National Brain Fart

After much thought, Ken and I both agree home school kids are probably in a good environment to excel at their own speed without distractions from public school culture (there are numerous other reasons, but most arguments are centered on this one). But, at the same time, there are crucial basic lessons in life that atrophy when children are not in an educational environment away from the home. I think it is very important for a child to work with other students toward and end goal. I think that getting up every day and getting ready and going to work is a very useful skill that I would be horrible at teaching. And my most important reason our kids attend public school is that I think that it's imperative that a student learn to be responsible to someone other than the parent, especially if that person isn't likable . We all have had bosses and co-workers that we don't like, none the less, we still must perform for those bosses and work with our co workers and we still must do the best job that we can. This is the foundation for good work ethics.

What I think needs to change about schools, a lot of things including: abolishing standardized testing, make school uniforms the norm and changing the focus on education to expand the curriculum to more than math and writing.

This guy here has an interesting view of what schools are doing to kids. I agree with him that a lot of time is spent focused on math and writing and very little is focused on the arts. The current form of education was designed to fill an industrial age need. It seems that more and more, society is steering towards an artistic culture, visual media is becoming the standard and print media's popularity is declining. We see art all around us, in internet and computer technologies, engineering, architecture, design, merchandising, advertising and news. There is even a substantial rise in having visualized information for business to share ideas and display results. Yet we seem to be so focused on the old school foundation, that we are crushing the necessary creativity out of our kids. Anyway, it's a difficult problem to solve especially since the mandate of the no child left behind act.

Personally, I think that education (at least at the high school level) should be interest driven. wither a student wants to be a chef or an engineer, that interest will encompass all of the foundation subjects and a great deal of the arts. If a student is passionate about a subject it will drive him to work well at it. And in the end, even if interests change, they will have obtained a broad based education. That's probably best left to another blog :) Enjoy the video, it's thought provoking.