We need to assess the transition from teaching to learning, sharing ideas and resources and assessing ideas based on what the idea is not who said it or how old they are or their formal qualifications. The next step I feel is to abolish the distinction between primary secondary and tertiary eductaion and then go lateral with people being able to study ideas on different levels, grade 4 english 2 nd year uni maths and year 10 geography. this would see 50 year olds and 7 year olds study the same ideas.

It's about learning and there should not be a distinction between learning to listen and learning to speak. between learning to hold a knife and fork and Pythagoras's theorem. one cannot stop learning even if it's a football team's new strategy.

Thanks for the post. All I'd add to your observations are some thoughts that are well expressed in a post by Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/#!/SomeThoughtsOnTeaching

Ironical that a leftist's critical thinking should have finally led him to understand the government's one-size-fits-all compulsory meat-axe approach to everything is not actually utopian after all.

Imagine if a particular religion claimed and exercised the right to compel all children to attend for education the time, place, content, funding and teacher qualifications of which were all to be decided by that religion in its sole discretion. Would you think that religion might engage in a bit of biased indoctrination? Of course it would!

I object to state education for exactly the same reason its supporters object to religious education; only I recognise the statist religion is just as irrational, and far more violent than any religion to date.

Just as church and state should be separate, so should education and state.

State control of education should be abolished. I realise there will then by a cry of "what about the poor?", as if their children arrived by accident and they have no responsibility for their own choices, and as if chocolate biscuits and televisions and mobile phones and microwaves and even trips overseas should have priority over their children's education, as the current system permits and encourages.

Well even if government funding of education were to be continued, that is still no reason for government to run and provide the schools, nasty little Stalinist indoctrination camps that they are, where they teach the children to salivate at the ring of a bell, like dogs belonging to the State.

A real education revolution would see government either removed from the picture entirely, or acting only as a funding channel to parents choosing their child's education from an unhampered market of much greater variety and quality, and it would cost a lot less too.

Hear, hear, JKJ, and the same for health as well. If you can't afford to stay alive you should have thought of that before you were born!

These ideas were of course advocated by John Holt via How Children Learn and other books: Paul Goodman in Growing Up Absurd: Everett Reimer: Paulo Freire: Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society: George Leonard in Education & Ecstasy. Jules Henry via Culture Against Man & other works. And even by A S Neill of Summerhill fame.
Montesorri devised her system as an alternative to the then dominant system which she understood was purposed only to produce cannon fodder for the factories and killing fields.
Which is of course what our "education" system does.Henry Giroux who is inspired by Paulo Freire and others too describes the situation with illuminating clarity.

It’s instructive that the current batch of over privileged and under educated fellow travelers come from Hi Tech teaching systems, small class sizes and a dumbed down curriculum.

I wonder how much better educated, even those with “degrees”, might have been with class sizes of 50, a curriculum that included reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography and science, equipped merely with a stick of chalk, a blackboard and if you went on to do physics at university, a slide rule.

It is that generation that researched, designed, built, marketed and sustained all the electronic wizardry that the current generations use to abuse each other.

They struggle with reading, comprehension, can’t do “sums” and depend upon someone else’s opinion to feel relevant.

If you don’t agree, just read some of the posts on this forum.