No more schooling

In response to the article, "Further Notes on the Four Resources Model," by Allen Luke and Peter Freebody, I will recount a conversation I had with 9 of my students this afternoon in class. Because more than half the class was missing, we deviated from normal class routines and broke into interesting but random discussions. A key component of the article reads, "it remains our contention that, within a certain range of procedures, differing teaching approaches work differentially with different categories of students." Through our random discussion my students concluded that we should nix the whole notion of school. Schooling programs children to be a certain way, a robot of sorts. One student went up to the board and related students going into school and coming out of school with the idea of a natural resource going into a factory and coming out as a car. The finished product is a set thing. Our model of schooling does not work for everyone, evident in those students who fail their classes or drop out of school. Another student said that because we HAVE to go to school and HAVE to do homework, schooling becomes a big chore instead of a great way to learn about the world around us.

I am a math teacher and a firm believer in furthering one's education by schooling, but I do think that our system has forced our youth to fit a mold....even when we compare American society to other societies and realize that here we have a lot of OPTIONS and in most other places they have more of a set track in their educational career. I am torn, because I agree that students can learn a LOT by just life experiences and then do not think of their education as something forced upon them. Yet, how do we properly ensure that our students are learning what they need to learn if we have alternative methods of schooling? Or, does it really matter?