"innovational," the students have only these two choices: to drop out (either physically or mentally) or to make themselves smaller and smaller until they can act in ways their elders expect...The students are asked to put aside the best things about themselves--their own desires, impulses, and ideas--in order to "adjust" to an environment constructed for children who existed one hundred years ago, if at all...Even the best teachers, with the best intentions, seem to diminish their students as they work through the public-school system. for that system is, at bottom, designed to produce what we sometimes call good citizens but what more often than not turn out to be good soldiers; it is through the schools of the state, after all, that we produce our armies...In one way or another our methods produce in the young a condition of pain that seems very close to a mass neurosis; a lack of faith in oneself, a vacuum of spirit into which authority or institutions can move, a dependency they
2007-02-12
16:49:30
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2 answers
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asked by
christina rose
4
in
Primary & Secondary Education