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From: childers@avsd.UUCP (Richard Childers)
Newsgroups: sci.math,comp.edu,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Public Education is a Fraud
Message-ID: <352@avsd.UUCP>
Date: 23 Dec 88 21:26:09 GMT
References: <7.UUL1.3#913@acw.UUCP>
Reply-To: childers@avsd.UUCP (Richard Childers)
Organization: AMPEX Corporation, Redwood City, CA
Lines: 50

In article <7.UUL1.3#913@acw.UUCP> scott@acw.UUCP (Scott Guthery) writes:

>Teachers succeed without teaching and students succeed without learning.  
>Is there really any question why there's no education going on in our 
>education system?

As far as I'm concerned, why don't the parents take a leadership position
in teaching their children how to think, how to read, how to write ?

I've seen several friends who had children, then sat passively when they
were in an ideal position to begin stimulating the child's problem-solving
process, telling the child to go  take a nap when they could have been just
as easily reading them a story.

In my own case, I was reading when I was *two*, habitually by the time I was
four, slavishly by the time I was six or seven. Much of this is related to
my mother's initial efforts at stimulating my tiny intellect, no doubt.

How can a child think critically and question the teacher when everything
they experience at home and at school tells them to remain silent, not to
challenge the teacher, be it a school official or a parent, to just shut up
and endure ?

When I moved to San Francisco, at the age of ten, I was the most educated
child in my school, a situation that remained predictable for years after.
Inevitably, my teacher identified me as suitable for skipping grades, and
while I'm sorry it happened, it was the best thing at the time. While it
was being worked out, I filled in my time reading whatever I wanted to, and
teaching English and grammar to a new student who'd just moved to the States
from Korea - another thing that's never made use of, the potential for one
student to tutor another.

It seems that it is only in the United States and certain Asian countries that
education is seen as a competitive matter, instead of a cooperative one, a
way for the society to improve itself instead of merely a way for a single
individual to increase their value to the job market ...

>As long as we continue to reward excuses for failure and resent achievement, 
>our education system will continue to build yet more fetid byways in the 
>intellectual sewer.  AIDS studies, anyone?

All rhetoric aside, how many inquiring minds have you cultivated lately ?

-- richard

-- 
 *          "... where there is no movement, there is no perception."         *
 *                    Ribot, _The Psychology of Attention_                    *
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