Aspies For Freedom

Well heck, let me just be the first to say, YAY!  Thank you for starting a new thread.  I will ponder more from my world and get back to you, on a less personal level than we previously exchanged.  

1.  I think that public education CAN be a good idea.  Not an entirely natural one, but as a people, we progress.  But as I have experienced the reality of the education, it falls short in many ways.
2.  Possible for a state school to accomodate all people?  If you say so.  You have seen it.  I have not.  The academics and studies of things I have a harder time with than the real life experience.  I feel that oftentimes studies are flawed.
3.  That sounds great!  I think there is far too much emphasis put on a college education, and that not all people are suited for all kinds of positions (once they are out of school.)
4.  Individual children should be assessed, yes.  And in ways that they are able to understand and cope with.  So you can accurately judge.  And the test results should be used to help the children on an individual basis.
5.  Children must be educated rather than trained....I think I know what you mean.  I also think that part of the education, of which we are sorely lacking here in the US, is practical knowledge.  How to do the most basic of tasks to run your life in the outside world.
6.  Again, sounds great.  Children are marvelous little sponges.  It must be given to them in pieces parts, but still offered.
7.  Watchful eye, yes.
8.  Secular education?  Nope I do not agree.  Will not agree.  We have a different point of view on that one.
9.  Free would be awesome.  Teachers in my school do not have pencils or paper half the time.  Parents supply the goods.
10.  Another great thought.  

There is a lot of thread to read and it is late. My apologies to all who have posted here who I won't be reading until tomorrow or later. Here are my preliminary thoughts:

1. It can be.
2. It would depend on the way the school is set up. Not everyone learns the same way.
3. Gotta think about that one.
4. Depends on what is meant by "assessment."
5. Not sure the distinction being drawn here.  It is difficult to get educators to agree on what, exactly, "educated" means .... so ????
6. Why would any ideologies be excluded? That sounds like "abstinance only" sex education here in the US.
7. Of course.
8. Of course.
9. Of course.
10. This sounds like what is called "tracking" here in the US, and comparative studies between tracked and untracked schools have been inconclusive. I would be particularly concerned about it at lower grade levels because a consistent finding was that small skill level differences at lower grades translated into pronounced differences years later.

Here are some basic recommendations from my experienced but non-expert perspective:

1. smaller schools. Anthropology tells us that the natural tribe is about 150 people. That should be the biggest school.
2. smaller classes.  No more than 10 to 1 ratio.
3. more hands-on, engaging activities.
4. fewer worksheets.
5. zero tolerance for unkind words or actions.
6. greater focus on the long-term goal of raising confident, competent adults.
7. more opportunities for children to pursue learning through their own interests
8. less focus on testing and scores. It's like trying to bake a cake when somebody keeps opening the oven door and jabbing a knife in to see if it's done.
9. less infatuation with electronic gadgetry. A superior education is possible with almost no access to electrical devices. Hire more teachers rather than buy more gadgets.
10. there is no number ten. I'm tired. Goodnight.

On this I totally agree.  It is one of the reasons my children are not in public school.  Everything is a competition.  Every stupid little thing. But it isn't quite accurate to call this "individualism," though individualism plays a role. It is Social Darwinism.

I went to a public school with tracking in Alabama.  You guessed it, all the dark-skinned kids were in the 'basic' classes and all the blue-eyed kids were in the 'advanced' classes.  <*sarcasm* Funny coincidence. > Here's the worst of it, though, the advanced and basic classes ate lunch at different times, had breaks at different times, etc.  I went to a school where at least half of the students were black and I would not see a single black kid all day long.

Yeah, it was very different from what I was accustomed to. Keep in mind, though, that this was almost 30 years ago.  <Now I feel old.>

Wondering, I think maybe you just want to argue because I called you on those unsupported statements regarding homeschooling (different thread, and I'll get there soon enough). Yes, individualism is necessary for Social Darwinism, but it is not sufficient.  Furthermore, an individualist philosophy does not preclude a cooperative society. After all, self-interest leads to cooperation more often than not. If this were not true, then toddlers, the most self-interested of all humans, would never learn to share.

Aside: Point of fact is that Darwin would probably not be very pleased that his name is used to describe Spencer's philosophies. "Survival of the fittest" is a bastardization of his theories. Oh, well. Society has always preferred a good sound byte over accuracy.

I thought we were talking about all pre-university education. It certainly should be part of the curriculum by middle school.

Next spring I will take my oldest, who will be 14, to the Holocaust Museum.  The last time we looked at 20th century history he was 10 and I did not feel that he was ready for that much information.  I do not believe in censoring information, but in helping the child put it in context and evaluate it.  This is where things get sketchy at public schools, where they tend to simply avoid any topic that might lead to questions about which the teacher or parents might feel uncomfortable.

From my understanding, fascism does not necessitate xenophobia, though that is one of these easiest means for forging/strengthening national identity.  Fascism is sort of the opposite of individualism, ie, the needs of individuals are invariable subordinated to the needs of the state/society.

Any good idea can be practicable given the right priorities. My vision is of neighborhood schools, where pretty much every student can reasonably walk to school.  Save a lot of money on transportation, too.

"smaller classes.  No more than 10 to 1 ratio."

My classes were that small. Class sizes are not such a big problem in Europe. Of course it's a good thing.

As I've stated on another thread some time ago, moving to Germany is probably what saved me academically. Small school, small class, and the teachers were allowed to teach rather than dictated a curriculum and methodology that must be followed in the vain hope of producing optimal educational units.

In theory.  In practice, no teacher can keep up with 25 or more students.

And so.  It seems that our ideas about what a 'good' public school would look like are fairly similar.

As with 'individualism,' there are many types of 'capitalism.' The type of capitalism you address here collapses upon itself. Resources cannot be exploited indefinitely.

In the 'primal' way you define individualism, what you say makes sense.  Most people do not define the word in this way, it is not common usage. The word more frequently associated with that type of 'primal' self-interest is 'sociopath.'

The US hasn't had capitalism in the classical sense for, well, my entire life. What we have now could be called, perhaps, corporatism. There is a decided marriage of the state and the corporation such that true competition doesn't exist except at the small, local level. Oligopoly, that's the word I'm looking for. I think a political economist would politely describe us as a "mixed economy." There is a shift in economic thought here such that decision making processes take into account long-term realities rather than just quarterly profit margins, though many industries have hardly taken note.  We are barely surviving our second bad case of "voodoo economics" under Bush II. Pretty much anything is going to be an improvement.

You are correct.  I should have said that I have yet to find a teacher who could pay attention to what more than 25 children are doing every minute of the 7-8 hours the children are at school. Speaking for myself, I cannot know what my 3 children are doing every minute of pretty much any 7 hour stretch. We teach them well and then have faith that they are behaving according to their upbringings.  At school, there is no guarantee regarding how the other children have been raised to behave. Some of the parents I've attempted to talk to have been nothing but little bullies all grown up, quite certain that the solution is not for their child to be more respectful, but for my child to "toughen up." This board is full of stories, I need not offer more here.

Let's just say that the same people who sit on corporate boards also serve on government panels related to those industries. It is common rather than unusual for the same person to serve on several boards of directors within an industry. or across related industries. I designed the database for coding research on exactly this topic in the 90s. (Aside: when looking for funding, one response asserted that Elite Theory was "passe." ) As for the generalizations about how people in the U.S. behave, it might be instructive for you to conduct some post-graduate work over here and see for yourself. Anomie is a whole other tangent that I'll not pursue, though maybe on the chavs thread....