I kind of have a dog in this fight as I live in Asia and my kids go to school there.
It’s funny but if I lived in the West I would want my kids to go to a traditional old-style school (the sort of Catholic schooling I got), with the desks in neat rows facing the teacher, who was an old-fashioned educator trained to impart knowledge and not be a government propagandist. School uniforms would be essential as would a good deal of rote learning the basics (times tables, spelling etc).
However as I live in Asia and see the kids turned into zombies without any social life, being picked up from school to go straight to extra-curricular English lessons, piano lessons, science cramming etc I don’t want that sort of education for two reasons.
One, I reject such a soul-less life for kids, they do need a bit of goofing off time, if not the pressure cooker will blow in their later teens and it won’t be pretty.
But more importantly is that I can’t see the advantage in it if everyone is doing it, they are all turning out super qualified kids to do what? Get a job as an accountant in a computer assembly plant in some industrial town in the provinces? How many rocket scientist or professor of molecular biology jobs are going to be waiting for all these kids at the end of the production line?
Instead against all my original plans my kids to to a local US-franchise school that goes very much against my original gut instinct. It’s a very child-centred education where kids are taught to be expressive, questioning (up to a point) and to find their own talents. It seems to be the sort of place that turns out more creative, artistic types and whilst there may be a surplus of such people in California or New York, in Asia those types are thin on the ground.
I also feel my kids seem to be a lot more relaxed and self-confident than the almost autistic types being turned out by the rote-learning educational factories. Given that much of the ordinary tasks today can already be done by computer program and this is likely to continue I can’t help think my kids will have an advantage. After all who earns more money, the technical people who make TVs and DVD players or the creative types who make the content for those devices?
Maybe I am wrong, only time will tell.
I'm glad you wrote this. This is exactly how it is in asia, and many westerners do not understand what is going on, so they have no problem with this soul-destroying foreign system taking root in America.
You can find asian students who study piano or violin for endless hours, and yet if you ask them who is Liszt or Paganini, you will get a blank stare. Never heard of them.
One, I reject such a soul-less life for kids
Well said.
I think there is a happy medium between the two. The type of school you (and I) went to WAS that ode point: giving kids a sense of boundaries yet not making them into automatons. I don’t like the Montessori method for too young kids but think it good at a later stage. I think of my time in Engineering where the first year was just theories and yet in the final year we were able to take these and create something new in our thesis. You can’t compose a symphony without knowing the scales...