Re: [seul-edu] education and schools

[Michael Viron <mviron@wsdo.sao.uwf.edu>]

On Wed, 27 Dec 2000, Leon Brooks wrote:
> We may be talking a little at cross purposes here. University is quite a
> different thing to ``school'' as such, and it sounds like your
> experience is a little more self-directed than usual (the short term for
> this is ``atypical'' :-)
>
> My comments were directed to the general case, and would be more
> strongly true for the earlier grades (and grade groupings themselves are
> one of the limiting factors important in repressing ``free-range''
> social pattern forming) than for University.
A few more thoughts have come to mind--that really depends on how you
define "school".  If you define "school" as meaning lower education (high
schools, primary schools, and middle schools come to mind), then that is
a very different meaning than considering education in general (including
higher education, which is colleges, universities, and the like).  There
are some high schools and middle schools that provide experiences outside
of the normal courses for the school (field trips, extracurricular
activities, and electives).  It is also possible to found organizations at
both the high school and middle school level (although most people are
less inclined to go through the process).

Some middle schools offer programs, such as the Talent pool program at
Harry Hurst Middle School in Louisiana, which allows students to compact
out of a class (I compacted out of French), and pursue year-long research
projects on something thats of interest to them.

The Talent Pool program was a very easy way of providing students
experiences outside of the normal...such experiences including writing and
publishing books, semester or year long research projects, many field
trips, and doing presentations...the opportunities are there...just not at
all schools.

Another .02,

Michael