Education vs. Schooling

[Guest panter]

Unschoolers maintain that a child's learning should be curiosity-driven rather than dictated by teachers and textbooks, and that forcing kids to adhere to curricula quashes their natural inclination to explore and ask questions.

 

Unschooling is an acknowledgment that schools and education are in many ways contradictory, that there's an implicit tension between them. Education is about the production of more democracy, production of peace, production of happiness whereas schooling is often the production of global economic competitiveness...

 

The Unschooling Movement Grows In Popularity

 

 

[ajb]

Unschoolers maintain that a child's learning should be curiosity-driven rather than dictated by teachers and textbooks...

 

That is great and I would encourage children (anyone really) to ask questions and follow their curiosity. I am all for directing one's own education.

 

However, in reality some structure and in particular guidance is required.

[CaptainPanic]

Curiosity driven education would be the best. I agree.

The practical problem is that every kid will be curious, but interested in different topics at different times. So, this puts an enormous burden on the educational system. Now, a single teacher can educate up to 30 kids (in a rather inefficient system from the kids' perspective, I admit, but effective from a school's and a short-term profit point of view). If we go to a curiosity driven education, then we may need twice the amount of teachers, or even more!

 

Also, I believe that kids should then be able to specialize much sooner into a field that they are interested in... but important other fields should not be neglected (for example, personally I would have loved to specialize into the exact fields such as physics, chemistry and engineering much earlier, but now that I am older, I enjoy the fact that I was forced to learn languages - although I despised them at the time).

[Marat]

Formal, institutionalized schooling teaches some important skills for later life, such as how to deal with stupid and oppressive bureaucracies, insane supervisors, disruptive fellow-employees, standing in line, filling out forms, finding your way around irrationally structured institutions, etc. If often wonder how people tutored at home manage to handle the absurdities of public institutions when they finally emerge into the objective world.

 

While it is theoretically appealing to allow students to pursue their natural curiosity, curiosity itself has to be broadened first by education. Autodidacts are infamously narrow-minded and unself-critical in their understanding, since they have never been drawn out of themselves by true education. As is often the case, the etymology of the word gives a clue to the truth behind it, and 'education' comes from the Latin 'educere,' meaning 'drawn out,' which is more than just expanding on your own only as far as you feel like going. Even the word 'idiot' comes from 'id,' meaning 'self,' and refers to the idea that a stupid, uneducated person is someone whose whole knowledge is concerned only with himself, rather than with influences which have drawn him out beyond himself.

[ParanoiA]

Formal, institutionalized schooling teaches some important skills for later life, such as how to deal with stupid and oppressive bureaucracies, insane supervisors, disruptive fellow-employees, standing in line, filling out forms, finding your way around irrationally structured institutions, etc. If often wonder how people tutored at home manage to handle the absurdities of public institutions when they finally emerge into the objective world.

 

 

When they finally emerge into the objective world? You're describing public institutions as part of the "objective world"?

 

How very telling. That's the problem with centralized processed education...conditioning. Yes, we must all go to absurd public institutions in order to find absurd public institutions normal, and tolerable.

 

Formal, institutionalized schooling teaches important skills for dogmatic cultures layered with centralized bureaucratic processes that require citizens to subordinate themselves to state demands, like subjects.

 

 

And what's with the missing time? Do the self-taught never enter the "objective world" until they're done schooling? They don't have to wait in line, deal with the driver's license bureau, or go out and play with their friends in the neighborhood? And gradution day is the day mom and dad let them out of the house to see the outside for the very first time? 'Look son...trees, grass, fresh air, sunlight, bureaucratic public institutions...'

 

It's the same story we get from the autodidacts. They read a book on their own and call it part of their education. This is likely true, as I teach myself things everyday of my life. And we all do this. I'm not sure why they feel compelled to feel superior about it. Just as I'm not sure what's to admire about schools of sameness.

[CaptainPanic]

I agree with Marat in a way... although my personal experience is that I was taught about the bureaucracies only at university, and my teachers were not so insane.

But the real lesson is a lesson in attitude, not simply getting around a bureaucracy. The lesson is that if you lose your temper, or if you try to beat the system all by yourself, you lose, and you spend only more time. However, if you play with the system, and you try to find your quickest way through it, you will be rewarded.

The lessons are not the practical issues that Marat described. They are the deeper lessons you learn: how you as a young person have to deal with these things.

 

While I agree that what's in the books isn't taught very efficiently, the school system prepares kids for the real world. If we change the school system such that kids can choose their own topics, then we must be careful not to make a gain (for example) in teaching maths or languages while losing a lesson in discipline and obediance.

[ewmon]

I see children in a tabula rasa sense. I pity anyone who loses their curiosity and individuality and becomes – effectively – institutionalized. Formal education does provide skills: Language (verbal communication), Art (non-verbal communication), Science (logical interpretation of the world), History (what people have done so far), and Math (using numbers). Formal education can be thought of as informing students what current society believes, and testing as the students' knowledge of it. I think that formal education and testing are fair enough, but that people should never lose their curiosity and sense of self.

[ewmon]

(double post deleted)

Edited September 15, 2010 by ewmon

[ParanoiA]

But the real lesson is a lesson in attitude, not simply getting around a bureaucracy. The lesson is that if you lose your temper, or if you try to beat the system all by yourself, you lose, and you spend only more time. However, if you play with the system, and you try to find your quickest way through it, you will be rewarded.

