Re: Agile education and pragmatic schooling

On Monday, June 28, 2004 at 2:42:16 PM, 
    Benjamin Walling <bwalling-kc006eDv7NM3AZtZ2NlBNQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Public schools tend to concentrate on the learning of facts, instead
> of learning to learn.

I don't know about the offical goal of schools in the US, but in Germany
the motto, that should be comitted to the students, is "Non scholae,
sed vitae discimus". (I'm not really sure that this is an official goal,
but, at least, it's the aim of the school I'm going to---though maybe I
have just luck that it's a humanistic one.)

In practise, howsoever, just few students grasp this concept and the
rest does not seem to be able to receive this message because of
their ignorant interpretation of the purpose behind being in
school, which [interpretation] mostly results in ad-hoc learning
which means pushing the necessary facts into your short-term memory as
the next test comes closer instead of listening and reflecting what's
told in the actual lessons.

But I don't necessarily put blame on the teachers, because most of them
(esp. the elder teachers) *actually* try to prepare the students for
later life; it's much more the negative attitude of the students.

This makes schools a depressengly suboptimal institution for smarter and
interested people, and, guess what, I feel myself hopelessly
underdemanded most of the time. Still, I have to get almost two years
behing me before I eventually get the formal justification that I'm
qualified for attending a university (I hope it'll look better there.)


-- tcr (tcr\@freebits\.de)  ``Ho chresim'eidos uch ho poll'eidos sophos''



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