Miles Jackson wrote:
> 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.
Absolutely. But considering the amount of time children spend in schools and the amount of time they spend doing homework -- this adds up to ten, eleven hours a !*&@&^($^ day -- schools are a miserable failure. Because, let's be clear about this, after tens of thousands of hours of this "learning," the vast majority of kids come out of schools with bare functional literacy. They can read and do basic math and kind of write. Geography = 0; Science = 0; History = 0. And they'll never read a book again.
How much children learn "on their own" is entirely a function of what kind of environment they grow up in and on their ability not just to learn but to put their learning to some use. One of the problems of school is that you have fifteen years of utterly passive "learning" going on, with no way to apply that knowledge or test your learning in terms of the world outside the artificial boundaries of school.
Joanna