Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
But yeah, nominate your pet subjects - let's force kids to learn Shakespeare, Plato, Dickens, history, politiics, how to write a budget or wherever else your bias leans. It doesn't matter. My personal selections are "Buffy the Slayer Studies", "The History of That Time I Thought I Lost My Wallet But It Turned Out I Left It On The Table" and "Why the Formatting of Datasets Really Is Quite Important Guys". The cultural side of the syllabus will involve everyone being forced to learn to sing/play guitar like they were in a shit punk band.
|
People are often reluctant to start investigating a subject which they have existing prejudices about. I agree that students should be free to study whatever they are interested in, but I think you need to pay closer attention to where these interests come from - in many cases, they are just as likely to be a result of culturally/parentally ingrained biases as they are acts of spontaneous expression. The education system needs to take into account that children are growing up in a profoundly anti-intellectual culture which stresses the acquisition of employable skills being 'entertained' over exploring genuine interests, developing meaningful modes of enjoyment, and engaging in critical thought. You dont want a situation where 90% of highschool students are reluctant to study certain subjects in detail because 'That Wont Help Me Get A Job' or whatever. In general, I think youre going to be constantly fighting against the ingrained stupidity that most people grow up into, and it seems it a bit utopian to beleive that left to their own devices students are going to develop a wide-range of meaningful interests. Some will, most wont.
Thats why I think its necessary to have some degree of compulsion when it comes to being introduced to a subject. Sure, noone can ever be forced to learn something they dont want to learn, but I think that (eg) being forced to attend a few introductory lectures on why something is important/interesting may in some cases open students minds to a discipline they either didnt know about previously or had wrong ideas about, and result in them wanting to look into it in more detail. Your pure-voluntary approach might work for subjects where everyone already has a fair idea what they involve (eg Physics/Maths), but it isnt going to work for important subjects which are either unknown or widely misunderstood.
The same applies to the artistic sides of schooling. Left to their own devices, students are most likely going to be interested in what they grew up with, which will probably be shitty mainstream pop/rock music, and hollywood action films. However, I think whole point of education should be try to point to the existence of something beyond mainstream media-culture, and hopefully stimulate some sort of desire to explore further outside these extremely limited boundaries. If because of their upbringing someone isnt aware that (eg) music can be something more than background noise or that films dont have to be primarilly about 'entertainment', how are they likely to learn this for themselves without some kind of guidance? Yeah, having an environment based around free-play instead of compulsion is important, but it needs to be somewhat directed otherwise youre just going to end up perpetuating the status quo by pandering to pre-existing cultural biases without any attempt to show the existence of other modes of relating to the world. Theres a middle-ground between leaving students entirely to fend for themselves, and shoving shakespeare down their throats until theyve lost whatever desire they might have had to read and enjoy literature.