An Education About Education

Patrick Crozier interviewed Brian Micklethwaite about his views on education. In addition, Brian has returned to blogging about education.

This is one of those areas in which freedom is so important, and yet, not understood. People just assume coercion is necessary, but in my experience no one actually learns anything unless they voluntarily agree to learning. You can force the child to stay there, but then the child is less likely to learn about the subject matter and more likely to learn how to coerce and be coerced. I would hope more of us could recognize that we were incarcerated for much of our early life, and whether we enjoyed school or not, that imprisonment was harmful to us.

I think the subject of an earlier post has some bearing here, in that many can't conceive of scrapping our current school system and not replacing it with anything. Now, I know perfectly well it will get replaced, in fact all the smart parents are homeschooling already, but there won't be a great over-arching "system."

What would you like to learn today?