 

This is an example of what I mean by conditioning. You actually see something admirable in submitting to the status quo? You think it's important lesson that you can't beat the system all by yourself, and you lose? Good thing Frederick Douglass didn't believe that. Good thing my country's founders didn't buy that. Good thing the gay community isn't listening to that either. It always starts with somebody standing up for themselves, and then others, and then it gains momentum until it becomes a movement.

 

I don't see anything good out of accepting a system. Every system ought to earn its existence. We should be able to audit every idea a human has ever shared, without a deadline or threshold. Otherwise, you're conditioning subordinates to obey and accept the world as-is. Nothing evolves when its accepted, as-is. It's the idea of not accepting something as good enough that causes change and advancement.

 

 

While I agree that what's in the books isn't taught very efficiently, the school system prepares kids for the real world. If we change the school system such that kids can choose their own topics, then we must be careful not to make a gain (for example) in teaching maths or languages while losing a lesson in discipline and obediance.

 

This is true, to me, but it goes both ways. There will definitely be disadvantages to self-driven academia, and could conflict with post-school life. Thing is, that's already happening right now too, with formal education institutions. Kids grow up and form under years and years of being processed by grownups. Stand in this line, eat at this time, learn this subject, go to this class, get on this bus - everything they experience is standing around waiting to be processed by grownups.

 

So it's no wonder to me that teens and young adults have what's commonly described as an "entitlement" attitude. It's not really entitlement, in my opinion. It's standing around waiting to be processed, to be assigned to a task, waiting for someone to tell them the things they need to know. There's not alot of initiative, because it's contrary to their life experience up to that point. You don't take it upon yourself to learn things - you wait for grownups to give you what you need, and tell you what you need to know. It looks like entitlement, but it's really just the result of showing up to government buildings to be processed.

 

We may actually have more entrepreneurs and innovators if we would stop molding everyone into the same casting. There will be consequences. And there will be benefits. Most of all, there will be diversity. I believe that will serve society better than stagnant, calm, boring, sameness.

Edited September 15, 2010 by ParanoiA

[Marat]

Although there has been a lot of research showing that young children learn to use their imagination academically only by being allowed huge amounts of time for free, unstructured playing, for some reason our society now is insisting that all children begin their formal education at an earlier and earlier age. This could well produce a generation of dullards who can't creatively advance knowledge by inventing new theories, even though they knew the alphabet four years earlier than the generation before them.

 

Interestingly, I now teach university students who started pre-school when they were 4 years old, while my generation had the option of starting kindergarten at age 6, but didn't legally have to start grade 1 until age 7. For some reason the three years of additional learning these students received haven't made them any smarter in their early 20s than my generation was, and many of my colleagues insist that they are much less smart than the previous generation. Did they spend too much time being lined up and told what to do and when all day at an age when they should have been wandering around the neighborhood, inventing their own games with other kids their age?

[CaptainPanic]

This is an example of what I mean by conditioning. You actually see something admirable in submitting to the status quo? You think it's important lesson that you can't beat the system all by yourself, and you lose? Good thing Frederick Douglass didn't believe that. Good thing my country's founders didn't buy that. Good thing the gay community isn't listening to that either. It always starts with somebody standing up for themselves, and then others, and then it gains momentum until it becomes a movement.

 

I don't see anything good out of accepting a system. Every system ought to earn its existence. We should be able to audit every idea a human has ever shared, without a deadline or threshold. Otherwise, you're conditioning subordinates to obey and accept the world as-is. Nothing evolves when its accepted, as-is. It's the idea of not accepting something as good enough that causes change and advancement.

 

Hmm... I should have chosen my words more carefully, as I can see they are misunderstood.

 

What I meant to say is that you can beat the system (and for example go through the bureaucracy a lot faster), but that it takes some skills which a student needs to learn first.

And once you have learned more about the system, it's even possible to change it altogether - as you pointed out, history has numerous examples.

 

But someone needs certain skills to be a leader, or an innovator. To some, it comes naturally, to some it doesn't. But I sincerely believe that struggle is a good teacher in this case... and that is the value of a stupid slow bureaucracy: the struggle itself teaches students some important lessons in life. The struggle itself may even motivate people to do something about it.

 

This is true, to me, but it goes both ways. There will definitely be disadvantages to self-driven academia, and could conflict with post-school life. Thing is, that's already happening right now too, with formal education institutions. Kids grow up and form under years and years of being processed by grownups. Stand in this line, eat at this time, learn this subject, go to this class, get on this bus - everything they experience is standing around waiting to be processed by grownups.

 

So it's no wonder to me that teens and young adults have what's commonly described as an "entitlement" attitude. It's not really entitlement, in my opinion. It's standing around waiting to be processed, to be assigned to a task, waiting for someone to tell them the things they need to know. There's not alot of initiative, because it's contrary to their life experience up to that point. You don't take it upon yourself to learn things - you wait for grownups to give you what you need, and tell you what you need to know. It looks like entitlement, but it's really just the result of showing up to government buildings to be processed.

 

We may actually have more entrepreneurs and innovators if we would stop molding everyone into the same casting. There will be consequences. And there will be benefits. Most of all, there will be diversity. I believe that will serve society better than stagnant, calm, boring, sameness.

Of course, too much struggle, and students may just give up. If you can't beat it, join it.

What you describe here, is a system that is no longer a useful struggle... but is instead a system that hampers innovation. And I agree that society (at least the one I am familiar with) seems to go towards this. The university was a useful struggle, and a single student was able to make a change. But the bureaucracy created by massive institutions such as governments cannot be changed by me - not yet at least.