A New System Required?

[Eriny]

Yeah, I've recently been reading a blog on unschooling - http://un-schooled.net
I don't think un-schooling is necessarily better than going to school for a bunch of reasons (mostly I think some standardisation in learning is important for university entrance and to make sure a high school qualification means roughly the same thing for everyone who has it. Also, unschooling is not realistic for families that need to survive on two incomes), but I do think that mainstream schools have a lot to learn from alternative education. Like I said, I was lucky in that I was able to do some more independent stuff. I actually worked on logic puzzles and writing articles and really enjoyed it because it was what I wanted to do.

[lexitu]

@ Eriny - What school did you go to out of interest?

Had a quick read through un-schooled. Bookmarked it and I'll read some more later. Seems okay, but I'm not sure it should replace education in school. Parents can have an educational role to complement school. I can see a few problems with what the person proposes. I think kids should be exposed to a different culture and learn from others who don't have similar genetic material to them. They are already going to develop similarly to their family, so in-house education is likely to accentuate this similarity. The insular environment wouldn't be very constructive and they wouldn't have as many experiences to draw from, true?

Oh and the blog just reminded of something that I liked about my old school - we had classes with different grades. For example, My last class was a 3, 5+6. It was great to have this mix of different perspectives, statuses, leaders and non-leaders all observing and interacting with each other.

[Eriny]

^ It wasn't an ordinary programme at the school I went to, they just gave high-performing student that opportunity. If you still care, PM me and I'll tell you my school.

Mixed classes sound interesting, and I agree with a lot of your concerns on unschooling (though there are probably ways of making it less insular like after school classes and stuff).

[lexitu]

Oh no that's okay Good that you had that opportunity though...

And yeah mixed classes was great. I loved having friends younger and older than me and this really helped with my maturation.