Carlton green wrote:georgew wrote:pwa wrote:Well you have to come up with a different one then. Fewer holidays and longer days so that there is more school time? Or less work done and less stuff learned?
Well.....it doesn't work that way.
We already know that reducing working time may result in increased production and that to suggest that more hours equals more learning is misleadingly simplistic.
The funny thing is that once I stopped going to school I started to be happier and to learn better. One day at the Technical College and four at work really suited me - in fact it was the best experience of education that I’ve ever had. We all have a pace at which we can assimilate knowledge but unfortunately the education system as is doesn’t accommodate that sufficiently.
What length the optimum school or working week is is something that I don’t know, but as it will vary between individuals one size fits all will have to do. My suspicion is that four focused days of work are more efficient than five, but I’m also fairly sure that if we all changed to that way of doing things then we’d soon discover it was flawed too.
The education system is littered with inconvenient truths, and the first of these is that children should not be introduced to formal education at the age of four or five years of age. Children will learn better if this is delayed to six or later, in common with other European countries as children will then learn more efficiently and more quickly as their brains have now developed sufficiently to cope with formal education. The whole paraphernalia of testing and academic qualifications need to be overhauled and something similar to the Finnish model should be adopted which has been proved to be a resounding success. In addition, teachers should be carefully selected, highly qualified and trained, and they then should be left to create an education programme without interference from Government. Again, it should be recognised that there is no correlation between the school educational qualifications achieved and the quality of the subsequent university degrees.
As has been already suggested, a parallel path of vocational training should run in parallel with the academic one which should be porous and allow easy transfer from each to the other.....I see it as important that this vocational path should enjoy a similar status to the academic stream, as it does in Germany. This would militate against the vast amount of waste in the present system whereby students drop out in the early years of university.
