"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.†--Plato
I just thought I’d bring up the topic for discussion, I got other thigns to do and will post later. 
Yes, that would be ideal, but most everything is forced, coerced and seduced in this nation.
Great idea, dont know if plato had children of his own but this just would not work. Firstly there are some things that simply cant be dressed up to look interesting, secondly dressing up everything to look interesting is going to make the parents life alot harder, and would be impracticle for day to day tasks, finally children would not learn that there is alot in adult life that we have to do that we dont want to or are noit interested in. It would make them spoiled. If i could adapt the qoute it would simply say “direct children by what amuses their minds where ever possible.”
And do to each for each child would still be a culture of forced learning, the problem with today’s forced educational systems is that they’re under-funded and the criteria for classes based on junk science/junk methods of teaching.
They kill the desire for education in children early on.
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This is basically what Montessori schools do. Teach Johnny only what he wishes to learn, when he wishes to learn it. Yeah, Rhino - it does make them spoiled. I’d drown my kid before I sent him to one of those schools.
The problem is that not all children are geniuses, despite what their parents think.
You can’t always get what you want. There is more to education than school. Stop your whining, realunoriginal. You can read and write. Educate thyself.
Cyrene - The desire to learn is not inborn - at least the desire to learn math and history isn’t. Nothing is being killed.
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I’m wondering what he meant by child or if he meant young adult… hmmm…
Either way I agree with plato conditionally - some kids should be allowed to do what plato said (i.e. it’s obvious they are better self learners), so should have the option of learning at their own and not be restricted to classes.
I did time in Montessori.
It’s anyone’s guess wheather I’m “well educated,” and if Montessori had anything to contribute, I’m in denial. Certainly not spoiled.
It’s a hoax. The whole damn thing. A hoax. Parents spend tonnes of money, and the teachers shove grades together and tell them to shut up and learn. They’re like compulsory school except . . . with no direction, no merit. They certainly pretend a lot of ideals when introducing parents.
Now Waldorf Rudolph Steiner school had potential. But because they didn’t believe in compulsory education and hadn’t been around long, the school boards of most provinces kicked them out (with the aid of stupid parents).
I believe youth schooling is obsolete by today’s common information access. Get a babysitter if you need to, heap them altogether if it’s the cheaper way. But stop fooling yourself. You’re sending them to be babysat when your life is too busy, not to learn.
Mind you, compulsory schooling at one time did serve at least one purpose. Sick, demented parents couldn’t be guaranteed ultimate power over their kids as long as some governmental institution was (mildly) keeping some tab on what’s going on with them. But now homeschooling is legal about everywhere for any reason. So no one can check up on their lifestyle.
If you see no other way to set up a social structure, then still send your kids to school. Better a prison with other inmates than a prison alone. Your greatest enemy is yourself.
That’s funny, I didn’t read the Plato quote in the OP as having much to do with public education. My sons go to public school, but I’m not leaving it up to the teachers there to teach my kids how to enjoy LEARNING. I work on that myself, by reading with them and listening to them read (the local library is one of our main haunts), teaching them about art and music (and paying for lessons), and using the many discussions we have to ask what they think about a subject and why. I seldom answer questions straight out (unless I’m too tired or have had too many questions already!) but instead make them think it through, or look it up. Also, we go lots of places so that they can experience the diversity and variety of the world outside of their usual comfort zone. We’ve had great discussions on homelessness, crime and punishment, homosexuality, hypocrisy, racism, to name a few. I answer their questions as honestly as I can, even sometimes when it’s not comfortable, because I think sugar-coating will eventually turn them off to asking questions as they get older and increasingly able to see through the lies.
It’s my experience that kids are naturally inquisitive, and as long as they have a happy, secure environment where the adults are very involved in learning, too, they’ll be fine. As a parent, I do my best to create that sort of environment and give them some tools and they seem to be able to proceed from there, for the most part. The worst thing I’ve encountered is occasional resistance to doing the required daily reading for school when they’d rather be playing basketball…but they’re also learning that there’s a time for each (and consequences for not getting work done). But I’ve never gotten the idea that they approach learning in school as being ‘forced’. I would be surprised if they viewed ‘learning’ as something limited to school in the first place.
The best thing I did was pull our boy out of public School and enroll him in the online school called Trent Academy. They were the ones to tell me he had dyslexia not ADD or ADHD or hyperactive as the public schools wanted to say he had. He was not homeschooled, he attended school at home. Boy did the Gov’t want to fight me on that, but, Trent set them straight. He had a teacher that I hired from them. I highly reccomend them if public schools don’t work for your kid. My son now loves to learn.
Kids need educational structure but, even more, they need adults that know and care what is going on with them.
The desire to learn a lot of things is inborn and what sort of things that interest is invested in is largely genetic. With that being said interest in math/history/science is hard to maintain and spark because our mental adaptations are bent towards ancestoral problems, not abstract ones.
That being said it doesn’t matter, people aren’t inborn with the sense to use condoms or anything else, I think the fact that the educational system specifically teaches in a way that humans aren’t good at remembering (humans can remember things much better say if they were taught things in a set order, physics, biology, etc, opposed to having random classes at each and try to force them to remember random facts outside of the body of logic/science that allows the single facts to make sense.
Its a bad system that kills the drive for knowledge (that lots of people have.)
Ingenium - if every parent was like you, we wouldn’t be having this debate about education. We )often) wish to limit learning to school, and in doing so seek to force schools to be evrything to everyone. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
You rock.
There’s the solution to the “education problem” - right there in Ingenium’s post.
I come from a family of schoolteachers. I have done some teaching. What you are saying is music to mine ears.
gaia - you have a good point. I’m not sure why seven-year-olds should have to go to school to begin with. I mean, what do you learn at seven that you don’t relearn later? Or that could have been taught casually at home?
Thanks, faust, the support means a lot coming from you. It’s a family thing for me, as well. My maternal grandparents were both teachers, my mom was a teacher (actually is still a teacher, retired from California schools, currently in Honduras teaching at some one-room school somewhere in the middle of a mountainous nowhere – in her 70’s!) Two siblings are teachers, a brother who chairs his music department at a college in the midwest and a sister who’s a community college instructor here in California. I always joke that we all came out of the womb with the education gene, or it’s a cultural thing. Or both.
A few quotes from Frank:
Tough to argue with Frank on that. Except that actual teacher have tried to fight the power - it’s really the government’s fault. And so the public at large.
Okay (Imp) - it’s the liberals’ fault.