Five Subjects Schools Ought to Teach

For the past several months, I’ve been tutoring a young man who has been having difficulty in school.  I won’t get into the details, but he’s slowly but surely getting better. However, tutoring him has given me a greater awareness of what schools are teaching kids nowadays, and boy do I disagree with their policies. My views about what ought to be done with these schools are radical – so radical that I feel I cannot publish them online. Nonetheless, I think there are certain tools of the trade that teachers aren’t equipping their students.

While some of these subjects are left out of schools simply because the people running them see them as unimportant, quite a few of these subjects are left out simply because teachers assume parents will be teaching their kids these things. However, so many households have both parents working, leaving no time to teach their kids the good stuff. That is why I wrote a list of five things I believe teachers ought to be teaching kids.

1. Logic

“Logic!” said Professor Kirke, C. S. Lewis’s self-insert from his classic book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” And Lewis would know, seeing how he wrote about the problem with education in his written books and essays. Over half a century later, and this problem persists.

I remember learning a little bit of symbolic logic in math class, but the lessons were brief, presented without any buildup, and had little to do with the rest of the course. Naturally, I had forgotten it by the end of the year, and my grade was no worse for it. Part of the problem, I think, comes from not emphasizing what’s fun and interesting about logic: things like the three laws, how to construct an argument, identifying fallacies, and so on.

Logic is the building block of thinking, the way we organize our thoughts. Logic is required to avoid basic mistakes in our thinking. Logic is also objective – that is, it doesn’t presuppose any particular controversial view of the world. Rather, all worldviews presuppose the objectivity of the laws of logic. The fact that this isn’t taught in our schools is detrimental to our very society. The world of thoughts and propositions interacts with but is not the same as the world of feelings, wishes, and imagination. No matter how you might feel, the law of non-contradiction is just true, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The objectivity of logic has wide-ranging practical implications. For example, politics is given to ad hominem discourse, sentimentality, tribalism, and the like. For the longest time, political commentators aimed at being objective in reporting on it, but no longer. With the rise of social media and ideologies which rationalize the demonization of entire groups of people, many of them have abandoned even the pretense of objectivity. A logical mind can take an ax to most of what is published in mainstream news outlets, left or right. More logically-minded people would lead to a lot less hostility and paranoia springing up, that’s for sure.

2. History

And by “history,” I mean an entire class dedicated to the subject, not this catch-all, miscellaneous “social studies” that gets bandied about. Perhaps I’m biased as a history major, but I don’t think kids are getting as many history lessons as they should be. Or rather, they aren’t getting the right kind of history lessons.

A good history lesson will put the students into the mindset of the people of that time and place. It teaches them that the world they live in has not always existed but developed over a long process. Schools should teach a bit about how people at other times lived and thought and why. Too many people nowadays assume that they have it better than their ancestors. Maybe they’re right, but how would they know that if they don’t study history?

Of course, this isn’t to denigrate learning one’s history. A people without a history are people stranded on a deserted island, ignorant of everything but what exists in the here and now. However, most of the history taught in schools is a simplified, cartoonish narrative. They seem to save some of the interesting parts of history until later when you get into college, and even college professors don’t teach you all the interesting things out there. People should at least be taught to look for and read primary sources, to learn the mindset of people from the past, and understand why people believed what they believe.

As the saying goes, “The past is a separate country.” People need to be taught to avoid being parochial and close-minded. Too often, that leads to bull-headed conflicts and bad decisions that could have been easily avoided had cooler heads prevailed. With understanding comes empathy, and with empathy comes conflict resolution.

3. Self-Control

This might seem like a platitude, but it’s a platitude that is not emphasized enough. So many kids nowadays are told to treat their own emotions like it’s a product of their social environment as if they cannot help but act emotionally. In response, authority figures try to bend over backward to try and control the social environment around the kids, try to make it conform to the child’s sense of safety and self-esteem. Of course, children cannot be expected to control themselves as well as an adult, but what happens when those children grow up? Undoubtedly, the children who never learn to control themselves will grow up into adults who cannot control themselves.

Self-reflection can help with this. When one does wrong, one can learn to reflect on one’s actions and emotions. Children can learn the impact of one’s feelings on others and choose ways of coping with or expressing those feelings. They can be taught exercises that relieve high tension and stress.  They can identify the lines of thought that lead to anger or sadness and learn to control them through focus. None of this involves repressing one’s emotions, but rather learning to channel them in positive, socially-acceptable ways.

4. Classical Philosophy

This is something I began thinking about, but why don’t more schools teach about the history of western philosophy? Or the meaning of life? Or how to have a Socratic dialogue? Classical philosophy is full of answers to some of the most important questions one can have in life, yet school never taught this. Is it because they’re afraid of offending parents? If so, who would be offended by their kids being taught the views of Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant in an academic, kid-friendly way? What’s wrong with getting children thinking about these sorts of big picture questions? I don’t see how it’d hurt them. And you assume you have nothing to learn these great men, that’s because you haven’t read them yet.

5. The Bible

Honestly, I was thinking about leaving this off the list, not because I believe kids don’t need to be taught about it, but because I shudder to think of how badly teachers will treat the issue of the Bible. So much of modern biblical studies is ridiculous. Do we want kids to be taught about Q, Q1, Q2, proto-Matthew, Proto-Luke, and all of the texts that are supposed to exist according to the speculations of historical-critical scholars?

However, I think that it’s worth the risk. Ignorance of the Bible is ignorance of history, literature, ethics, and other fields. The Bible is the biggest-selling book in the history of the world. It had a huge impact on western culture and throughout the world. To be ignorant of it is to be ignorant of what the majority of humanity has also learned for centuries, yet in certain households, the only education or exposure some students will have to the Bible would be in education. That’s why, despite the separation of church and state, public schools should teach kids the Bible.

There are a lot of subjects that I think deserve attention, but these are five of the main ones I believe will help students become well-rounded individuals. This list leans more heavily toward the “liberal arts” though. You won’t find many “practical” or “every day” subjects taught here. That will have to wait until next week’s blog post. However, these skills will free the minds of those who study these subjects and broaden their horizons. It teaches them the goal of life – the pursuit of truth as an end in itself.