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.

Thanks for the list of authors & book titles Ducky, the titles make them sound like a good list to avoid.

In fact they sound like the very people who have turned our education from one turning out useful cannon fodder into one turning out totally useless academics & bureaucrats.

This bit of cannon fodder managed to use the old education, to a have a productive life, with sufficient earnings to be able to do everything I ever wanted to do.

This included voluntary cannon fodder, flying jets off aircraft carriers, developing manufacturing techniques, sailing my yacht around the pacific, or breeding horses.

It was remarkable how much they taught us cannon fodder, back in the day. I was recently reminded that at while still in primary school I could draw a map of Oz, with state boundaries, rivers & harbors, most cities, & the distances between them, & I was not a good geography student by any means. I was reminded of this, when a young biology teacher asked if it would take all day to drive from Brisbane to Cairns. She's a BSc for gods sake, & can't read a map.

A few years back I was asked by a youngish arts graduate if I would take him & his motorbike out to the reef from the Whitsundays. He wanted to ride his trail bike up the reef to Townsville. What do they teach them at Uni today, it certainly can't be to read?

A revolution usually includes lining much of the old guard management up against a wall, & getting messy. This might be going a little too far with education, but mind you, only a very little too far. Yep, much better turning out useful cannon fodder, than the sheep of today.

Hi tomb,

The words we use are the tools we use to think with. These "special" words you use constrict rather than expand understanding. They function to reduce complexities of experience into trite, platitudinous "buzz words".

Your comments are founded on a socialized (moral and value laden) fabric, whilst these can be of certain value to issues, they are relevant only after critical analysis and not as a substitute.

Critical thinking is defined as "the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion" and "disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence".

Tomb, your were never educated, you were “conditioned” and regardless of what you think you learned, the outcome tells us you have very little between the ears.

Let’s start with taking out of your post, all those things that are “buzz words”, “rhetoric” and “thought terminating clichés”.

We need to “assess the transition from teaching to learning”?
“sharing ideas and resources”?
“assessing ideas based on what the idea is not who said it or how old they are or their formal qualifications”?
“abolish the distinction between primary secondary and tertiary eductaion (sic) (its spelt “education” Tomb) ?
“then go lateral with people being able to study ideas on different levels” “this would see 50 year olds and 7 year olds study the same ideas”.?
“there should not be a distinction between learning to listen and learning to speak”. ?
No difference 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”. WTF?

What a load of old cobblers Tomb. It concerns me that you actually believe you “said something” significant.

If you (or your friends) disagree with my assertions, you can always offer an explanation.

Spinning round in your head is a CD packed with rhetoric, buzz words and clichés. You string these together thinking they have some intellectual merit however, when you remove these there is absolutely no content in your post whatsoever.

after scraping through high school (largely due to being good at sport) I now see one of my boys in med school and a daughter with a couple of degrees and honours in languauges. The kids were home schooled for a number of years (despite having to fight the education department). They were taught to think and read. Soon as they reentered the chaos and indoctrination of school they saw how broken the system was. The more money poured into the system the more its seems to be broken. The system has pushed out the vast majority of male role models needed by boys.

Education is just learning. We call it education in order to formalise teaching. Think it is better to talk about the transition from education to learning rather than bickering about different types of redundant education platforms. What is relevant and what is the best way to learn it. Can we isolate learning from reality? We are trying to move forward to a more relevant and inclusive learning environment that excludes no one. Work and learning and leisure need to converge