Strangechord

Dave Pollard has the most engrossing entries over at How to Save the World. A few weeks ago he wrote about Ivan Illich, 20th century philosopher/writer. Illich wrote a book in 1973 that I’ll be using next term in my independent study on education social movements - Deschooling Society (available entirely online here). An excerpt:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

Wonderful stuff. And the comments led me to another education philosopher, John Dewey. Dewey believed that because every human being is unique, education should therefore be a highly personalized experience. “Dewey says… educators can set about progressively organizing our subject matter in a way that it takes accounts of students’ past experiences, and then provides them with experiences which will help to open up, rather than shut down, a person’s access to future growth experiences, thereby expanding the person’s likely contribution to society.” (source)