Obscura wrote:Industrial society has thrust youth that would normally be of a "working" age where they'd be doing something useful into a pointless artificial world called "school"
"School," how broadly constructed is this? I have to say, anybody who's been between jobs will know what the existence of living without a job can feel pointless and artificial, too.
School, like so many other things in life, defies categorization as being all good or bad. Likewise, the kind of response here easily turns on too much diagnosis and certainty of what's really wrong with schools, or industrial society. The source you give, for instance, is finding his way into this problem through an admitted minority - so I'm less than thrilled at the prospect of having the successful parts of schooling trashed just because some Highly Successful type wants to pick a bone over their feeling of having been held back. It's a valid concern, obviously, but it's fairly useless as a condemnation for the entire system - especially in the years since Columbine and bullying by text have entered the public consciousness, and when calling the Downs students "retards" or constantly talking about "gay" this and that have become less acceptable at school.
Having lived in roughly the same kind of popularity and intelligence orbits the writer describes, I'm quite thankful that I was attempting to manage myself (not popularity so much) in front of a quite diverse number of peers, with some adults, and most everybody pulling towards making it a safe environment - as opposed to, say, living in a hill fort in pre-Roman Britain, when you still had to do all these things, except that your circle of potential friends was much smaller, the parents weren't so accommodating, the food was even worse, work involved knapping flints and pushing logs around, and being unpopular could get your skull bashed in as there always was another offering to be made.
We aren't quite at a stage where we can just use computers, big data, and big society to just tailor school to every student, but we may aim to get there. Up to now, schools show society's interest in pushing standards forward, just like we have this totally artificial construct of a "police force" instead of having everybody take care of business on their own or with the help of only interested parties. It's artificial, but probably unavoidable, and certainly not completely undesirable.
There is a question that goes beyond yours - how long can the old model human stay relevant in an ever-accelerating world? I can say "school" or "industrial society" is to blame but really this argument tends in the direction of wanting a steady-state universe, which unfortunately has no chance of happening.
You're right, though, in stating that school is clearly too artificial and wasteful, so I'd definitely like to see the gap reduced between self-direction and being sequestered for the good of society until the arbitrary date of release. Some kind of safe harbor and route for ordered learning has to persist though - young teens can't suddenly jump into driving trains, doing international business, or having kids, at least according to The Consensus (which, I'd say, has a fair bit of wisdom to it actually), and lifelong learning isn't going to help if it's all topical, without a foundation in the basic subjects.
One major school problem is actually quite simple to solve, and it takes a lot of the sting out of anti-school arguments: Don't force students to sit for 45 minutes or more at a time. This reduces moods, gives the students' metabolisms a chance to work, and reduces tensions between teachers who would get upset when their students didn't always succeed in this daily endurance marathon. It's a very simple thing, giving students a chance to move about.
School reform didn't just start, either. For its failings, schools 20 years ago were already much kinder than the James Whitten era schools with "no handouts," no school breakfasts for kids who needed it just to get by - so they had to sit still
and they were dying of hunger. Now that we've fixed that problem, we've got another example of schools organizing society in a way that helps kids, just like after-school programs can help kids escape disorder outside the school that other social help programs wouldn't fix as easily.
