“Ik vind dat echt "freaky", waarom in godsnaam je kinderen niet naar een gewone school sturen? Een school is meer dan een kennisfabriek, het is als het ware een samenleving in microvorm. Jongeren leren er dus omgaan met allerhande situaties die zich IRL ook kunnen voordoen. “
==> Wel, lees eens het boek van Adler & Adler ‘Peer Power. Preadolescent Culture and Identity’ Rutgers UP 1998
Dan leer je de realiteit van het klasleven wat systematischer kennen. Natuurlijk ontken ik niet, dat in een klas goede dingen gebeuren in sociaal opzicht. Maar er gebeuren ook heel vaak nare dingen. Een klas is een heel kunstmatig milieu: het is vanuit algemeen menselijk oogpunt zeker niet normaal te noemen, dat je zoveel uren moet (niet: mag) doorbrengen met een een groep die, vooral inzake leeftijd, zo extreem homogeen is; en dit in omstandigheden, waaronder je noodgedwongen voor allerlei elementaire handelingen (spreken, naar wc gaan) toestemming moet vragen. Al mijn kinderen hebben natuurlijk wel ervaring met dit soort leersituaties, met name op de muziekschool en andere avondcursussen die ze volgen, maar ik zie niet in wat er heilzaam is aan een voltijds regime van 32 of meer uren per week in dit soort situatie. Ik verwerp lesgeven in klasverband helemaal niet uit principe, maar ik geloof niet dat voltijds klaszitten perse heilzaam moet zijn. Eerlijk gezegd, ik geloof dat zo’n voltijds regime véél te véél is.
http://www.psycport.com/news/2001/01...D.Missing.html
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“Ik vind echt dat je je kinderen iets fundamenteels ontnomen hebt”.
==> Werd Goethe iets fundamenteels ontnomen? Bertrand Russell?
Enkele quotes met betrekking tot dit ‘ontnemen’:
“I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.” Edward Grieg, quoted in Henry T. Fink, Grieg and His Music (1929), page 8
“I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.” Thomas Edison, quoted in Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (1959), page 20
“But now a much worse peril began to threaten. I was to go to school. I was now seven years old, and I was what grown-up people in their offhand way called "a troublesome boy." It appeared that I was to go away from home for many weeks at a stretch in order to do lessons under masters. . . . . Although much that I had heard about school had made a distinctly disagreeable impression on my mind, an impression, I may add, thoroughly borne out by the actual experience, I was also excited and agitated by this great change in my life. I thought in spite of the lessons, it would be fun living with so many other boys, and that we should make friends together and have great adventures. Also, I was told that "school days were the happiest time in one's life." Several grown-up people added that in their day, when they were young, schools were very rough: there was bullying, they didn't get enough to eat, they had "to break the ice in their pitchers" each morning (a thing I had never seen done in my life). But now it was all changed. School life nowadays was one long treat. All the boys enjoyed it. Some of my cousins who were a little older were quite sorry--I was told--to come home for the holidays. Cross-examined the cousins did not confirm this; they only grinned. Anyhow I was perfectly helpless. Irresistible tides drew me swiftly forward. . . . . How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I made very little progress in my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor. The greatest pleasure I had in those days was reading. When I was nine and a half my father gave me Treasure Island, and I remember the delight with which I devoured it. My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn”. Winston Churchill My Early Life (1988 reprint), pages 8-9, 12-13.
“The New York public schools of that era gained a reputation later for high quality, partly because of the nostalgic reminiscences of famous alumni. Feynman himself thought that his grammar school, Public School 39, had been stultifyingly barren: "an intellectual desert." At first he learned more at home, often from the encyclopedia. Having trained himself in rudimentary algebra, he once concocted a set of four equations and four unknowns and showed it off to his arithmetic teacher, along with his methodical solution. She was impressed but mystified; she had to take it to the principal to find out whether it was correct.” James Gleick Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), p. 30 © 1992 James Gleick, all rights reserved.
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“Bovendien vind ik het waanzinnig om jongeren van 15-16 jaar naar een universiteit te sturen. Intellectuele capaciteiten hebben daar niets mee te maken. Ik denk dat zeer veel jongeren op hun 15-16 capabel zijn om universitair onderwijs te volgen (Amerikaans onderzoek wees dat al eerder uit). Maar daar gaat het niet om, kennis wordt niet in een "hol vat" gegoten, het moet ingebed raken in een persoonlijkheid en een bepaalde emotionele setting.”
==> En door welke instantie moet die ‘setting’ dan gebeuren? Welke Big Brother bepaalt, welke ‘setting’ de goeie is? Wij zullen onszelf wel ‘setten’. Wat moet een jongere dan doen, als ie na 3 of 4 jaar (studietempo: gemiddeld een uur of drie per dag) een middelbaar diploma heeft? Thuisblijven, kwestie van niet ‘freaky’ te zijn? Trouwens, ik stuur die kinderen niet naar de universiteit, ze willen dat zelf.
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“Anderzijds zijn zulke kinderen hoe dan ook vervreemd van hun leeftijdsgenoten en zelfs van een flink stuk van de samenleving.
Hoe je het ook wil draaien of keren ze zullen zichzelf als "anders" beschouwen, wat ik maatschappelijk gezien geen schitterende evolutie vind.”
==> Uw ideaal is dus blijkbaar een samenleving waarin iedereen zich als hetzelfde beschouwt. Wel, ik kan enkel maar zeggen dat mijn ideaal anders is. Ik ben geïnteresseerd in de individuele verschillen van mensen (groepsverschillen interesseren me daarentegen weinig of niet). Alles wat echt waardevol is, komt uit het individu, en ieder individu is ten gronde ‘anders’. Daardoor zijn we juist mens.
Over de noodzaak van dit anders-zijn:
“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty.”
“[School] forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of the average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school. . . . I was not a creation of the schoolmaster,--the Government Board of Education was not consulted when I took birth in the world. But was that any reason why they should wreak vengeance upon me for this oversight of my creator? . . . So my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in. R. Tagore "My School," in Personality: Lectures Delivered in America (London: MacMillan and Co., 1921), pp. 114-115 “
“. . . I worked most of the time in the physical laboratory [at the Polytechnic Institute of Zürich], fascinated by the direct contact with experience. The balance of the time I used in the main in order to study at home the works of Kirchoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, etc. . . . In [physics], however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. In justice I must add, moreover, that in Switzerland we had to suffer far less under such coercion, which smothers every truly scientific impulse, than is the case in many another locality. There were altogether only two examinations; aside from these, one could just about do as one pleased. This was especially the case if one had a friend, as did I, who attended the lectures regularly and who worked over their content conscientiously. This gave one freedom in the choice of pursuits until a few months before the examination, a freedom which I enjoyed to a great extent and have gladly taken into the bargain the bad conscience connected with it as by far the lesser evil. It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly. "Autobiographical Notes," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Paul Schilpp, ed. (1951), pp. 17-19 © 1951 by the Library of Living Philosophers, Inc.
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“Ben jij één of andere religieuze dissident of wat?
Sorry, maar dat soort indruk geef je wel...freaky....”
==> Wat bedoel je met ‘religieuze dissident’? Is er dan een standaard-religie in voege, ten opzichte waarvan je al dan niet dissident kunt zijn? Kun je me zeggen dewelke? En als je helemaal geen interesse hebt voor georganiseerde religie, wat ons geval is, ben je dan ook dissident? Ben je dan ook ‘freaky’? En is het erg om ‘freaky’ te zijn? Is het erg om dissident te zijn? Is het...
(quotes gepikt van:
www.learninfreedom.org)