(2003-09-04) Dave Pollard De Schooling

Dave Pollard recommends the elimination of formal schools for Educating Kids in a SmallWorld model (Deschooling Society). Perhaps it sounds as if I'm reducing education to finding a job, but I'm not. Making A Living is not the same at all as finding a job. Discovering and pursuing the role you want to fulfil in society, what you want to spend most of your life doing, is probably the most important decision any of us makes. To some extent how we make our living defines who we are. And the second objective, becoming an informed, contributing citizen, requires us to learn most of the things that a traditional, elite, "liberal education" requires: a knowledge of history and geography, an awareness of what's happening in the world and what it means. The best way to imbue this, and to measure it, is for the "teacher" to engage students in discussion about specific pre-determined issues, enable the students to do their advance research using the above life skills, the internet, and other tools at their disposal, any way they want to do so, and then gauge each student's progress by the quality of their participation in the discussion.