<> --------- <> <> Marx thought, for what it's worth, that education/work should be mixed <> from <> the beginning.
yes. I've forgotten which course it was - sociology of education? - where I read Urie Bronfenbrenner's study of schooling in the FSU as compared to the u.s. excellent book. In the FSU, they consciously designed it so that children were in the workplace with their parents. Reading that book was why I began taking my kid to work as much as possible. Bronfenbrenner made an excellent case for the damage done by a world were children are segregated from children not in the same age group as well as being segregated from adults of all ages.
<> <> Part of being a child is being grouped with other children for part of <> the <> time -- and that probably was true even pre-neolithic.
sort of. the practice of age grading is very new, only emerging in the late 1800s - mostly to deal with the shift from teaching as profession dominated by men, to one dominated by women. Women were seen as too weak to deal with 16 year olds in the classroom - since 16 yo's and 7 year olds were in the same room. They started age grading in order to relegate women to the lower grades, encouraging men to take the upper grades. (It's a central plank of the story in some classic book on the history of schooling in the u.s. name of which escapes.)
And, at the time, children extremely disobedient considering how outraged people get at the slightest issue in the classrom these days. In this same study, as well as another study of the history of adolescence (another classic), the authors talk about how schools were filled with rowdy kids who would habitually break out in uprisings, sometimes beating up their teachers - something that also happened at elite private schools. age grading was introduced, ostensibly, as a form of social control, as well as a way to pawn off the work of teaching the lower grades on women who would take less pay. (I can't remember the feminist author I read who wrote about this issue - the feminization of teaching ....)
bronfenbrenner also takes up the age grading issue, aruging IIRC that it si very damaging. I read that book fucking 25 years ago, though, so i can't tell you more or provide the central tenants of his argument.
also, I've always been fond of Eric Fromm's claim that people really shouldn't go to college until they are 30 or older.
There are <> certain <> mechanical skills (a keyboard, reading at an elementary level, few <> other <> things) that will probably continue to be usefully introduced in a <> formal <> group setting. (Note: Border-line recipe-dictation is useful as long <> as it <> is een as a perspective on the present, not as a statement of what <> "every <> culture must have." (Given world demographcis, western culture will be <> absorbed & non-existent a couple centuries after its military <> domination is <> broken.) Can one really imagine that (say) 10,000 years from now, <> assuming <> humanity misses destruction by capitalism) there will be a single book <> from <> the last 5000 years that will be absolutely _essential_. Perhaps <> through the <> torturous paths of contingency-dominated history books themselves <> (including <> electronic forms) will no longer be of interest. They've only been <> around <> for a copule thousand years out of 200+ thousand years of homo-s <> existence. <> Why can't conversation among members of the same local community be <> sufficient for 'culture'? We can know one thing about the future more <> or <> less for certain: we wouldn't like it. Back in the '80s I heard a <> presentation by a Guatemalan peasant most of whose family had been <> slaughtered & who had escaped to this country. (He had a translator <> with <> him.) Near the end he broke down sobbing: he wanted to be home. Tht's <> how <> any of us would feel were we suddenly plunged into a socialist future. <> <> So what we're debating here is not whether education is an essential <> to <> human society. We are discussing what hypothesizing various futures <> contributes to our understanding of the present. <> <> Carrol <> <> <> <> <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <> <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <>
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