You can play the Education for the Aughts Podcasts by clicking on the triangular ‘play’ button on the player below [at the bottom of the post if you’re reading this in RSS] - it will expand and begin streaming audio. Alternatively, you can download an mp3 file of the podcast to listen in your own media player. You can also download a PDF of “The Future of Teaching: The Molding of Men” for reference.

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I asked a simple question in late January: Do you know William Arrowsmith? Here’s a graphic of the results:

This site’s readership is largely college educated, and those who aren’t ed-school grads [or didn’t attend college at all] are still hyper-aware of education theory. They’re teachers, concerned parents and employees in K-12 and university-level institutions.

And almost none have come across William Arrowsmith, an education theorist, classicist and master teacher. To demonstrate how few educators today look to Arrowsmith’s work, Google his name. You’ll see that my poll is the 5th result and has little competition.

I decided to open my podcast series with a reading of Arrowsmith’s 1967 piece, “The Future of Teaching: The Molding of Men.” Though four decades old, it speaks to most of the issues I read about daily on both blogs and old media. He touches on many pertinent subjects including:

• Relevance - what it really means and why it matters; comparing his words to the present shows us how egregiously educators have betrayed this concept.
• The purpose of education - how seemingly irrelevant topics make our lives better.
• Technology - though implicit in his argument, Arrowsmith demonstrates the folly of focusing on empty process at the expense of content.
• Teaching and teachers - how many of our teachers both in 1967 and today are anything but.

ADDITIONAL READING:

William Arrowsmith: A Recollection, by James W. Tuttleton, The New Criterion, 1994.

William Arrowsmith, William Harris, Middlebury College.

The Myth of the Superhuman Professor, Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University.

A handful of translations/books available via Amazon.