[extropy-chat] Re: Home-schooling

[Brent Neal]

 (1/20/04 8:36) Max M <maxm at mail.tele.dk> wrote:

>I would be more interested in how we can use a voucher system to improve 
>the private schools. Then we can have a better and more varied choice.

I would be MUCH more interested in how you propose to disentangle the current voucher system proposals from the religious loonies' desire to transfer public funds to their prosyletizing efforts. Only Milton Friedman's foundation's private vouchers seem to be working in that regard.


>
>It's like everywhere else in life. We are idiots at 90% of what we do, 
>and only really good at a few specialised thing. Why should teaching be 
>any different? A well educated teacher is an expert. Why should I be 
>better at teaching as a private amateur?

The key phrase here is "well-educated."  My experience and my wife's experience (she taught high school, and was a department chair for 2 years before quitting in disgust) is that a truly well-educated teacher CANNOT be the product of modern schools of education. As a case in point, I will give you the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, which trains people with average entrance SAT scores of less than 800 combined to be teachers.  Teachers of that caliber cannot teach your children to be any better than they are, except by counterexample.

And in re: specialization, read my .sig. 


>Even though education could easily be rationalised and automated at many 
>levels.
>

I disagree with this categorically. Education at ANY level is one thing which absolutely cannot be automated, because it fundamentally requires contact with other more-knowledgeable, well-trained people. There is a vast difference between "well-read" and "well-educated."  A large corpus of knowledge is useless if you don't know how to apply it.  I've known lots of people who have a remarkable grasp of trivia, but who cannot THINK.  Further, all people learn in subtly different ways, and the failure to recognize this fact is one of the chief failures of the so-called "egalitarian" school model that the United States has championed since the early 70s.

Just the $0.02 of a lurker with a 3 month old daughter and a wife who made her reputation by righteously skewering the education establishment.

Brent
-- 
Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades
http://brentn.freeshell.org

"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein