Jul 15, 2025 Society
Bored yet by millennial parents’ brunchtime chatter about which primary school is best for little Isla and Noah, or secondary school for Jack and Olivia? English philosopher John Maynard Keynes said that even the most practical among us are “usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. Though they are mostly unaware of it, the school-angsting parents are no less slaves to defunct philosophers.
The first question unknowingly backgrounding their debates is whether there’s anything to teach in the first place. The most radical constructivists — popular with baby boomer hippies in the 1960s — argue there’s no objective knowledge anyway. There’s no point in your kids being taught a body of knowledge about science, history or even maths, or being instructed in a particular canon of literature, music or other arts, because there is no such thing. Instead, they should be encouraged to explore the world and construct their own knowledge. Gen X might associate the idea with Metro in the 1980s — the defunct alternative high school Auckland Metropolitan College, not the magazine.
Against the constructivists are the objectivists. At their most extreme, they don’t just say it’s a fact that 8 x 7 = 56, but also that what constitutes water, and caused World War II, and whether the Ockham Book Awards were rightly decided, can be factually determined. The role of teachers is to drum this knowledge into their students, starting with rote learning in primary school and cramming for three-hour exams thereafter. Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire mocked it as the “banking model of education” — your children are empty piggy banks into which teachers deposit their knowledge. An anti-capitalist, Freire surely enjoyed his pun. It’s the style of education associated with the old grammar schools.
But just as you won’t find any constructivist extremists at today’s Western Springs College, you won’t find any objectivist-ultras at Auckland Grammar School either. It’s more the emphasis contemporary schools place on handing down a body of knowledge, compared with encouraging students to be more creative; what foundations they need first, on which to build their own ideas. The stereotypical conservative says you’ll be a better creative writer if you learn spelling and some grammar first. The cliché liberal says you’ll learn spelling and grammar the more you are encouraged to write creatively. They’re probably both right.
A second big question is related: how much knowledge are we born with, if any, and how reliable is it? Are we blank slates, as John Locke believed, having to learn or be taught everything from the external world? Or are we born with at least some innate predispositions, as his fellow Englishman Thomas Hobbes argued back?
American psychologist Steven Pinker suggested in his 2002 bestseller, The Blank Slate, that both are important, but leaned towards Hobbes. Other mammals, like horses, are born knowing how to do things like stand and walk without being shown. Pinker’s colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky — better known for his political activism — argued human children are similarly born with an innate universal grammar.
His evidence includes that they seem to make the same mistakes when particular languages have unexpected twists. This is why it is so difficult to learn irregular verbs. It’s called a “virtuous error” when kids invariably think, not unreasonably, that the past tense of ‘go’ is ‘go-ed’, rather than ‘went’. Almost universally, children can instinctively apply the regular rules they pick up so naturally, and then need to learn the exceptions.
If Pinker, Chomsky and Hobbes are right, then your child can often generate knowledge for her- or himself, like ‘birds’ being the plural of ‘bird’, so maybe a liberal school is best. On the other hand, they’ll still have to be instructed in the S-rule initially, and also that ‘media’ is the plural of ‘medium’ and ‘Māori’ the plural of ‘Māori’, even when they’re adopted into English from Latin and te reo, so maybe you’ll need to buy that King’s or Dio blazer after all.
A third question concerns discipline and moral education. Are children born little darlings, at risk of corruption by social norms? Or are they inherently monsters, requiring civilisation?
Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought the former. In his account, the pubescent Jack and Olivia really were as perfect as you thought 12 years ago. It’s society that has taught them that sneer. “Man is born free,” Rousseau reckoned, “and everywhere he is in chains.” Poor Jack and Olivia just need to go to a liberal secondary school to be set free again and become the lovely kids they were the day they were born.
Hobbes disagrees. Without civilisation, human nature will make life “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. Little Isla and Noah should go to a strict primary school to be taught what is right and wrong, and how to fit in with society, which will tame them. No less a figure than Socrates thought that once someone is taught that something is wrong and understands why, it’s impossible for them to willingly do it. Teach your kids why they shouldn’t start vaping, he would have opined, and they never will.
Socrates was an absent father, too busy with work to get to know his three children.
As in most things, Aristotle is probably your best bet. He says that Isla, Noah, Jack and Olivia were all born with differing propensities to do right and wrong and different abilities to learn, and it’s the role of the parent and teacher to help them develop the virtues and other skills. That includes through demonstrating the relevant virtues and skills themselves, by teaching those virtues and skills both rationally and experientially, and, when necessary, by demanding compliance. The goal is to habituate the next generation into doing the right thing, and to ensure they acquire the technical knowledge and develop the practical wisdom to understand what they should do in different situations, and why.
Whatever else a school says it does, check that it aims to do that.
Of course, according to Aristotle, quite what strategy is best to teach a specific virtue, skill or hunk of knowledge to a particular child also demands the parent or teacher exercise practical wisdom rather than merely following a rule. So back yourself in whatever decision you make for your child. Hopefully the annual Metro schools edition offers at least a bit of background information to help — but don’t think it can do more.
In the end, you probably know best at a high level what style of education is right for your kid. But then leave it to the teachers at your chosen school to get on with the job of applying that philosophy in the classroom. Respect that, on a day-to-day basis, they are more expert and wiser than you.
