

Back to (the wrong) school - bootload
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/09/back-to-the-wrong-school.html

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sgentle
I wonder if Seth (or indeed pg, or Ken Robinson, or any of the others who've
written similar critiques of industrial-era education) have any alternatives
in mind? I agree that teaching kids to sit in neat rows has outlived its
usefulness, but at this point I think we can write off that observation as
being the low-hanging fruit of educational critique. The important question
is: what do we do instead?

I assume nobody's seriously proposing home-schooling, unless they intend to
drop their life's work for a decade and a half to become teachers. The Khan
Academy is a long way off being a replacement for, say, a decent literacy
teacher. So what's being advocated here? Don't send your kids to school at
all? Send them there but teach them to treat the whole thing as an ironic
schlepp through antiquity?

I, for one, would love to see some treatment of the Montessori method[1]
which, although a bit hand-wavy, seems to be based on self-direction and has a
promising concurrence with Piaget's developmental research. Or Waldorf/Steiner
schools[2], which seem to be a more creative form of education with a focus on
art and autonomy.

I don't know nearly enough about those schools and other alternative forms of
education to know if they actually work, but if anyone's searching for
something to say on education and the new new economy, I sure would appreciate
some positive directions rather than more ol' faithful Ford-bashing.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education>

