

For if we choose the wrong “food,” that is, if we choose to follow an existentialist philosophy when we should be following an essentialist or a perennialist philosophy or some other philosophy, we may find peace and happiness but it will not be a lasting one. Like the seed thrown among the rocky soil, it may sprout out but it will eventually wither and die. Then our children will be right back where we were when we were searching for truth, justice and peace.

The Curriculum