G'day Tahir,
>I think public education is failing everywhere in the world.
So would I if I were being strangled.
>I'm involved in higher education and I'm becoming acutely
>aware that none of the models that we have are well adapted
>to the kinds of population that we have today and the
>changing demands that education faces.
Yeah, we've not been very good at that. These days we're always mouthing
platitudes about 'change' at our bemused charges. And one reason said
charges are so bemused is that our pedagogical practices and expectations
show no sign of having been tailored with anything like those changes in
mind. Mind you, I see no sign that my privately educated students are at
all better off (in the breadth of their intellectual development, I mean -
they're lengths ahead in the boojie 'cultural capital' stakes, of course -
and generally evince a more instrumentalist proclivity, too - but then
they're the ones who'll soon be 'managing' all that 'change', eh?).
>Education was until recently an exclusively elitist preserve and we don't
yet
>have a way of even understanding what a real mass education should look
like.
Well, the Dutch and British public (a confusing word for the English, as, in
this context, they actually mean private when they use this word, but let's
assume we don't) education systems were superb in the sixties and seventies
(I say that as an erstwhile state-school student there and in South Africa,
Namibia and Australia). All I've ever seen of private schools is their
beautifully groomed football and cricket grounds (usually winning at the
former and losing at the latter - as one'd expect, I s'pose), but I'd find
it hard to believe the pin-striped Tories I've heard (and one is forced to
hear so many) had any better an education than the Goldsworthies, Hepworths,
O'Rourkes, Singhs, Patils and M'bandes with whom I was forced to ingest all
that state-subsidised Kreutzfeld-Jakob stew and Tapioca pudding.
Anyway, there's a lot wrong with public schools - more than has been wrong
for the best part of a century - but what's wrong ain't wrong with the idea
of it! What's wrong is to do with the funding of it; the horribly narrow
view held by our betters as to who are, and who are not, public education's
'stakeholders'; and the consequent demoralisation of adminstrators and
teachers in the public sector. That's what's wrong, and nothing else.
>Most of the theories are just a joke. If you think the US is bad, try South
Africa.
I remember learning 'Die Stem', some stuff about heroic voortrekkers, and,
of course, what Dingaan and his 'bleddy keffirs' did to noble Piet Retief at
Umgunghundluvu. That load of mendacious crap, and nothing else. Were the
Rooinek highschools any better? Anyway, Soweto told us what the non-white
schools were like ...
No wonder dumb smug bigotry ruled the roost for so long! That so many got
from there to be the sorts of dazzling people I have the good fortune to
meet on the Net nowadays - well, I can't begin to explain it. There musta
been something in those cultures my pubescent eyes couldn't see.
Best to all,
Rob.
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