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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
I think specialisation, in the sense you mean, is only ever bad when it closes doors. I think people should have the freedom to study what they want from a very early age. Not discard things permanently, but choose which book they want to read, what picture they want to draw, what game they want to play almost as soon as they are capable of making choices at all. I don't see any problem with a kid completely disregarding a subject for a period so long as they always have the option of going back. It's only the rigidity of the current education system which makes that very difficult to achieve. To me a perfect classroom would be somewhere where children turned up, chose their activity for the day / week / year, being coached where appropriate by someone who had a genuine love of learning.
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I'm not sure something like that could work. Most children would just play games all day, if they were given the option. I know me and my schoolmates would have done. I guess some would paint all the time, but would they leave school literate? What if they were rubbish painters too, effectively wasting their entire school career? Obviously that's an extreme example, but there would be far more occurrences of children leaving school ill-equipped to deal with the world simply because they didn't possess the breadth of knowledge which we do,
because we were forced to do it.
Not to mention the fact that children can't really make informed decisions as they're only proto-sentient (i made up a stupid word! \o/).
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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
But even on a practical level (ignoring the morality of freedom) forcing people to study things they don't want to learn doesn't really seem to work anyway. Maybe a limited number of people need that sort of coercion, but I doubt it applies to the majority
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It applied to me, it has applied to an awful lot of people I've met. Kids, by and large, don't want to be at school, or at least they would rather be doing other things.
What do you mean by "doesn't seem to work"? It worked with me, I didn't enjoy any of my science lessons really, but I can still recall large chunks of them. Teaching people that don't want to learn certainly isn't as easy as teaching people that do, but it can be done.
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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
I might have liked things like art or music or PE, if I didn't have some ****s forcing me to do it.
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If you hadn't had someone forcing you to do it, would you have done it at all?