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I don't think it even takes a radical teaching method. I think it takes a radical reordering of priorities.
Instead of glorifying athletes and closet organizers famous for making sex tapes ... we need to glorify education, hard work, and resourcefulness. And parents need to reinforce the message by rewarding/encouraging those traits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Relevant Carl Sagan: "Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact." ( http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199601/carl-sagan?pa... )
True. But it is VERY hard to encourage the enthusiasm of a 4 year old who asks "Why?" 600 times a day. :-)
let's have some dissenting opinion here. not all kids are equal. not all kids want to learn. in each and every discussion over this topic people bring up quotes by very smart people, like kubrick, sagan, etc. on how organised learning is not needed, a young mind wants to learn, grows like a flower, all by itself, even better without the shackles of structured education. i call bullshit. this is biased through the peo…
Children want to learn, and if you dont beat out their love of learning by forcing them into a box that hardly anyone fits in, their inherent need to understand the world comes out. Its almost... logical.
Relevant Carl Sagan: "Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact." ( http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199601/carl-sagan?pa... )
That aside, this long-winded series of human-interest anecdotes reminds me of why I stopped reading Wired. The whole thing could have been written in 1/3rd the space.
it's amazing that people still actively publicize idiotic self promoters and charlatans like Mitra.
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” ― Stanley Kubrick
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” ― Stanley Kubrick
That's been a popular view among progressive education reformers as well. It's the basis of Montessori schools, for example. I went to one up through Kindergarten and liked it, finding regular 1st grade utterly dull in comparison. But I don't have a good guess as to whether it would've been a better overall schooling (I still found plenty of time to learn things on my own). I've also long liked this Seymour Papert qu…
Someone who definitely falls outside the progressive reformers would be John Holt, yet he passionately argues along similar lines as what Kubrick is saying here.
Holt: "... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it."
By modern definitions, Holt is not even exactly "homeschooling". More accurately, he advocates what would be called "Unschooling" -- the idea that home life observing adults is a more than powerful enough motivator for young children to acquire basic skills.
let's have some dissenting opinion here. not all kids are equal. not all kids want to learn. in each and every discussion over this topic people bring up quotes by very smart people, like kubrick, sagan, etc. on how organised learning is not needed, a young mind wants to learn, grows like a flower, all by itself, even better without the shackles of structured education. i call bullshit. this is biased through the peo…
Anyone who spends time with small children knows that before they reach school age, they are all absurdly curious about the world, and they absorb information like a sponge. I suppose you think it's just a coincidence that they lose that curiosity right around the time they start being stuffed into classrooms.
Writers like John Taylor Gatto have written hundreds of pages going through historical and psychological research to show that "genius is as common as dirt."
Your contrary opinion is actually one of the most insidious false lessons we learn in school, and it's a very useful form a social control. "See, most people are too stupid to manage themselves, you'd better let us elites make all the hard decisions for you."
And even if I grant your premise, it still doesn't support maintaining the schools we have, because they demonstrably don't work at conveying a "base level of education". They're elaborate kabuki, where everybody pretends the work matters and everybody knows it doesn't, and the average student retains almost nothing.