I say that, even though I'm totally in favor of public education. I just have a radically different idea of what it should look like.)
I think that I've probably mentioned them before,
Check out Sugata Mitra's ted talks about his "hole in the wall" experiments
And his current colleague, James Tooley.
Mitra experiments with kids teaching themselves, and it works incredibly well. He's a great speaker as well. He got a $1M prize from Ted.
James Tooley, began as an idealistic young lefty teacher, going to work with in Zimbabwe
Yeah - As the marxists would say, he was educated through struggle.
He now researches low cost private schools in the third world.
Remember the young ?Afghan/?Pakistani girl that the taliban shot in the head for openly campaigning for girls to go to school? She came to Britain for surgery and is back campaigning.
It was actually low cost private schools that were educating the girls!
I really enjoyed reading the posts in the thread about schools interfering with transference kids and keeping it from parents.
Part way through, Friday mentions all of the time spent standing in lines, being herded around, sat in rows, sorted into streams and classes.
I refrained from commenting that that is part of state sector education as well. Teaching kids the meaning of hierarchy and their place in that hierarchy. Teaching them how to behave as sheep.
I used to joke with college pal who came from the same county as me, that there was no way that the local (socialist) education authority would waste it's budget educating kids so they could become tory voters.
The fail was already built into the system. Keep them dumb, and they'll go into the coal mines, the steel works and the ship yards, and they'll vote socialist and pay union subs all of their working lives.
Thatcher closed the mines, the steelworks were on strike for a year before thatcher closed them and the unions closed the ship yards with strikes.
The education authority now has an extra vested interest in failing kids, it gets extra funds because of high levels of unemployment.
The last thing it wants to happen is for its unemployed to find jobs.