Frankly, that sounds like 70s liberal lefty hippy dippy claptrap.the POV that education has to (tolerably, at least) fit the child
If you start from the POV that all the premises of standard education descended from Mount Olympus, you would see it that way. This thread is about books written by people who do not start from that premise.I am old enough to have attended the 50th, 55th, and 60th reunions of my high school class. And what strikes you if you do that is that your classmates, those teenagers of long ago, are adults now. Senior citizens, even. And they are certainly not to be sorted and pigeonholed from Class Valedictorian down to Class Screwups (and on down to Class Dropouts).
So exactly why is it sensible to allow notoriously impractical people (teachers) to create an environment with an official pecking order (class ranking) - and also unofficial pecking orders enforced by bullies?
School as we know it is premised on the assumption that after you round childrens ages to the nearest six months everyone of the same age can be, and should be, ranked according to how well they learn and articulate
- the particular subject matter which teachers are competent at and select
- in the particular way that those teachers promulgate it?
I myself ranked third in that class, behind two guys who went to Yale and became college professors. So from my perspective at the time, some of the people who were my classmates seemed stupid. I dimly understood that those people would have careers of some sort, of course, but the appearance was that they were not all that good at anything (other than, in some cases, playing sports). In hindsight that appearance, that perspective, is little short of obscene. The guy who came closest to not graduating reported at a reunion of the anguish he underwent at the time, and indeed the initial trouble he had in the Navy - but said that he ultimately wrote three books on procedures for the Navy.
Somewhere - many places, actually, a child - many children actually, are in the same fix Charlie was in back then. Education as we know it is putting them through an excruciating, pressure-filled existence which they endure just to avoid the loser dropout label. Ameliorating that situation does not strike me as claptrap. It is a consumption devoutly to be wished.
The last 50 years have been “educators” deciding to ameliorate that situation” and we see what has happened.