Photography was still new and mysterious when this picture of Sam Houston was taken. Men would make a living claiming that they could show the spirits of the dead captured on the plates. Sam Houston, already a legend, looks as if he is daring any spirit to make an appearance. Brave soldier, congressman, governor, general, and leader of Texas, Sam Houston was the sort of alum any school would be proud to honor. Though colleges are named after him, no college can claim him as Sam Houston had only one year of formal education. As a business venture, he also started a successful school.
In Sam Houston, James L. Haley says:
“But although the young Houston could secret himself away for hours enraptured in the classics, in a classroom he remained, from all indications, terrible.”
Here is a suggestion: any classroom that deemed Houston terrible was terrible.
When you have young Sam Houston, lover of classics, and you turn him off to school, then the school has failed. As Haley points out, Houston was a man who would go on his own odyssey rather than merely reading about it, though apparently his prodigious memory retained the entire Iliad.
And this points us to the horrible problem of conformity in the classroom. Testing and “accountability” measures for teachers have made this worse, but notice that in the good old days, when government control was non-existent, schools still routinely failed the brightest and the best.
Why is this?
Leaders are often non-conformists and schools try to teach to the middle. The sole teacher in a one room school house must keep order. Sam Houston kept a pair of lead knuckles for discipline in his own stint at teaching. Order can be stifling, especially when it cuts costs by forcing a teacher to do too much. The teachers in the one room school houses were forced to deal with many grades. They could not develop “individual educational plans,” because they had to juggle the needs of many students, with many temperaments, and many levels of ability.
When homeschooling works, as it often does, I think a key reason for the success is that moms and dads want their child to learn. They individualize the schooling for their child . Except in very large families, the student teacher ratio is enviable. In our house, it was never higher than four to one! Our children learned to read when they were ready, not when a chart told Hope to teach them.
If Sam Houston had been in our house, we would have let him read the Iliad and taught him a bit of Greek. The man who mastered Cherokee would have enjoyed that I think.
Our colleges and universities are even more guilty than our high schools. We have created “units” and “credits” and classes based on rote, not on competency. I fear we too often stifle young Sam Houston and label him a “failure” (perhaps even setting back his career) before his genius can manifest itself. Pity the man who finds his way in his mid-twenties instead of on schedule at eighteen. Pity the woman who is a non-conformist or the student who is good at everything, but has a learning disability in one area that forever prevents graduation.
Technology has given us the tools to change, but morality demanded we change a long time ago. Sam Houston lived in a time when you could escape from the stultifying conformity of education which was good at producing workers for the state and for big business, but not so good at cultivating eccentric genius. We cannot afford to waste one Sam Houston now growing up in the inner city of Houston and forced into schools that would have labeled our genius founder a “dunce” or given him drugs to help him calm down.
We need to change to be fit for Houston . . . all the kids of Houston.
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