School

Recently I took a wonderful class on coursera!  If you want you can turn in participation and get credit for taking the class.  I think it costs something like $100 to get a signed certificate that you took the class. 


But I didn't have time to figure out how to turn in all the homework, and I didn't take it because I wanted someone else to know I had taken it.


I took it because I wanted to learn.


I would have to say, of all the classes I have ever taken, it was the most educational.


So what is school?


Is it a set of rules and tests to see if you followed them well enough to get enough credit to be looked at to get hired for a job?


To me, my learning, my reasoning for going to school was to learn.  And that is what I got from it.


If they had been teaching something I could have learned another way, from a book or a video game, or from talking to friends, then that is where I would have gone for the information, not to school.


I do not send my kids to school.  But I am very much for free public school!  I have often lauded the opportunity there is in this country to go to school for free!  But do we have free schools in the U.S.A.?  Are our schools places where  people can go to learn?  Where people go to get knowledge they can't get better and easier someplace else?


Do our public schools give us knowledge or tell us what knowledge to get?  Do they open our minds and help us discover new ways of learning we wouldn't have thought of on our own, so we can open the floodgates of the unknown and drink in the depths of understanding?  Or do they restrict how we are allowed to learn and tell us not only what we "must" learn, but where and how we must find that knowledge.  Are these really, by definition, schools?   Places to measure and keep track of learning?  Yes.  Places to create competition over limited types of learning?  To be sure.  But "schools"?  Places we can go to discover what we never would have known otherwise?  I think not.


Now, there are many schools in other parts of the world, that do serve this purpose.  Even here in the U.S.A.,  there are likely places where what a child discovers in school, cannot be had other places, given their situation in life. 


If the only person I knew who could tell me what the words on a page meant, was a teacher at school, I would gladly walk 10 miles there and 10 miles back each day.  Some kids do. 

             "there are no classrooms.  There are no desks.  It doesn't matter.  There is a teacher,"




Thankfully we have a place that is free to everybody no matter their age, that provides boundless information in increasingly innovative ways.  The Public Library.

                                                           That Book Woman