Light a Fire vs. Fill a Pail? You’ve got to be kidding.

So, this Friday’s meme from Heart of the Matter is to comment on this quote from William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

It sounds nice, which is what you’d expect from a poet, but that’s about the only good thing I’m going to say about it.

Education is certainly not dropping a bunch of knowledge into an empty receptacle, but, if the fire is supposed to be about creating a passionate interest in something, or everything, that’s not education either.

The fire, if we must keep up with the analogy, is already there. I’ve never met a kid who wasn’t curious about practically everything. I’ve never met a kid who didn’t ask ‘why?’

Your average kid has enough to “fire” to consume a parent’s sanity and then some.

So then what? What is an educator supposed to do with the fire?

At first, I suppose, give it new places to go. The fire has lots of interesting places to stretch within what any child knows from his environment, but the stuff outside that sphere contains fuel for a lifetime. A child isn’t going to immediately know that he’s interested in Egyptology, or botany, or architecture. You need to drop a bit of something into the pail before he realizes that’s even a place for his fire to go, so to speak.

So, there is a bit of pail-filling going on. A bit of flame fanning too. But it can’t end there.

You can’t spend the rest of your life helping your child find more fuel. You’ve got to teach him how to find his own too, and explore each path as far as he wants or needs.

And that too requires some pail-filling. Things like learning to read, how to research, and memorizing math facts and formulas are work, and they aren’t always fun to do. They’re not always what the flame wants to do. But without knowing those things, the child’s fire is severely restricted.

And finally, to finish off with this crazy flame idea, an education needs to teach him to focus the main power of his fire on the things he’s most interested in, to eventually use it as a tool (like a flamethrower or torch) to achieve certain ends.

Tags: meme, homeschooling, education, yeats

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