Children need skills that will enable them to play a future role that is constructive for them and constructive for society. As adults, they will need to earn a living, take responsibility for others (children and family members), and live healthily. .
The attraction of a new revised and more open curriculum is that children will know why they're being taught what they're taught because the curriculum will be driven by utility. .
John Holt defines education as: .
something that some people do to others for their own good, moulding and shaping them, and trying to make them learn what they think they ought to know. .
At the risk of oversimplifying this point, let me give a few examples. .
We teach our children one thing about society and they learn the opposite from experience. For instance, doing schoolwork and getting good grades are the most important things that will result in a good job for you as an adult. That all people can be created equal by education, but that some educations are more equal than others. That learning higher math is necessary for learning to use a computer, that learning what someone else demands you to learn is more important than learning what you want to learn. .
Perhaps one of the reasons we are witnessing a reduction of support for public education, is that so many have passed through the educational process and are now realizing how distant from real life the rituals of education are and some of them are having a hard time forcing their children to go through the exact same process. .
Holt wrote: .
I do not think we can treat as separate the quality of education and the quality of life in general. . I am saying that truly good education in a bad society is a contradiction in terms. In short, in a society that is absurd, unworkable, wasteful, destructive, secretive, coercive, monopolistic, and generally anti-human, we could never have good education, no matter what kind of schools the powers permit, because it is not the educators or the schools but the whole society and the quality of life in it that really educate.
