I also think primary school education as it currently exists is very badly designed from the perspective of “do no harm to children”, since it is practically designed to introduce conformity, stifle creativity and in general produce very weird socialization patterns (like what is this deal with sorting children into pseudo-military regiments based on their date of manufacture?).
First off, it seems to me the PRIMARY advantage of humans over other animals is that we can work cooperatively in highly complex ways in very large groups. I don’t know if you’ve seen how our closest relatives the Chimps and Bonobos do in large groups, its not very inspiring. Humans are a domesticated animal, we have domesticated ourselves. And the domesticated humans appear to be by many measures the most successful creature on the planet, and certainly the most intelligent.
So should it really surprise you that a lot of the effort of school is to train cooperation? Presumably our evolved ability to cooperate is tuned to work up to maybe a hundred or a few hundred humans, before we start, very sensibly killing the strangers and stealing their women and children as slaves, before they do that to us. DNA is only one way to pass stored species knowledge down through the generations, culture is the other. And culture seems to have enhanced human productivity by factors of thousands over what it was when we first picked up the bulk of this genetic design 10,000 years ago.
My 15 and 13 year old daughters have cringed at the thought of being home schooled instead of being allowed to go to their underfunded and not very spectacular in any way suburban california public elementary and middle schools. I think you may be telling a micro story about the bathwater and missing the macro story of the baby. Schools do lots of great things. It is entirely possible they could do much better, but they are already way better than nothing.
My 15 and 13 year old daughters have cringed at the thought of being home schooled instead of being allowed to go to their underfunded and not very spectacular in any way suburban california public elementary and middle schools.
That is probably because they have friends and most of their social circle there. Surprisingly people have had friends and social circles for millennia before schools.
First off, it seems to me the PRIMARY advantage of humans over other animals is that we can work cooperatively in highly complex ways in very large groups. I don’t know if you’ve seen how our closest relatives the Chimps and Bonobos do in large groups, its not very inspiring. Humans are a domesticated animal, we have domesticated ourselves. And the domesticated humans appear to be by many measures the most successful creature on the planet, and certainly the most intelligent.
So should it really surprise you that a lot of the effort of school is to train cooperation? Presumably our evolved ability to cooperate is tuned to work up to maybe a hundred or a few hundred humans, before we start, very sensibly killing the strangers and stealing their women and children as slaves, before they do that to us. DNA is only one way to pass stored species knowledge down through the generations, culture is the other. And culture seems to have enhanced human productivity by factors of thousands over what it was when we first picked up the bulk of this genetic design 10,000 years ago.
My 15 and 13 year old daughters have cringed at the thought of being home schooled instead of being allowed to go to their underfunded and not very spectacular in any way suburban california public elementary and middle schools. I think you may be telling a micro story about the bathwater and missing the macro story of the baby. Schools do lots of great things. It is entirely possible they could do much better, but they are already way better than nothing.
That is probably because they have friends and most of their social circle there. Surprisingly people have had friends and social circles for millennia before schools.