> joanna wrote:
>
>> Schools are basically designed to crush that impulse, to humiliate,
>> and to control. I never knew what boredom was until I went to school.
>> I spent a good part of 1st and 2nd grade in the corner...sometimes on
>> my knees...even though I was a straight A student. A significant
>> proportion of teachers and parents have absolutely no respect for
>> children. They actually think that children are empty, void....until
>> they get filled up with whatever the current ideology tells you you
>> have to fill them up with. And then they're supposed to feel grateful
>> for that.
>
>
> Schools as they are currently organized have to be abolished.
>
Man, everybody from Christian homeschoolers to anarchists have to kick
the public school system in the balls! Let me ask this: if the schools
are so effectively crushing the impulse to learn, why are college and
high school completion rates significantly higher today than in the
past? Why is performance on standardized IQ tests higher today than in
the past? Why are a higher proportion people achieving professional and
graduate degrees than in the past? If the purpose of schools is to
crush the capacity to learn, schools are a miserable failure.
For a variety of reasons I'm not going to go into here, my wife is homeschooling my 8-year old son. I have to tell you that the whole notion that children will just "learn on their own" is a fairy tale. It's hard work to teach and it's hard work to learn. Without adequate guidance from somebody with a coherent lesson plan, the typical child is not going to learn how to do math or read. With respect to academic skills, yes, a young child is pretty much an empty vessel, and it will take a lot of hard work on the part of the kid, the teacher, and the family to help the child learn. I don't see this as lack of respect for the child; it's an inevitable result of the difference in knowledge between the child and the adult. --And in two senses: the content, obviously, but also effective methods for learning the content.
Miles