On Sat, 28 Oct 1995, Ben Budiman wrote:
> An education process should involve the five disciplines of Music, Books,
> Chess, Sports, and Arts. Actually their origin is an ancient oriental
> philosophy of the five basic skills: Zither, Books, Chess, Sword, and
> Brush.
Ben -
There are a lot of messages tonight. Many of them I've marked for comment
as time permits; but your beautiful description of a five-part curriculum
can't be put aside.
[1] My daughter was a Montessori student from 4 until she was 13. There
are Montessori high-schools, I understand, in some parts of Europe. The
upper levels of study were analogous in many ways to what you describe
here.
[2] There are also some strong analogies between this five-discipline
study and the medieval quadrivium/trivium. Music, for example, as
perceived number.
[3] In both those cases, the underlying principles are holistic and
syncretic rather than analytic and compartmental.
P.S. In actual practice, I'd use GO (the oriental board game) rather than
chess, for the following reasons:
- it's constructive rather than destructive
- it has no irrelevant underlying mythos of named pieces
- it has really just a single rule, from which all tactics flow
- it is, spiritually, the profoundest game humans have ever developed
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
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. . . . There are far *fewer* things in heaven and earth, Horatio, . . . .
. . . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy... . . | _ .