Jesper Juul (1948 - 2019) was a Danish family therapist and author and a renowned international authority on the family. In his book Your Competent Child (1995, in English 2001) he argued that today's families are at an exciting crossroads because the destructive values — obedience, physical and emotional violence, and conformity — that governed traditional hierarchical families are being transformed.
An okay book that does talk about shortfalls in schools in several countries. I would have appreciated more detailed examples and recommendations for schools to change its system and way of doing things in general.
Overall, the message stays the same as in his other books: they key to education is a good relationship with the student and any system that stands in the way of facilitating one is harmful, period.
Thus, systems that does not place a focus on relationships are harmful (this includes every single teacher training programme that I have ever seen), that systems which make working on relationships difficult (which, to me, includes those large classes you see once a week) are harmful, that systems that are mired in bureaucracy and in which the key players lose focus on what is their actual purpose (i.e., helping people learn) are harmful.
Still, a few pointers would have been appreciated. I'm in an ongoing debate with a colleague about ways to solve this issue and our approaches are directly opposed. I'm all in favour of open learning and individual work with students who seek help, she's for increasing class time with all groups so that she can more easily monitor the students' progress and intervene directly when problems arise. Now I know that Juul says that there isn't one right approach for every student, but I think that these two models offer very different opportunities and wonder which ones would work best where, and for that examples might have been helpful.
Ein Buch von Jesper Juul zur Schule. Das sollte doch wohl interessante Einsichten und Anregungen für die Praxis bieten. So dachte ich und war sehr gespannt, was ich von diesem Buch für mich mitnehmen kann.
Eigentlich kann man sich direkt alles schon zu dem Titel denken, was in diesem Buch steht. Kinder sind überfordert, Schule fordern Leistung und Gehorsam - unser Schulsystem ist am *rsch. Was sonst?
I wholeheartedly agree with most of his ideas, but nothing grinds my gears more than unsubstantiated claims like, 'a lot of so called good students develop mental disorders after leaving school.' How many? Where? How did you check that? What mental disorders? Footnotes, please!