Frank wrote:
....snip...
Rather than recommend a curriculum, I'm gonna recommend that you look
into unschooling. Check unschooling.com and/or just google the term.
....snip...

Self-followup:

If the unschooling.com website is too radical for you, or even if
you're uninterested in the concept, you might wanna try a little book
called _The Teenage Liberation Handbook_.

Good luck,

Frank

From one of my favorite writers, only a bit OT, but certainly no further
afield than the subject has wandered. The writer can be found at
fredoneverything.com

Down With Education

Sort Of



December 29, 2004

Some years back, while laboring in the grim vineyards of police
correspondence for a metropolitan daily, I appeared as a guest lecturer
before a class of undergraduates in criminology at the University of
Maryland. The idea of a major in criminology struck me as peculiar, but
apparently there was one. I was to explain to the students the realities of
police work.

The adventure was a revelation. The kids, a scruffy bunch dressed in student
tatterdemalion, heavy on minorities, were as lacking in polish as in
grammar. Their intelligence seemed low. They had strong, simple prejudices
instead of ideas, and no inclination to examine them. The intellectual level
was that of a rural high school. They appeared to be bored. They had no
business in a university.

Why, I wondered, were we forcing these bedraggled beings to feign a
scholarship which appealed to them not at all, which they at once endured
and degraded-and that at great expense to the public? Why do we make this
burdensome imposition on people who do not want schooling, do not need it,
and do not understand what it is? It is wrongheaded.

I submit that it makes no sense to inflict on the unprepared and incapable a
pretense of a university education for no other reason that to further a
pretense of equality. What real purpose is served? And yet this forcing of
the unneeded on the undesirous runs through all schooling in America.

It makes little more sense to require that the intelligent but uninterested
study what they do not like-usually, the liberal arts. Doing so accomplishes
nothing. An engineer forced to read Blake is merely an annoyed engineer. He
will never touch a book of poetry in his academic afterlife. There is no
reason why he should.

I think that we ought to abandon utterly any requirement that vocational
students waste time on the liberal arts. Schools of engineering,
criminology, and business management are just that, vocational schools,
nothing more. They may be of a high order. Graduating in electrical
engineering from a school of the first rank is not easy. Yet the document
awarded is not a diploma but a trade-school certificate. So is a degree
chemistry or ophthalmology. All are evidence of training, not education. If
a student of chemistry wants to study history, and many might, he should
certainly be enabled to do so. But it should not be required.

Universities usually defend requirements in the liberal arts on many grounds
in which few believe. I suggest that we cease to defend them at all. A
liberal schooling should be a luxury, like a yacht, and should be regarded
as such. The arts are not for many and should be forced on none. They
require much and exact a price. Only the intelligent can profit by them, and
of the intelligent, few want them. Why not make them voluntary?

I now hear of departments of English literature which award degrees to
students who have never read Shakespeare or Chaucer. The students of course
say that such authors are "irrelevant." The literate respond with horror,
leaping to such barricades as may be found in publications on coated paper.

But the students are right. Shakespeare is irrelevant. More accurately,
Shakespeare is irrelevant to anyone who believes that he is irrelevant. You
do not get a federal job by knowing Chaucer, or having heard of Chaucer.
Those forced to study writers, or philosophy, or history they don't want to
study will gain nothing. Those who do want to study them lose much, because
the courses will often be of sufficiently little rigor as not to oppress the
bored.

Yet there are intelligent young of inquiring nature and breadth of mind to
whom liberal studies appeal-students actually attracted to reading Aeschylus
in the original , and Asian history and the Elder Edda, who want to study
Fragonard and Watteau. Let them. By so doing they harm no one. Being
turbulent adolescents under the influence of evil hormones, they will need
direction. Nonetheless if a student chooses such schooling, knowing what he
is choosing, it is his business.

It is not just in the universities that we force the young to study things
that mean nothing to them and will have no influence on their lives. As
soundings of the public monotonously reveal, a minority of the population is
in possession of such arcane information as the century in which the Civil
War occurred, or who fought in World War I, or where Italy might be found on
a map. Things are yet worse: Far more people than we admit can barely read.
Most who can, don't. The United States is not the well-schooled nation that
it seems to believe that it is.

The public schools, say some, have failed to such a degree as to make their
continuance rationally unjustifiable. Yes, they fail, but why? To some
extent it is because they are expected to do what cannot be done-to educate
the uneducable. For reasons of dizzy idealism, we pretend that all students
have the wit to learn. Thus we suffer high-sounding programs like No Child
Left Behind. You cannot ensure that no child will be left behind. You can
try to ensure that no child will get ahead. To this we incline.

As in the universities, the difficulty is that we refuse to separate the
able from the rest, yet insist on attempting to teach to the uninterested
things that they do not want to know. If this effort bore fruit, it might be
justified: A disputable case can be made that the historically literate are
better equipped to vote, etc. But it is easily demonstrated that the
majority do not learn much. Why bother?

A wise course, and therefore one impossible of realization, might be to
recognize that schooling is inherently hierarchical and not susceptible to
populist leveling. A beginning would be to make all study voluntary beyond,
say, the sixth or eighth grade. By then all would have learned to read who
were ever going to learn. Below the university level, private schools unregu
lated by government are the only way to let people study the subjects they
choose at the level of rigor that they want. Freedom from federal intrusion
is crucial. Nothing else can prevent resentful minorities from imposing
invertebrate standards on all.

Fat chance.

I didn't write this - but I like what he sez...

L8R

Skip

--
Morgan 461 #2
SV Flying Pig
http://tinyurl.com/384p2

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you
didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail
away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore.
Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain