alt.education

"*Anarcissie*" wrote:
>On Mar 11, 5:26 am, vaselectro...@gmail.com wrote:
>> as an outsider to american society homeschooling seems an absurd
>> practice to me. The purpose of public school should be to help
>> children to learn how to socialize with their classmates, despite
>> their differences. If the educational system has flaws, the solution
>> is not to isolate kids from "traditional" educational environment but
>> to "build" a new educational system based not on "good citizenship,
>> patriotism and loyalty to the state" but on "freedom, collaboration
>> and connectivity". Since there are so many homeschooling kids why
>> don't you (the parents) try to find a common ground and create a
>> "grassroot type" of educational system?
>
>Well, there is the larger question of what business the
>State has with children, such that children must be
>forced into some sort of institutional processing plant.

Whatever business "we the people" of the various states, all of which
have set up educational systems (most of them in their respective
constitutions), decide.

There are very few limits on state governments, provided that they
don't run afoul of the Bill of Rights.

>The present school system is supposed to be a
>descendant of the Prussian school system via Horace
>Mann,

That is an ideological myth.

The Prussian school system was the first one that was not run by the
church, so in that sense, all government education systems are
"descendants of the Prussian school system".

We also have inherited kindergarten, though it isn't much like the
Prussian concept, and it is becoming less so all the time.

Horace Mann took ideas from whereever he could find them, but there
wasn't any particularly Prussian slant to what he did choose. In any
event, 49 other states have created their own school systems, some of
them at the same time as Mann and independently of him.

>and the intent of the Prussian system was
>precisely to build a strong, unitary state through the
>universal training and indoctrination of young people.

There is no particular evidence that this was the principal goal of
the Prussian system. Certainly it was a strong selling point in
fractured Germany that it could help do so, but the closest equivalent
to that in Mann's ideas was that schools could help in the
assimilation of immigrants who did not have the skills and culture of
people born here.

>The form of school there was at least consistent with
>the aims of the Prussian ruling class. But the U.S.
>is a different country with supposedly different
>principles.

And we ended up with a considerably different system. But every
advanced country has public education, and most countries, unlike the
US have a central education agency dictating policy to the whole
country. That is another way is which we are quite unlike the
Prussian system - school systems here are run by the states, and in
most states, the state power is delegated to local districts where
many of the most important policy decisions are made.

lojbab