The other day Christopher saw a cloud factory.
Our kids LOVE how it's made videos. We watch wax turn into crayons, machines turn copious amounts of flour into copious amounts of bread, and bees turn nectar into honey. The conclusion that the building huffing white puffiness into a cloud filled sky was a cloud factory was not at all insensible.
"That's where clouds are made!"
It was not a dumb interpretation, and we got a chuckle, but it was quite wrong. What was missing? Knowledge. His understanding of natural vs. manufactured (and obviously the water cycle, though we've studied it) is rather lacking. Which is fine, he's a little kid. But as we were talking about homeschooling at the time it lead to a discussion about a knowledge base.
I have heard that education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. I humbly submit, it is both.
Intelligent observations, without a solid knowledge base, will lead to finding lots of cloud factories. Meaning, what good is the ability to think through things and come to conclusions if it starts from a point of ignorance?
I have seen educational models that heavily rely on one or the other. The recitation of facts with the absence of wisdom training. Or, the recitation of facts almost being demonized as an unnecessary waste of time. I do not know exactly what the balance is, but I feel that knowledge with out wisdom and visa versa makes for very unbalanced trains of thoughts.
I guess you can say one of our homeschool goals is for our children to find less and less cloud factories as they grow.
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