[forensic]

Compare and contrast tradition schools for the wealthy with what became public school.

A proper education comes when you put pupils in a room with a very smart person and let them question him. He answers their questions and introduces them to new ideas. Pupils guide the learning, tutors are just a resource. There are no lesson plans.

This is how the great thinkers have learned and taught since the dawn of man. This is how the wealthy and in-the-know still educate themselves.

When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. They invented "public education" and modeled it after church education where students are preached to and rigidly controlled.

Church is a place where poor people go to be controlled. Public school extended this control programming to the formative years of all the children of the non-elite. Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity.

Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. All the great thinkers, today and in the past, learned by directing themselves and (ideally) questioning smart people. Never by being whipped into doing lesson plans, always by following their creativity and doing investigations and self-directed projects.

[pnathan]

That is a thought experiment, not a citation.

Also, German schooling was famously rigid, and produced a sizable crop of scientists in the 1900-1960 era.

[Fliko]

Actually, German schooling was more famous for it's freedom unlike it's French brother.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_European_research_un...

[pnathan]

Hunh. That is decidedly not the image I had of German schooling. But thank you for the link. It's very interesting.

[Fliko]

Most of the information seems to be stuck in books and harder to find on the internet, I looked for a really long time and that was the best resource I've found so far. It's very possible it's relative to other schooling models.

[forensic]

Your mistake is thinking that school produced those scientists. They produced themselves despite school, not because of it, and they thrived because Germany invested heavily higher education and research. Science in Germany was due to German philosophy, higher education, and lots of funds.

Universities in 1900 are indistinguishable from what we have now. In 1900 they were still targeted at the wealthy and unusually talented. Now they are just extended sunday school. Obedience training for adults.

[pnathan]

Citations, please!

You are saying these things with massive assumptions!

edit for clarification: you are not using any sort of proof mechanism in your statements. No data, no citations.

[forensic]

Wouldn't it be great if you had a personal research assistant who would spend hours looking stuff up for you?

[pnathan]

Wouldn't it be great if you had a conversation with someone who backed up their assertions instead of expecting belief?

[forensic]

I don't expect belief. I expect effort.

I imagine you doing the rounds at dinner parties raising your finger shouting "Citation needed!" over and over again.

Google: gatto, liberal education, conformity, obedience. My argument is a point of view, not a research study.

Gatto cites Dewey, for the record.

[Daniel_Newby]

> When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education.

Rather a lot of the scientists and engineers on the Apollo program grew up in tiny backwater schools funded by local subscription. Their teachers were high school graduates or (if lucky) graduates of a two year normal college. The "educated upper class" consisted of the local town fathers who thought that the average teenager was capable of a lot more than the amusements they would have otherwise picked for themselves. It turns out the town fathers were right.

> Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of learning the classics of high culture in what you are claiming are industrial indoctrination factories.

> Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good.

Calculus, computer science, electromagnetism, chemistry, writing, poetry, etc. 16-year-old me was not yet organized and knowledgeable enough to know where to even begin.