My two bits:
What I have found in my country.... either the "mainstream" schools
where there is intense competitveness or the "alternate" schools where
the child is actively discouraged from competition (ok, in my opinion,
for children who have a family business to walk into, but not great
if the child has to take, say, the engineering entrance examinations).
I don't see very many healthy "via media" schools.
Our educational system itself is so very outmoded; we still have the
British legacy where independent thinking is actively discouraged and
cramming, notes, "keys" and examination marks are all-important.
Attempts to improve have only succeeded in further burdening the child
and its parents; you only have to look at parents doing the research
for various school projects to see this! What is taught in the schools
is generally not of much relevance outside academia.
Most youngsters in India either actively opt for professional courses
after leaving school...or drift into other jobs which have no good
university-level courses. Mass education is becoming big
business...but I don't feel that the quality of the teachers or what
is being imparted has improved at all. Mechanical,
lecture-and-take-notes kind of teaching is still the order of the day;
most schools discourage even visits by the parents, though they want
the parents to help in the homework and help the child get those
all-important marks.
I suggested in my daughter's school that they teach children simple,
interesting things like mending a fuse, depositing a cheque in a bank
and so on. Horrors, it wasn't in the syllabus!
I taught basic German, and music, in a school and consistently found
that my classes were often pinched for other, "important" subjects;
and finally parents said that learning a foreign language was
burdening their children; they could always learn it later. That was
the only time that school had an independent courses being designed
and taught along with the school syllabus. That the children enjoyed
the classes, of course, was irrelevant to its continuance.
And whether on TV cable or school subjects, we don't seem to come out
of the "bouquet" mentality. If you take Physics, you cannot avoid
taking Chemistry, and of course you can't learn Economics with it. The
children are so channeled and commanded what to do everywhere...and we
are still obsessed with feeding our children information, rather than
teaching them how to access it and transform it, by analysis and
synthesis, into knowledge.
The surprising part is that this kind of education makes Indian
children perform well on scholastic aptitude tests or professional
courses abroad, so it is perpetuated.
I would like, ideally, to have a combination some stress on rote
memory (like multiplication tables for instance) some stress on
gathering information and then ingesting it, and some stress on
creative thinking....oh well, thankfully, my child is grown up now...!
Rather a negative opinion, isn't it? I do feel sorry for our
overloaded (physically and figuratively) school children...earlier, we
only had to "come first in class"...now they must be good in
academics, debate, sports....
Deepa.
On 5/20/07, Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sun, May 20, 2007 at 08:53:25PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I don't know about your brand of Waldorf or Montessori schools, but ours
> do not prepare kids for harsher realities of the world. They grow up too
> sheltered -- sure, some children need that, but most don't.
First-hand, I've seen the school systems in Russia, and Germany.
Russia was not bad, as far as science was concerned. The German
one was much less demanding, but also more well-rounded (at 13
years it'd better). Since then, things have largely gone to the
dogs almost everywhere
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment
How is school quality in India like?
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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