Are you worthless? Are your kids worthless?
What would it take me to persuade you that your future looks like this? "A public school and several years of you attending it" is what you wanted to say? But before anything else let's also have a word about a seemingly unrelated topic - depression.
As usual the point here is to hear from you, so if you don't feel like reading most of this - please navigate yourself to the last part (next to the Dostoevsky picture).
It's not about me, I am neither depressed, nor have I ever had (at least I think so) the "authentic" experience when it comes to depression, but that's not the point. This is just a way to come close to a question that would be interesting to hear about from the people here.
I've recently came across some depression related statistics and before going any further it would only make sense to share them here. According to the World Health Organization over 300 million people around the world are diagnosed with depression, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US and the second leading cause of death for people between 15 and 25, in addition to that around 37% of all people suffering from depression related disorders receive no support (and that also counts for support from the ones close to you) or treatment at all and are not even aware of their condition.
The one thing that all people suffering from depression share can be named as "Not being in the right place in life" and of course there will be a million factors involved here, but I want to ask you about the one that is most "public" - public education. Since majority of those years when you are formed as a person you spend in the education system, it is a fair point to give our modern education system "the look".
Public education, especially the one that I was a part of (post-soviet) sadly makes 80% of kids (by the time they are 12-15 y.o.) adamant that they are complete idiots, which might have had it's own benefits for the regime, but today everyone can have a say in it, which is a benefit hardly anyone uses. I do not want to deprecate the input made by individual brilliant teachers that can be found in any (even the worst) system, I am talking about the thing as a whole.
I am strongly in favor of the approach that can be described by Dostoevsky's quote "People just don't know that they are good until they find out that they actually are", that is surely something that parents play a huge role in, but in cases where kids weren't so lucky - public education delivers the final blow.
And now to get to the actual point - I wouldn't have had these thoughts if I hadn't become a father, but here I am... There are numerous "alternative" approaches to education, such as Montessori, Steiner/Waldorf, Harkness, Reggio Emilia, Sudbury and many more.
Has anyone here attended any kind of alternative school? That is the question that this post urges to know the answer to. Do your children attend any kind of alternative schools? Do you know anyone else who does? Please share some feedback if you have it and even if you don't, share your thoughts about alternative education methods. If you don't have anything to say right now, but might be interested (maybe somewhere deep down) to read about other people's experiences - be sure to check back in a little while.
Yeah... I would not expect this to be a popular subject here, but it should be appealing to some of us at least.
Thanks for your time, peace out!
I am checking back in a little while because I am intrigued with alternative education. I am not sure if "online courses" is considered as an alternative education. I am currently teaching myself programming languages through freecodecamp and w3 schools. Not only but also, I am taking massive open online course.
These days, traditional school needs to adjust with the latest technology and culture. Well maybe soon, there will be remote university as we already have the culture of remote working.
In the US, private and home schools have become increasingly popular options. Much, but not all, of this education tends to be religiously-motivated, and I've seen the quality of this education run the gamut.
On the one hand, these options can churn out science-deniers that will be our future and the death of us all through their brazen denial of climate change. On the other hand, some of the other home schooled children I've met were easily the best-prepared, brightest students (and sometimes kids fell into both of those categories at once, strangely enough).
I've read too much Foucault to think completely positively about public schools. They serve some very particular social functions: children's bodies are accounted for at all times, which is conditioning them into social control; kids stay out of the job market, which helps economic indicators like higher employment numbers and bolstered wages; and the public school does a fairly poor job at actually educating kids whose brains aren't really wired for this weird, rigid model of learning.
I don't want to pretend US schools are the norm, but they're certainly not THAT unique.
I understand that finding the right model of education for your children is a difficult task. Good luck finding one that works for you and your family!
Thanks for the feedback! I've don't know much about US public education, but I wouldn't imagine it being too different from most parts of the world.
The issue I have with public education is that by the time (at least I) you graduate - you don't quite know how the world "works", you don't know what exactly to do apart from what is the next obvious step: to get a job or to go to colleague/university, not knowing why exactly you are doing it. That is of course not the case for everyone, I know people who know what they want to do since like 15 y.o. and stuck to that for the rest of their life, being happy with their choice.
What I feed schools must emphasize on is to show children how to find their way and to make informed decisions regarding their future, rather than just doing what is expected and hope that this will work out
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