Child's Play: On Wittgenstein and teaching children

Wittgenstein was fresh out out of a POW camp. He wrote the Tractatus living within the horrors of war. Working in a rural school was abandoning his training as an aeronautical engineer. It was abandoning his life as scion of a wealthy urban family that commissioned Klimt for family portraits and a Piano Concerto for the Left Hand for his brother.

Silence?

He was an artilleryman.

A teacher has to learn how to handle mixed abilities. Pedagogy is not just for the genius.

This quote from TFM:

The villagers had never heard of anyone pulling their daughters’ braids or boxing their sons’ ears for failing to understand algebra. In all likelihood, no one had tried to teach their children algebra before. Wittgenstein’s time as a schoolmaster came to an ignominious end when he struck a sickly eleven-year-old in Otterthal so hard that he required medical attention, resulting in a legal hearing. He was not charged with a crime, but, to his intense shame, he had to rely on his privileged background to avoid punishment for misconduct.

To his intense shame indeed.