Re: Off topic: educational methods

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

> In both places learning nears -- nil.
The best cure is the cane, as the sad decline of education in England since
the 1960s shows. Of course, it's no longer permitted to cane children in
most civilized places, but I don't see why adults can't be caned. When I
was at school in England, I was never caned, and I can't remember anyone
who was except a fellow called Orlando, and with a name like that, of
course, anything is to be expected. But the fear of it was enough to make
most of us outstanding students. There was no attention deficit syndrome in
those days. If anyone had it, it was caned out of them. I still suspect
that's a better method than doping children with ritalin and speed.
Interestingly, there was a reasonable amount of teacher/student
interaction. I ascribe this to the lack of civility that was traditional in
those days. Teachers were so sarcastic -- brutal by today's standards --
and students had to calculate carefully how cutting they could be in return
without crossing a certain border.
All these tensions somehow kept our attention from flagging whilst an
enormous amount of knowledge was packed into us (we were doing matrix
manipulations and calculus at 10 -- stuff that wasn't touched in America
until the graduate level).
Paradoxically, my parents were very good friends of A.S. Neill of
Summerhill School fame. But I wasn't sent there and perhaps strangely, did
not particularly want to go--partly because the food there was evidently as
bad as everywhere else, so why bother? All the old Summerhill hands agreed
that Summerhill was not what it had been in in its glory days.
I am left with the impression that there is now too much civility, too much
lack of drama in the classroom. The problem of course with allowing
teachers (always called masters in England in those days) to wield such
power is that some nut always goes overboard. Perhaps that's an inherent
danger of the system, but I can't help feeling that it worked well at what
it considered its task: efficiently imparting knowledge.