A Good Foundation

By Bobby Neal Winters

The phrase back to the basics gets used a lot in education.  It’s a nice phrase to use.  It’s hard to disagree with.  But then it gets messy when you start asking what the basics are.

Yep.  What are they?

I don’t know.  However, let me come back with a phrase that, while it rolls less trippingly off the tongue, it is easier for me to defend intellectually. 

The foundation you lay for learning will shape the learning that comes afterwards.

It is a good metaphor, a good foundation for an essay, as it were. Rock solid.  Let’s build on it.

Children do need the “three Rs,” of course, reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic.  That should go without saying.  I’ll say it anyway.  But if that is the be-all and end-all that kills the imagination.

Children are natural learning machines. (I am not fond of the “machines” metaphor for children; if it’s still there in the final draft you will know I just couldn’t come up with a better one.) When they are left to play on their own, they engage in some of the best learning they can do: They pretend.  

Pretending builds imagination.  Imagination builds not only creativity, but problem solving.  They learn to think things through.  A lot of this happens on the playground.  They get together in groups and make up their own games.  They learn things from each other.

Time spent in free-play in the school yard is not wasted.

I will also make a case for art.  By this I mean the kind of art taught in kindergarten and the lower grades.  There should be more of it.  It should be extended up the grades.  It is basic.

And I am not being an elitist here.  Far, far from it. I am not talking about turning out a bunch of Picassos or Georgia O'Keefes. 

No.

Doing art work forces you to plan things out.  It’s not just some people can draw, some people can sculpt, some people can do whatever.  There are techniques you can learn.  You learn to break things down into doable steps.  And, as I said earlier, it forces you to learn to plan your artwork out.

And--this bit is key--when you are done, you can see with your own eyes how it all came out. It either works or it doesn’t.

This is coming from someone who never took art after kindergarten.  By living, I’ve come to appreciate that the craft it takes to produce a work of art is transferable both intellectually and vocationally.

A pithy phrase to use here would be “Don’t take art out of school and complain that your workman does ugly work.”

I get to this point, and I notice that so far I’ve concentrated on the skills.  Skills are foundational for everything else.  If you are good enough at reading, you can just go ahead and teach yourself a lot of things. 

And I can write about them with some idea of having a receptive audience because having skills is not controversial. No one was ever annoyed because his kid learned algebra or learned to glue two pieces of wood together.

The skills are not the problem.

It is how we teach the application of the skills where the problem comes in.  The most basic skill, reading.  Everybody agrees we teach our children how to read.

But what are you teaching them to read, eh?  Aye, there’s the rub.  

On one hand, demographics are trending to where a smaller percentage of our population will have Anglo heritage so why teach them through the writing of “dead white men.” On the other hand, if we leave out the writing of dean white men, they can’t appreciate the fact that I quoted Shakespeare in the previous paragraph, and that is very important to me.

We’ve got problems, and we haven’t even started talking about history yet. It’s one of the most important things to know to be a good citizen, but, golly, it is a mind field.  But it is a good venue in which to improve your skills in reading, thinking, synthesizing, and writing.

So let’s do this.  Let’s do the best we can at laying a good foundation for learning--and I am not kidding about art and recess--and just fight about the rest of it forever and ever. 

That is a useful skill too, especially in a democracy.

Let us now use our skills to imagine what we can do to help our school systems teach our children.  They are going to be running the show before too much longer.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.