Decius wrote:
I think this tends to encourage a lot of medicore violinists ... and discourage a lot of potentially great talents and interests of various sorts

Hear hear.

Ultimately, children would be better off if schools attempted to understand and provide support and guidance for their personal individual extracirricular interests rather than providing children with a preset menu of group activities and telling them that they have to pick some, but this would require a lot of personalized attention that is both expensive and fails to serve an institutional goal for which the school system receives funds (such as promotion of the fine arts, or athletics).

More crucially, this would require that schools not be hamstrung by the politics of the parents and community they "serve". This is almost certainly impossible. I've been forced to consider the notion that publicly financing education results in an untenable educational proposition -- that of serving the lowest common denominator. The only sanctioned topics, not to mention methods of instruction, are those that survive parental outcry, and policians' careerism. The result is safe, bland, boring and quite frequently useless to almost everyone. I think most of us find success in spite of our pre-college education, not because of it.

Children would also be better off, particularly in high school, if parents would not try to protect children from being exposed to each other's self expression, but thats obviously never going to happen.

Indeed, sadly it seems like it won't. So the question of all this becomes, what do you do about it? Homeschooling sounds very appealing, but I'm certain that it cannot work unless a certain critical mass of parents choose that path. I would think that too few results in socialization problems as the kids spend all their time with a small group of people, mostly their own parents. I worry that most neighborhoods can't support this critical mass, not to even mention the need for the parents to be engaged, intellectually progressive, etc. I am cynical in this regard.

Vouchers, or variants thereof, seem to work some places, but I see structural problems in the US approach that makes the idea difficult. I'm interested in learning a lot more about this, but my gut reaction is skepticism.

Thoughts? What's our way out?

RE: My son's DOOM cartoon