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[lastguru]

No manis gaida kaut ko grandiozu. Nu tad arii dabuujiet

Saakumam es iemetiishu vienu ienteresantu postu vienaa listee, tad veelaak piedaliishos diskusijaa.

Diskusija tika atveerta ar sho izteicienu:

THere is one reason why I look for college degree's. They show that you have the stick-to-it-ness to make it through 4 years of tedium. If you can take 4 years of crap, you might be able to take the crap needed to do what we do.

Tad veelaak paraadiijaas shis briinishkjiigs meils. Jaa, tas ir garsh, bet ir veerts izlasiit.

Not only do I question the value of most college degrees (regardless of how their value is perceived by potential employers), I question the entire current educational system. Let's face it, we care more about what cars we drive than we do about what our education system REALLY does to our children. The whole Western educational enterprise is a bankrupt farce.

Let me explain.

I was raised by successful academics, by people who worship higher education. It was presumed that I would excel academically, and I did. The pressure put upon me began very early. It was tremendous and constant. All of the affection and approval I received was conditional upon my performance. Any decent child psychologist can tell you how toxic this is to a child's emotional development, and how epidemic this kind of pressure is in Western culture. We have record rates of child suicide, not only among college-age kids, but among kids in high-school, junior high, even grade school. We are pressure-cooking our children. We are breaking their backs with text books, and breaking their minds, hearts and spirits with relentless homework and testing.

I emerged from my own performance-oriented, conformance-oriented education with a framed piece of paper, a set of knowledge entirely unfit for every career I investigated, and considerable emotional damage. I had no courage, no confidence in my ability to succeed in the world, no confidence in myself. To me the world was not an exciting place of learning opportunity, adventure, and challenge. It was a mystifying, terrifying, foreign minefield. I had ADHD. I was depressed, anxious, and neurotic. Sound familiar to anyone?

The only useful skill I could transfer was my writing ability. Everything else I know about love, work, business, the real world, the streets, spirituality, health, my true self -- I have learned since I left college. And I have learned those things, not because someone required me to, but because I needed to learn them myself in order to survive or thrive.

When I got out of college, I associated learning, especially reading and study, with fear, shame, and inadequacy. I had difficulty with the simple physical act of reading. In the interests of my education, love of learning had been blasted out of me.

Many years after college, I began to rediscover some courage, some genuine confidence in myself and my ability to learn, and a true agenda for myself and my career, independent of external expectations. Only then did I really begin to "think independently."

Independent thinking is much more than a reflexive set of rhetorical and logical skills. Real "independent thinking," the genuine ability to "think for yourself," can only be predicated upon profound self-regard, courage, and self-confidence. It is a frame for the entire body-mind. If we merely help our children to become self-confident autodidacts, they will take care of the rest of their learning themselves, just as we did (if we admit it to ourselves).

Our education system provides, as far as I can tell, the opposite of true learning. We thrust our children like trick ponies through one flaming hoop after another. We sit them at desks with their hands folded for years, fitting flush, in preparation for sitting for years professionally in cubicles, fitting flush. We don't educate them. We train them to perform, to conform. As we tell them that we are "teaching them how to think," we instead teach them how to take orders, and how to validate themselves using external phenomena. Instead of teaching them how to collaborate to solve complex problems, we teach them to compete against the rest of the world.

We use a strict, formal, factory-style system to cram them full of largely useless information, forcing them to "learn" big chunks of it within arbitrary deadlines. We test them, test them, test them, and test them some more. We tell them that this knowledge is what they need to thrive, succeed, and enjoy their adult lives, when we never really ever believed that ourselves. We do this to them for between 12 and 16 years of their early lives.

We do not produce courageous, autodidactic entrepreneurs this way. We produce small machines that interlock into larger machines. We systematically break their spirits. It's profoundly dehumanizing. It's abhorrent and shameful.

I'll be damned if that is what my daughter will go through.

Speaking as a parent, here are most of the things I want an educational system to provide for my child, in rough priority order:

-- Reinforcement of her love of her self, her unconditional, positive self-regard
-- Reinforcement of the notions that knowledge is empowering, and that learning is a delightful adventure
-- Cultivation of her confidence in her ability to learn, her inherent autodidactic skill
-- Confidence that if she pursues her interests and gifts courageously, the world will reward her
-- A sense that her learning, her thriving, are largely her responsibility
-- Reinforcement that the things that she loves and that interest her are exactly the things she ought to pursue
-- Skills for collaborating and participating non-competitively
-- Knowledge about the entire span of jobs and careers and business opportunities in the world
-- A sense of the connectedness and sacredness of everyone and everything

Everything else I trust that my child will learn for herself, just as I did (long after college!). Notice the absence of any set curriculum, any testing, any externally-imposed body of knowledge. I don't believe any of that works worth a damn.

If a child is interested in poetry, expose him to a wealth of it. If a child is interested in Math, expose her to a wealth of it. That's all you need to do. Keep them healthy and safe, follow their lead, encourage their curiosity, and otherwise -- stay the hell out of their way!

Anyone interested in how well such an educational approach works in practice may be interested in the Sudbury Valley education model. Sudbury schools are popping up in progressive communities across the U.S. and Canada. They largely do not have the disciplinary problems, security problems, or psychological problems of traditional schools. Their graduates go on to excel in college and in careers. Often, multiple careers. Be prepared to leave your prejudices at the door:

http://www.sudval.org/

If my daughter ever attends college, I want it to be her idea, I want her to be burning with desire to go learn about something in particular that already interests her. I want her to pay for a substantial portion of her college education herself, to value it properly. And I want her to attend a college where she will be treated with respect as a peer. I want her to understand that she is paying her professors' salaries, and she is entitled to their respect.

I would like her to attend a school that values learning and knowledge over performance, prestige, and rote conformity. And graduate school? The healthiest graduate school experience is one where you can test out of the first couple of years of it when you get there, having already learned much of the material yourself.

But before she heads off to college, I will point out to my daughter that my own college degree mainly stole from me several year that I would have better spent travelling, playing guitar, surfing, skiing, hiking in the wilderness, meditating on a mountaintop. Anything but sitting still for hours indoors, having pointless material pounded into my head.

--Patrick Wilson-Welsh (B.A., English with Honors, UNC, Phi Beta Kappa)

Perhaps, just like there is an alternative operating system (OS), there should be an alternative educating system (ES). The one that does not force for many many years long to squeeze different-shaped people into one standard-shaped template, teaching them to obey rather than think [independently].

One of the worst tragedies in the current system is that absolute most teachers just can't teach! Perhaps, it is their education fault completed by the system. There is nothing more exciting that teaching...

It IS possible to teach children differently. You can teach them anything. Anything at all! Every child is equal starting his life in this world, what differs is inspiration got from family, from peers and from school. You can teach any subject, be it math, chemistry, history or poetry so that children will love it, so that they will catch every teacher's word, and work hard not because they are forced, but because they are interested (motivated)