andave's place

Can you help me? What do you think of this paper? How can I fix it? Namely, how can I make it more direct? Are my proofs identifiable?

Throughout the years, the proponents of the two primary methods of education, classical and progressive, have become enemies. Progressives paint the classical method as a mind-numbing regime of information militantly injected into the minds of oppressed children; on the other hand, classical educators view progressivism as a distasteful way of brainwashing children incapable of thinking on their own. Truthfully, they are not as polar as they seem; however, the classical method is inherently more evenhanded than the progressive method. Dorothy L. Sayers delves more deeply into the pedagogy behind the classical method in her speech “The Lost Tools of Learning” and further explains the three stages and how they utilize a child’s development.# Essentially, the classical method uses stages of learning to create a cultured person; the progressive method uses society and its needs to create an educated person. John Dewey, the “Father of Progressive Education,” continually stresses the importance of environment and the need for specialized attention in the development of a child in his book Democracy and Education.2 For Sayers, the purpose of education is to teach man how to learn for himself3; for Dewey, it is to be a good citizen.4 The classical method is superior to the progressive method because it has three comprehensive and even-handed stages as opposed to progressivism’s one, and because it does not ask more of children than they can give, no matter what their age.
The classical method has three stages: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. In the Grammar stage, the young child is primarily concerned with gathering information. At this time, learning by heart is easy; observation and memory are the quickest faculties. At the Grammar stage, students are most receptive to rules, stories, poems, and descriptions, which are the basic building blocks of any and all disciplines.
The Logic stage begins when children have enough background knowledge to realize that things may not be what they seem. It is the fruition of the Grammar stage; analytical thinking wakens, and the middle-grade student becomes interested in the cause and effect of a subject. Sayers strongly urges the introduction of formal logic into the curriculum at this time in a concerted effort to strengthen discursive reasoning. In the Grammar stage the students learn vocabulary; in the Logic stage they learn syntax. Grammar was the first building block, but the Logic stage is the next step.
The Rhetoric stage is the culmination of the two stages. By this time, the student, now close to adulthood, begins to realize that knowledge and experience are insufficient; logic and reason have limitations and cannot entirely explain everything they understand.# Suddenly students will reevaluate the material they had taken for granted in a new light and discover that they have a developing worldview. Appreciation and self-expression can come to the fore, because the student understands that knowledge is not disjointed but connected. Now, he can write and speak vigorously and originally, and begin to specialize in whatever discipline he feels led toward.
The entire classical method works with the student. It develops him through stages roughly corresponding to his own personal growth; beyond that, it teaches a man how to learn, so that he can research a topic and develop an informed opinion on it of his own accord. It makes the child work hard to learn well, but does not expect more of the child than he can give. For a while, it may indeed seem that teachers are merely filling the schoolchildren’s brains, but it is more than that: it is teaching the child how to continue learning throughout life.
According to the father of progressive education, John Dewey, education must be organic and dictated by the needs of society. Therefore, a person is what his environment, his friends, and his society make him.# The education is centered on the child and his experiences through the medium of society; The children are involved in picking the curriculum, and they learn from and learn with one another rather than focusing absolutely on the teacher’s words. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire says that the teacher, rather than having the mindset that he knows everything, should orient himself as a teacher-student. In other words, Freire meant that teachers should not be more than moderators and as such be open to being taught by students, much in the way Socrates did.# Progressivism emphasizes development through interaction and therefore is concerned mostly with empirical knowledge - hands-on projects and experience.
A thorough comparison of the two only brings out one major difference, with many repercussions: the progressive method is essentially just the rhetoric stage of the classical method. Both methods work toward the conclusion of well-educated, cultured people capable of comprehending ideas, but progressivism wants grade-school children to deal with abstract ideas early in their schooling. For the progressives, education starts with experience in order to forge connections between subjects; for the classical educators, education begins with knowledge and leads to experience. In the classical method, the ability to draw relations between subjects comes as a result of knowledge, in classical education. The classical method takes children through stages and does not consider them fully capable of handling the issues and ideas fundamental to humanity until they are able to research, analyze, and form an opinion upon a subject independently, using the foundational blocks of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric to do so. The Progressives see this progression as a flaw of the classical method. Freire calls the traditional method of teaching the “banking method” because throughout the student’s academic career the teacher, learned and unreachable, “deposits” random, unconnected information into the student’s head without teaching him how to use it.# However, the progression of stages is crucial to the student. As mentioned in the rhetoric stage, students that undergo these stages understand that learning builds upon itself.
The Grammar and Logic stages give the student background information to draw from, to draw parallels to, to analyze based from, and to question when faced with new ideas, thus providing the springboard for life-enriching experience. The Progressive method does not provide that sort of background. In education, it expects the child to guess the answers the teacher is looking for by her questions and provides no anchor for the child to use as a base. In life, it gives children the big picture without showing them how to appreciate it, use it, and learn from it; it is like giving a child a book of classical art prints and expecting them to recognize and understand characteristics such as perspective, shadowing, and light. Perhaps the child could discern the meaning of the painting, but the whole impact of the piece would be lost on the child. It is a noble idea, but progressivism simply asks too much of children, almost seeing them as superhumanly able to comprehend issues.# If the education centers around the child’s interests, how does the teacher ensure a well-rounded education? Children just do not know enough for the teacher to work with. Furthermore, if, for example, the child is interested in light, how can one teach him about the spectrum and qualities of light if he cannot even spell his name? Education must build upon itself; one cannot teach a child about the complex theoretical science behind light unless the child knows how to read and write, regardless of whether or not the child is interested in these foundational skills. The classical method of education wants to make people understand and appreciate ideas through a comprehensive education. As Sayers put it, “For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”# Progressive education wants good citizens, and therefore tries to educate the “whole” child - head and heart; it tries to reach just the heart rather than the heart through the mind, as classical education would. Sayers bluntly describes progressively schooled children when she asks, “Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a "subject" remains a "subject," divided by watertight bulkheads from all other "subjects," so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between […] such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?”# By considering the heart and the mind as two distinct spheres, progressive education does not teach these connections. Conclusively, classical education works better; it teaches the student that all aspects of life are interconnected.
However, it cannot be denied that there is some merit to the progressive method. It could even be brilliant, but only for people who have the background information to properly benefit from using the progressive method. Ideally, students would be taught with the classical method up through the first two years of college, or until they finish their general education. After that point, which would coincide with the rhetoric stage, the students could be taught with the progressive method. With the background material instilled through the years of Grammar and Logic, students will be able to follow the Progressive method much more smoothly. They will be able to question the new things they learn; they will be able to learn from and with their fellow students, they will even be able to interact on a deeper, more adult level with their teachers, if only because the students themselves will be able to carry themselves more maturely.
The progressive method can be used by blending it into the classical method. The classical method is certainly more balanced in that it provides background through the three stages of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric; however, if a classically trained student delves into progressive higher education, he will benefit from it more than an elementary student who does not have the necessary background to interpret ideas through a progressive focus, which tends toward the development by interaction and toward the good of society over the individual. The two methods are indeed different, but the goal is essentially the same, only seen through different glasses: well-educated people capable of comprehending and appreciating ideas. As Milton said, “The end then of Learning is to repair the ruines of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.”#

The # symbols are supposed to be footnotes, but those didn't copy.