Quote:
Originally Posted by Sheakspeer
The curriculum in general should be organized around thematic units that (as I stated) must be relevant to the world today and rigorous enough to challenge students to think about this world.
This strikes me as very key, and key to a lot of problems in the world. Not everything is supposed to be fun. Much of life is about learning to do what needs to be done anyway. Your job, your wife, your kids, your dog, your friendships, getting along with the neighors, the maintenance of your house, your saving for retirement, your handling of your bills ... the world is full of expectations for you and situations you have to handle by thinking about things you don't want to, making plans that irritate and don't interest you, and following them through so you can do what you don't want to do. It is not possible for that to change. You just have to learn to deal with it.
That's part of what school is supposed to prepare you for ... thinking ... the adult world ... doing stuff that is difficult and takes concentration and time.
Making kids comfortable or happy is not always the greatest good, in education or otherwise. The rewards of not stretching your boundaries are not always the greatest ones to be had and shouldn't be the most sought after. You gain a lot in life from having to think thoughts that are new to you, think hard, hit a few brick walls, perhaps think originally, and scramble about in unfamiliar territory as you try to figure things out. I'd go even further, to say that encountering the difficult and unfamiliar and attempting to deal with it, learning how it is done -- as well as how to handle the feelings its stirs up -- in a mature and productive way, is not just tangential to education, but a primary purpose and virtue of it.
There is the entire rest of the world and rest of your life to try to get comfortable with. It's not the obligation of schools to make you like your work, your responsibilities, or yourself.
School is supposed to be hard, and give you something to strive for intellectually whether you like it, or know or care what's important, or not. Even your struggles and potential failures in it are gentle lessons compared to the rough handling you get when you leave it. Especially if you have yet to learn to do what is hard, dull, and takes longer than you'd like.