The Wall - We Don't Need No Education!
for a parent it is nowadays quite a challenge to make the "right" decision in regard to the learning environment for one's offspring. For me it certainly is, in particular at this moment I question decisions made. My firstborn daughter is a 1st grader since two weeks and I am already asked to meet her class teacher because of strange behavior. Did we make a wrong decision to put her into an IB curriculum instead and depriving her from her German-Chinese bilingual environment that she grew used to during the last 4 years in kindergarten?
which kindergarten, which school or no school? idle parent or tiger mom? I wrote some time earlier an essay about our own experience in China here. as with everything else we are well advised to choose a middle way which I usually find by looking at the extremes.
In regard to schooling environments the 2013 documentary ALPHABET showed two antipodes of education and learning: the concentration camp like Confucian-Chinese drill and the example of a French educator who raised his child without school. None of these environments are a fit for our children, but they indicate where the journey should go. A recent podcast on the TED radiohour titled “unstoppable learning” has shed some light into making the right decision: it explains some elements of a sound learning environment which we are all well advised to make part of our children’s life and it comes quite close to Tom Hodgkinson's bottom line: in our quest to give our kids everything, we fail to give them the two things they need most: the space and time to grow up self-reliant, confident, happy, and free.
which kindergarten, which school or no school? idle parent or tiger mom? I wrote some time earlier an essay about our own experience in China here. as with everything else we are well advised to choose a middle way which I usually find by looking at the extremes.
In regard to schooling environments the 2013 documentary ALPHABET showed two antipodes of education and learning: the concentration camp like Confucian-Chinese drill and the example of a French educator who raised his child without school. None of these environments are a fit for our children, but they indicate where the journey should go. A recent podcast on the TED radiohour titled “unstoppable learning” has shed some light into making the right decision: it explains some elements of a sound learning environment which we are all well advised to make part of our children’s life and it comes quite close to Tom Hodgkinson's bottom line: in our quest to give our kids everything, we fail to give them the two things they need most: the space and time to grow up self-reliant, confident, happy, and free.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
[T. S. Eliot in The Choruses]