delbified said:
i was referring to tertiary education, moreso than primary or secondary. i agree there needs to be a core curriculum for primary and secondary schooling. but once a student has graduated and wants to enter the tertiary sector, they should be free to choose whichever type of study they want to undertake, including none at all.
the argument in favour of public colleges/universities is much weaker. no one has the right to dictate to an adult what they need to learn.
Agreed on everything till the last statement, if only because I was not suggesting that the schools (public or private) should dictate what students should study just to be clear.
You'll have to excuse me, for I was in the middle of correcting my mid term exams. Read your quote above and saw occasion to vent my frustrations.
I realize we have drifted away from the original topic, though many of the French protesters were students so...
In any case, the problem is really that the public schools have lost all sense of rigor and purpose in the formation of students, before they get to the university. Then, when they enter the private university system, they are floating on a sea of hot magma, which often swirls them aimlessly about. Unfortunately too, the private universities are increasingly being run like corporations. The adminsitrators coming from a business formation and not an intellectal one. The quality of students and the instruction, I'm talking about in the humanities not in finance and business courses (but that's something else) has droped as a result. Then, of course, there is much grade inflation, because it is very difficult to fail the "paying customers," err, um I mean students. This leads to a lax environment. I'm not saying this to be mean, and in many respects its not the students' fault, but this is the objective state of things. I therefore get students (many not few) who after 8 years of primary school, 4 years of secondary school and 2 years at university have never heard of the Ancient Roman Empire. Coming to a Rome based program! The things they don't know in the general education sense, compared to their Italian age contemporaries is noteworthy.
In Italy, although the Berlusconi administration is masterfully beginning to F-up even this with so called education "reforms," the primary and secondary school system is still very good in the humanities and sciences and, therefore, in giving the kids a good grasp of the world critically, and those mechanisms which have conditioned the course of civilization and history. And they are rigorous. Students fail who don't perform, where performance is based on a much higher expectation than what I can even place on my university students. I should know, I have a daughter in the
quinto elementare (5th grade). Thus when they arrrive at university, they are truly ready for specialization. The problem is funding at the university level, but as my students demonstrate: you can throw as much money from the private sector into the system you want, though this doesn't necessarily mean you have elevated the quality of instruction, nor that of the students. Often, in fact, considering all the business praxis that have taken over the institutions, it seems quite to the contrary.