No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

Then the sheep is fucked. But at least they have a shot at trying to defend themselves. Note that I'm assuming that it goes without saying that armed defense is a measure of last resort. Obviously one would try diplomacy, etc., first. But my point is that "democracy" isn't any kind of inherently perfect system if you're the minority party. It has pathological edge cases that can't just be hand-waved around.

>>What was her degree? Demanding maths when it's not needed by practitioners in a degree subject area seems perverse to me [I love maths FWIW].

Degree is inconsequential. I'd say "if she is a human, she will do better by learning math rather than not doing it."

How so?

Maths is more about "thinking creatively, clearly and critically about things that are complex and abstract" rather than about doing "arithmetic". And I guess, "thinking creatively, clearly and critically about things that are complex and abstract" is a very essential thing in human life. The entire human progress depended upon this skill and in fact, the very survival of humans depended upon this skill in the earlier world which was very hostile for humans.

Now coming back to the issue of having to do long division in early childhood: yes, it may be the case that you don't need to do long division (later) in your life even for once. Long division may not be that important but the concept of division (and remainder) is very important in our life.

Why is it important to learn division along many other complex (boring) topics in math? It's to hone your skills to "think creatively, clearly and critically about things that are complex and abstract".

Proofs in geometry and algebra help you more in this conquest. Sadly, most mainstream schools these days take out the creative challenges and motivational aspects from the math education and stuff it with mundane procedures to be followed like rituals. Sadly again, the much-tauted non-standard schools (like Waldorf, Sudbury etc) do away with the math almost entirely and which is very detrimental to academic progress of the kids.

edit: corrected some grammatical errors.

>They are fully democratic and focus on producing empowered self directed citizens who understand how to share limited resources and cooperate.

The more pertinent question is whether the citizens they produce can read and write, know how to multiply and divide, can name the parts of speech, and have at least a passing notion of the history and culture of their respective countries, regions, and locales.

Somehow, I doubt it.

Woah, bunch of what you said hit very close to home. Was kind of waiting for you to tell me you were 33 years old, moved to Sydney from the Netherlands and ... well that you were me.

Point I was wanting to make: there's a lot of us that didn't really get that "prod" in the right direction, or even had the opportunity to study in such a focused manner.

And I sure as hell wish I had that opportunity back in the day.

> The more pertinent question is whether the citizens they produce can read and write, know how to multiply and divide, can name the parts of speech, and have at least a passing notion of the history and culture of their respective countries, regions, and locales.

They learn how to read and write. Children are learning machines. They figure out how to do things that are a lot more complicated than learning how to read and write using an alphabet in a culture saturated with writing. A guy I know here in Shanghai has a Taiwanese mother and an American father. He went to American schools all the way through his education. He can read Chinese perfectly, and write when he's using a phone or computer though his handwriting is quite limited. Another guy I know whose parents speak German to him grew up in Ireland and was educated through English. His spelling and grammar when writing in German is not great but he has never studied German other than as a foreign language for an easy grade, nor has he ever lived in a German speaking country. John Taylor Gatto has written that he can teach a 9 year old to read in 40 contact hours.

People learn to perform quite complicated mathematical operations in the course of their lives, through experience. If you're interested in this there's a lot of research on unschooled children. Street children who buy and sell things learn all the mathematical skills they need in their lives, which is most of what most people need.

Knowing the parts of speech is almost perfectly useless. It has no effect on how well one writes, not even for people who are writing in a language they learned after adolescence. The only things that research shows improving writing are practice and critique.

People learn about their culture by living in it. Ditto for their history. As someone with way above average historical knowledge I can also say that history education through at least middle school is worthless. It's pre digested pap with no acknowledgment of nuance or shades of gray.