The End of Education

Thanks to Jon Husband for the link to Robert Paterson. Paterson points us to Aaron Campbell on the best outcome of an education.

I think both Paterson and Campbell might enjoy a good dose of Ivan Illich's De-Schooling Society (see my book list at right). Don't want to post too much on this tonight, but here are a couple of teasers from Illich:

The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself. But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else's achievement. . . . The learning I prize is immeasurable re-creation."

The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin . . . with the question, "What should someone learn?" but with the question, "What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?"