Personal tutors are great but honestly the only times that I ever studied in college were in study groups. Tutors are great for mastering more specific skills but I think that the classroom environment and collaborative learning that is possible there can be beneficial when it comes to forming relationships, teaching kids to work together and cooperate to solve problems, ect. Additionally slightly higher student to teacher ratios allows teachers to be more knowledgable about specific subjects which has all kinds of benefits. One of them is that when teachers actually know things about history they are less likely to just regurgitate the propaganda they are encouraged to teach. A huge amount of the propaganda that gets taught throughout all education is because it's hard to get changes to curriculums approved, and because teachers are overworked as it is, so as much as teachers might want to be teaching more up to date or more interdisciplinary history, they are just too overworked to make huge changes to their lesson plans.
Probably every teacher in my high school was a huge lib but because they got to have complete freedom to design their own lesson plans I learned about most American atrocities, both foreign policy wise and domestically, tulsa, rodney king, ect, and a lot of other things most high schoolers weren't taught. One of the reasons that I radicalized so quickly after bernie lost was because my lib teachers had accidentally given me a decent education. They all provided lib justifications for the events but even so it made it easier to connect the dots after the 2016 primaries. If singular teachers were expected to give most of the education to a single student then these sorts of higher level things wouldn't have been taught to me.
I think that we both agree that personalized learning and student self determination are incredibly important, at all ages and levels, not just college, but to me a brick and mortar school will always be an irreplaceable, essential, part of childhood.
I should note though that I went to a small private high school with low homework and tiny teacher:student ratios. Going from a public middle school that I did horribly in to there gave me a pretty unique look at just how much better, more freeing, and more stimulating school can be. I got huge freedom in terms of what i wrote papers on and everything. In English I gave a presentation on how the popularity of LOTR in a post WWII world reflects such a different social climate than the popularity of GOT in a post 9/11 world. I compared Petr Baelish to Gandalf, and Aragorn to Ned Stark among other things. And that is so fucking cool for a high school paper. We were always encouraged to make everything that we did something individual and expressive.
It is important to note that I am somewhat academically talented, I had an easier time with most things than almost all of my peers in high school and college. It's why I was diagnosed with ADHD later in life than most. There is a huge difference in experience between, for lack of a better term, low and high IQ ADHD. So a pretty high percentage of other ADHD people that you meet will probably be much more willing to burn it all down than I am. Because many people with ADHD literally have never had a positive experience with learning in any kind of structured environment. Although if I stayed in the public school system I might not have "blossomed" much at all. I was a shit student in middle school.
tldr: Yeah this is the education equivalent of abolish the police. I just think that we need to replace it with something at least reminiscent of our current system. And even if ADHD kids don't need it, kids with more severe disabilities certainly will.
Personal tutors are great but honestly the only times that I ever studied in college were in study groups. Tutors are great for mastering more specific skills but I think that the classroom environment and collaborative learning that is possible there can be beneficial when it comes to forming relationships, teaching kids to work together and cooperate to solve problems, ect. Additionally slightly higher student to teacher ratios allows teachers to be more knowledgable about specific subjects which has all kinds of benefits. One of them is that when teachers actually know things about history they are less likely to just regurgitate the propaganda they are encouraged to teach. A huge amount of the propaganda that gets taught throughout all education is because it's hard to get changes to curriculums approved, and because teachers are overworked as it is, so as much as teachers might want to be teaching more up to date or more interdisciplinary history, they are just too overworked to make huge changes to their lesson plans.
Probably every teacher in my high school was a huge lib but because they got to have complete freedom to design their own lesson plans I learned about most American atrocities, both foreign policy wise and domestically, tulsa, rodney king, ect, and a lot of other things most high schoolers weren't taught. One of the reasons that I radicalized so quickly after bernie lost was because my lib teachers had accidentally given me a decent education. They all provided lib justifications for the events but even so it made it easier to connect the dots after the 2016 primaries. If singular teachers were expected to give most of the education to a single student then these sorts of higher level things wouldn't have been taught to me.
I think that we both agree that personalized learning and student self determination are incredibly important, at all ages and levels, not just college, but to me a brick and mortar school will always be an irreplaceable, essential, part of childhood.
I should note though that I went to a small private high school with low homework and tiny teacher:student ratios. Going from a public middle school that I did horribly in to there gave me a pretty unique look at just how much better, more freeing, and more stimulating school can be. I got huge freedom in terms of what i wrote papers on and everything. In English I gave a presentation on how the popularity of LOTR in a post WWII world reflects such a different social climate than the popularity of GOT in a post 9/11 world. I compared Petr Baelish to Gandalf, and Aragorn to Ned Stark among other things. And that is so fucking cool for a high school paper. We were always encouraged to make everything that we did something individual and expressive.
It is important to note that I am somewhat academically talented, I had an easier time with most things than almost all of my peers in high school and college. It's why I was diagnosed with ADHD later in life than most. There is a huge difference in experience between, for lack of a better term, low and high IQ ADHD. So a pretty high percentage of other ADHD people that you meet will probably be much more willing to burn it all down than I am. Because many people with ADHD literally have never had a positive experience with learning in any kind of structured environment. Although if I stayed in the public school system I might not have "blossomed" much at all. I was a shit student in middle school.
tldr: Yeah this is the education equivalent of abolish the police. I just think that we need to replace it with something at least reminiscent of our current system. And even if ADHD kids don't need it, kids with more severe disabilities certainly will.