Great article Brian.

Imagination and creativity seem to be overlooked in mainstream education. I feel that in attempting to remove bias in education (ie personal opinions from essays etc) that learning has become detached at times. I love this quote by Rudolf Steiner (whose ideas form the basis of Steiner schools), below, on learning.

We shouldn't ask: 'What does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order? 'Instead we should ask: 'What lives in each human being and what can be developed in him or her? 'Only then will it be possible to direct the new qualities of each emerging generation into society. Society will then become, what young people, as whole human beings, make out of the existing social conditions. The new generation should not just be made to be what present society wants it to become".

I think you're wrong. I'm a current university student and I'll have a guess that I'm the only one here which has experienced the modern education system. I can tell you now that ideas like yours are already being put into practice and I can also tell you that they are not having the desired effect. Education has lost its rigour, we've lost that solid grounding of knowledge and with that the ability to form opinions of value. For instance students with little experience with the fundamentals of English grammar are asked to take a marxist perspective on Hamlet for instance, which would be fine in they were in university and they knew what marxism was!

In highschool I clung to subjects with any remaining substance such as mathematics or chemistry and spurned the rest which is a shame because I've now discovered a real love for literature as opposed to the mush they taught us in school. Many have noticed the decline in this generations knowledge / interest in history, english, etc... but have failed to lay the blame where it belongs - I'd rather be taught a complete anglo-centric view of history than no history at all