Harry Pollard wrote:
However, just to sadden your day, the most usual educational argumentMike Hollinshead wrote sometime ago that this was the basic reason universal
against removing compulsion from the school system is that it would put a
lot of kids on the streets where they could cause trouble. The school then
becomes not a teaching institution but an agency for holding kids until
there parents come home - a kind of adolescent creche.
education for adolescents was originally introduced here and in England.
As for the rest I would recommend a read in John N. Warfield's educational explorations on the problems of education in his "An Essay On Complexity" Sept. 1995 and "The Great University" both published by George Mason Univ.
There is a lot of very fine work being done in educational pedagogy especially by the theoretical engineers who expanding design ideas into education in such a way as to clarify the problem. Warfield's comments on levels of complexity applied to articulating the problems of education includes not only the external problem to be solved but the internal change that results when that problem is solved in the student. This then creates a result in the world that often puts them at odds with the models of their parents and the political system. He makes the point that complexity in something like education has two problems, on being that it is assumed that answers in the past will work in the present:
"If something has been valid for 36 lifetimes, it is reasonable to suppose that we have incorporated beliefs and habits drawn from that period of time. But at the same time, it can well be that if we look at the past few decades, i.e., at less than one lifetime, those beliefs and habits have been superseded by new possibilities, even if we are not tuned up to recognize and internalize them."
The second statement is the conclusion of "Essay on Complexity"
"Complexity is a state of mind, triggered into emergence by unsuccessful
efforts to comprehend a system that is immersed in a problematic situation."
Regards
REH
