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[escepticos] Re: [escepticos] Educación (y) en el escepticismo.

Pastronomía wrote:
Quizás no haya mayor evidencia de la veta magufa que todos llevamos dentro que aquellas que atañen a nuestros hijos. Los queremos más que a nosotros mismos y seguramente eso nos hace vulnerables. Pero precisamente por eso es interesante analizar las opciones que hacemos a la hora de transferirles nuestros valores. (Eso que llamamos educación). Los conocimientos que transferimos son importantes, pero...
Mi pirámide de anhelos filiales tiene prioridades extrañas, definidas sin duda por mi cortedad propia. Pero quiero que mis hijas sean buenas personas, (probablemente eso signifique escépticas en parte), luego felices, luego inteligentes, luego ...
En fin, la televisión, con todos sus males puede ser un instrumento magnífico a la hora de educar a cualquier persona. Los programas buenos, malos y espantosos se suceden hora tras hora, en mi experiencia igual que los docentes de cualquier liceo. (Reconozco que la escuela es un poco más grave ya que si te toca una maestra papanatas no hay mucho para equiparar hasta el año próximo).
Al hilo y casi en consonancia con lo que decía Eloy de la libertad de elección, que les parece este comentario del psicólogo Roger C. Schang que dice que la escuela hace infelices a los niños y, como demuestran los exámenes, aprenden más bien poco. Por ello debería cambiarse por sitios seguros donde los niños aprendiesen lo que quisiesen y se les guiara en ese aprendizaje: un sitio atractivo donde los niños estuviesen encantados de ir. "Necesitamos adultos que amen aprender, no que lo odien porque les recuerda los horrores de la escuela". Pego el texto completo del portal Edge en http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_2.html#schank 

No More Teacher's Dirty Looks
After a natural disaster, the newscasters eventually excitedly announce that school is finally open so no matter what else is terrible where they live, the kids are going to school. I always feel sorry for the poor kids.
My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don't learn much.
When you listen to children talk about school you easily discover what they are thinking about in school: who likes them, who is being mean to them, how to improve their social ranking, how to get the teacher to treat them well and give them good grades.
Schools are structured today in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years philosophers and others have pointed out that school is really a bad idea: 

   We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or
   fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and
   do not know a thing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

   Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from
   time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. —
   Oscar Wilde
Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them. The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have just been spoon fed. 

The Government is and always has been the problem in education:

   If the government would make up its mind to require for every child
   a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one.
   It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they
   pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of
   the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school
   expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. — JS Mill

   First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He
   created school boards. — Mark Twain
Schools need to be replaced by safe places where children can go to learn how to do things that they are interested in learning how to do. Their interests should guide their learning. The government's role should be to create places that are attractive to children and would cause them to want to go there. 

   Whence it comes to pass, that for not having chosen the right
   course, we often take very great pains, and consume a good part of
   our time in training up children to things, for which, by their
   natural constitution, they are totally unfit. — Montaigne
We had a President many years ago who understood what education is really for. Nowadays we have ones that make speeches about the Pythagorean Theorem when we are quite sure they don't know anything about any theorem. 

   There are two types of education. . . One should teach us how to
   make a living, And the other how to live. — John Adams
Over a million students have opted out of the existing school system and are now being home schooled. The problem is that the states regulate home schooling and home schooling still looks an awful lot like school.
We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite. 

Just call school off. Turn them all into apartment houses.


saludos

Pedro