Being a teacher is rewarding and I enjoy most things about my profession. But being a teacher in a Christian school always gets people to ask, “Why don’t you work in public school? You’d make better money.” First of all, this is true although more money more problems because there’s a lot of politics involved in public schools. Also, no teacher public/private/parochial decides to go into teaching for the money. Let’s be honest.
At the turn of the twentieth century, this book, Education published that was purposed as a raison d’etre for Christian education as well as what any teacher should strive to achieve in his/her classroom. A lot has changed in education since 1903, and when I started reading this I figured a lot of it wouldn’t be relevant to today’s educators. While there was a lot that has been deemed inapplicable due to history and social change, there was more that is still relevant that I suspected.
One of the challenges the author proposes is that teachers know each of their students personally so that they can connect material to the students’ interests and abilities. Today we call this differentiated instruction. Besides that pedagogical title, most teachers worth their salt get to know their students personally. And as students we all remember those teachers best who got to know us.
Another feature that we keep talking about in our society but aren’t doing anything about is the importance of physical education. We all know the studies that childhood obesity is rising at alarming rates. Yet, across the country, schools are being forced to cut physical education programs and recess. Scary to think that even in 1903 people thought it was important to have recess and yet here we are, more “advanced” and we’re cutting it like nobody’s business.
I wouldn’t recommend this read unless you’re really looking for a book on Christian education and are ok with archaic language. For me it was good only because it exceeded my already low expectations.