day no. 17,468: experiments in education

"In this age of child-psychology nobody pays any attention to the actual psychology of the child. All that seems to matter is the psychology of the psychologist and the particular theory or train of thought that he is maintaining against another psychologist. Most of the art and literature now magnificently manufactured for children is not even honestly meant to please children. At best they are meant to please the child-lover. At the worst they are experiments in scientific educational method." — G.K. Chesterton,  Child Psychology and Nonsense

It is one thing to consider how kids think and it is quite another to consider how you think kids ought to think. The first is merely observing the lay of the land, the second is landscaping. I point this out, not to imply that landscaping itself is a problem, but to point out that those who do it should have the integrity to be honest about it. 

God has called parents to shape their children's affections and conceptions. This is landscaping. It is pruning and trimming back and shaping a mind in a particular direction and for a particular purpose. That is all good and glorious and just as God intended. 

What the modern psychologist does is project his or her own idea of what he or she thinks children ought to be like into the child. It is not an objective study of the subject, but an invasive injection of a foreign object. They claim to be hands off and yet they meddle. Their dishonesty is, however, only half the problem. The other half is what they project onto the child. They anachronistically accuse the child of ideas only adults have. They read back into childhood that which the observer is experiencing in adulthood.

"Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea." — G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

In many cases the child is more experienced than the model he is expected to submit to. The ideas on the child's head are older than the theory he is being asked to consider. Modern educators see themselves as experts and our children as their test subjects. Instead of teaching subjects like math, science, etc... to our children, they experiment on our children like they are subjects.