> In the tender grades, the schools are a baby-sitting service during a period of collapse of the old-type family and during a time of extreme urbanization and urban mobility. In the junior and senior high-school grades, they are an arm of the police, providing cops and concentration camps paid for in the budget under the heading 'Board of Education'. The educational role is, by and large, to provide -- at public and parents' expense -- apprentice-training for corporations, government and the teaching profession itself, and also to train the young, as New York's Commissioner of Education has said (in the Morley case), 'to handle constructively their problems of adjustment to authority'.
> These are a few speculations of one mind. My purpose is to get people at least to begin to think in another direction, to look for an organization of education less wasteful of human resources and social wealth than what we have. In reconstructing the present system, the right principles seem to me to be the following: To make it easier for youngsters to gravitate to what suits them, and to provide many points of quitting and return. To cut down the loss of student hours in parroting and forgetting, and the loss of teacher hours in talking to the deaf. To engage more directly in the work of society, and to have useful products to show instead of stacks of examination papers. To begin to decide what should be automated and what must not be automated, and to educate for a decent society in the foreseeable future.
For all interested in alternative approaches to education, I recommend A. S. Neill "Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing" (1960), especially chapter 1 (about the Summerhill school itself). The schools started in 1920s, and sadly, we made no progress in that direction in the last century.
> These are a few speculations of one mind. My purpose is to get people at least to begin to think in another direction, to look for an organization of education less wasteful of human resources and social wealth than what we have. In reconstructing the present system, the right principles seem to me to be the following: To make it easier for youngsters to gravitate to what suits them, and to provide many points of quitting and return. To cut down the loss of student hours in parroting and forgetting, and the loss of teacher hours in talking to the deaf. To engage more directly in the work of society, and to have useful products to show instead of stacks of examination papers. To begin to decide what should be automated and what must not be automated, and to educate for a decent society in the foreseeable future.