Interesting thought - at least to me - I have just come back from the secondary school that one of my children is still attending for VIth Form. I arrived at 09.00 and reported to reception to collect a piece of work that was left over from last year's Art GCSE. I was asked to wait whist the students dispersed. This afforded me the opportunity to watch the frenetic activity that takes place presumably every morning as the kids and the teachers rush to and fro with apparant purpose.
I know that I went through it, albeit in a smaller school, and indeed most of us have been through it in one form or another. But is it what we should really be doing? Is this really the best way to educate and bring up our kids - to abdicate repsonsibility at age five and chuck them all into an uber creche until they are ready to leave home ( possibly) at the age of 18?
I don't know for sure and I am not saying that it is wrong, after all the schooling system does produce people fit for the social context in the vast majority of cases. It does provide the social context in which we find ourselves with adequate fodder to carry on the tasks that we allocate to ourselves ( or perhaps are allocated to us - directly or indirectly).
Of course it does provide us with qualifications that we are told are either improving or getting worse depending upon the side of the fence that we sit on and it provides us with dentists and dustment, shop assistants and surgeons and so on.
But does it provide us with the right context in which to raise our children, pass on our genes and fulfil a role on the planet and in the ecosystems that we are working within? I am not so sure. I think that the paradigm is running us and not the other way around.
Like I said, just a thought and I guess that I have some teaching to do.
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