Mette G.

I don't know if this has reached the news in the US and elsewhere, but we've been having a rather unique situation here in Denmark over the last
four weeks; almost no kids in the country have been to school!

Infact, there's
been a conflict over workload and such between the teachers' union and
the municipalities which employ them, and they ended up throwing a
lock-out at the teachers. This has led
to a LOT of debate and people complaining over all sorts of things but a major point has been of course, that the poor children didn't
receive any teaching and so did not learn anything while all this is going on.


What saddens me though in all this, is to see the childrens reactions to it all; the older students going
on about how unfair it is, that they will now do less good on their
end-of-year-exams because they havn't had teaching for these 4 weeks.
Noone seems to think that you can decide to study on you own (!) or even that it's possible to occupy yourself meaningfully meanwhile. The younger kids pick up on the adults' attitude too and when interviewed say things like they want to be allowed to go back and learn things in school.

I can
assure you that all the inherent flaws of the school system have been blatantly exposed during this conflict, but noone (parents, students, teachers)
seem to notice that. It made me think about just how deeply ingrained the
ideas of learning and teaching are in our society and in peoples minds -
so that even when it's painfully clear through something like this,
noone sees or acknowledges the problems that school create, for individuals and for society as a whole.

Mette

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Sandra Dodd

-=- It made me think about just how deeply ingrained the
ideas of learning and teaching are in our society and in peoples minds -
so that even when it's painfully clear through something like this,
noone sees or acknowledges the problems that school create, for individuals and for society as a whole.-=-

When there have been long strikes here they're local, and I don't think it's ever been over a week or so, and then the teachers get raises, because people don't know what else to do.

People forget school used to be taught by young women without special training, too, and not so long ago.

Paying teachers more doesn't seem to make anything better except that the teachers feel more professional. It doesn't change who wants to teach or how well they do when they get there, or whether the kids are having any better results.

Our big scandal here was that when a district created benefits for teachers and schools to be rewarded, teachers started cheating with the tests to get better scores. If a kid cheated he was in big trouble, from teachers who were cheating. But people don't seem to be saying, "Don't worry, the tests aren't worth so much anyway."

It's possible that such scandals and spotlights will, eventually, bring more people to see learning as separate from school, or at least to see school as more separate from normal life than some seem to see it. It's not something that grew naturally and gradually.

MAYBE, I hope, it will happen before too many more developing countries copy and adopt those same irritating school systems.

It's not about unschooling except that sometimes people say that maybe unschooling will change the schools. Not much, and not fast, but maybe in the cracks created by their own instability, the fact that some people aren't in school at all and still grow up and get jobs and reproduce will be noticed. Or not. :-)

Sandra

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]