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[Many people tell me that my suggestion that every U.S. high school student should read at least one complete nonfiction book before graduation is idealistic and impractical. How times have changed since Jefferson's day! Will Fitzhugh] "In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Thomas Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift. Jefferson's plan of book learning was modest compared to the Puritan education of the seventeenth century as advocated by John Milton. The Romantics rejected such advice. They opposed the reading of books as unnatural, as arising from the artificial habits and constraints of civilization. Wordsworth wrote: One impulse from a vernal wood Can teach us more of man Of moral evil and of good Than all the sages can. Emerson claimed that the farm was a better teacher than the school: "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years & and come out at last with a bellyful of words & and do not know a thing...The farm, the farm is the right school...The farm is a piece of the world, the School house is not." John Dewey's lab school, which he started in Chicago in 1896, was based on the conviction that children would learn what they needed by engaging in practical activities such as cooking. Today our schools and colleges of education, the inheritors of these ideas, are still the nerve centers of an anti-intellectual tradition. One of their most effective rhetorical tics is to identify the acquisition of broad knowledge with "rote learning" of "mere facts"--in subtle disparagement of "merely verbal" presentation in books and through the coherent explanations of teachers. Just like Rousseau, Wordsworth and Dewey, our schools of education hold that unless school knowledge is connected to "real life" in a "hands-on" way, it is unnatural and dead; it is "rote" and "meaningless." But nobody advocates rote learning of disconnected facts. Neither Milton nor Thomas Jefferson nor any of their more thoughtful contemporaries who championed book learning advocated rote learning. What they did advocate was the systematic acquisition of broad knowledge. And such knowledge is precisely what it takes to become a good reader." E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006, pp. 9-10 ============ "Teach by Example" Will Fitzhugh [founder] Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007] The Concord Review [1987] Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995] National Writing Board [1998] TCR Institute [2002] 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24 Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA 978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org Varsity Academics® -------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note: All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law. You can prevent most e-mail filters from deleting LM_NET postings by adding LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU to your e-mail address book. To change your LM_NET status, e-mail to: listserv@listserv.syr.edu In the message write EITHER: 1) SIGNOFF LM_NET 2) SET LM_NET NOMAIL 3) SET LM_NET MAIL 4) SET LM_NET DIGEST * Allow for confirmation. * LM_NET Help & Information: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/ * LM_NET Archive: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/archive/ * EL-Announce with LM_NET Select: http://elann.biglist.com/sub/ * LM_NET Supporters: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/ven.html * LM_NET Wiki: http://lmnet.wikispaces.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------