Spike Jones wrote:
>
> Those who had public education are welcome to counterexample,
> but my notion is that public schools encourage joining the ranks
> of the corporation, the joys of a 9 to 5 etc, but do not really help in
> giving one the skills and values of an entrepreneur or an innovator.
> The private schools do this better.
Dunno. I mainly sat in the back and read science fiction. :-)
Now and then I would look up long enough to see what they were
working on if it was a class like math. I would take that,
abstract it, play with it, see if I could see how it was
initially derived and often derive the thing they would try to
rote force into young minds next week or month. Then I would go
back to my book. I would take the tests and generally ace them
when I cared about the subject but almost never did homework.
SciFi taught me the magic and power of science and mathematics.
School generally just made it boring.
Literature, humanities and history classes were more fun when
the teacher was inspired which did happen occassionally even in
public school.
I agree that mostly the accent was on obeying rules and
following forms and making pretty notebooks. Actual thinking
and (Dewey preserve us) arguing or reasoning from or (horrors)
trying to integrate different topics in some general framework
were actively discouraged.
It is strange to remember it but until the 9th grade I thought I
must be dumb. The reason I thought that was that I couldn't
grasp the underlying logic or framework that made all the things
being thrown at us in school hang together. I couldn't catch
what they were getting at with the approach or the seemingly
random collections of facts. My intuition said there must be an
underlying system, a fabric of reality. I assumed that everyone
else knew and I was missing it! It took that long to realize
that there was no underlying system they knew or that guided
their teachings; any fragments of such that I thought I had
grasped were strictly my own invention. It took a bit longer to
find the trail of education philosophy that claimed no such
system or integration should ever be attempted or used!
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:54 MDT