Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Freedom and Beyond > Status Update

"Schools work hard to transmit to children certain other beliefs and attitudes, perhaps without even being aware what they are, or that they are doing it." - Well, teachers do. John Holt included. It's only a problem if these attitudes are too uniform, or children are restricted in the number of teachers who teach them.

"People may often have had to decide which of a number of applicants they would employ or promote, but they did not decide on the basis of diploma's and school transcripts, because there were none" - diplomas help employers make that decision: they want them. In turn the candidate with a diploma is in a stronger position over the candidate without, they want them too. As a teacher, I don't want the responsibility.

"since we cannot at the same time and in same place be in the jail business and in the learning business, we must get oourselves out of the jail business" - learning (at least not to make the same mistake) is an essential part of the prison experience, the difference between that and the school experience is the ratio of learning to jail.

"To ask or expect the schools...given our present understanding of education, to be innovative and imaginative...seems to be asking for the impossible" - perhaps we should be working on our understanding of education rather than condemning schools.

"To go on talking about the sounds of single letters is, with very few exceptions, the worst thing we can do for the children we are trying to help." - a cheap shot, can't think he has thought about this.There is a problem with English in this, but not one I've ever seen a child blocked by. In any case the distinctions between vowel and consonant, and digraphs etc. follow quickly on.

"...in three critical respects [Freire's] 'schools' were altogether different...they were not compulsory...the neither required nor gave any credentials...they did not lock the student into a prescribed sequence of learning determined in advance." - how much are these constraints a consequence of schools and teachers themselves, and how much a consequence of the political economy schools operate in?

"Men learned as they worked, and the lives of everyone on board ship constantly depended on both the work and the learning being done well...This seems to me the model of a sensible educational system for a poor community, a poor minority group, or a poor nation." - Yep, fewer schools, more war - that'll motivate them!

"Grades tell us little enough, as it is, but if we must use them, the very least we can do is use them to measure academic work and not as a disciplinary threat" - shocked to read of this happening in the US in the 60s. It happens now in Hungary because the schools don't have a disciplinary system with teeth. Likewise in the US, don't they have detention?

"a deschooled society would be a society in which everybody shall have the widest and freest possible choice to learn whatever he wants to learn" - as to 'learning what' the internet has deschooled society, but has also raised questions about the quality of what we we are all free to learn. But what about 'learning how to': resources are required and school has been our traditional way of allocating those resources.

"So the average knowledge job in the American economy today...requires a prior investment like $20,000" - the whole argument conducted without a consideration of the returns on that investment. His economic thinking is frustratingly hit or miss.