'Does the education provide a balanced range of learning experiences, so that no one aspect of learning is emphasised to the exclusion of others?'
Balance sounds great in theory and, over the long term, that is what most parents would be aiming for, but it may not mean a little bit of every subject every day, or even every week.
I can imagine LA going to visit children who are going through a phase of, say, nothing but reading (possibly great quality literature) for months and the parents being told off that the child isn't doing Maths, Geog, Hist, Music, PE etc Well, I don't have to imagine it. It has happened to some friends of mine. They tended to have months-long passions. One passion was to find roadkill and boil it down to extract the skeletons. They did that for ages. It was a family interest. Another time it was nothing but chemistry (parents were chemists). One time they got a little obsessed with reading the obituaries of famous people. Odd at first, until you realised that these were springboards for further research and was obviously History.
So, some HE families do things in chunks. And why not, if it works for them? All the LA will see on a visit though, is a snapshot of what is happening at the time they visit and they would probably decide the education they were providing wasn't balanced.
'One passion was to find roadkill and boil it down to extract the skeletons'
Ah, what memories that brings back! We started on things like birds and mice, progressing to squirrels and then ending up with my dragging a dead fox home by the tail and leaving it at the end of the garden, pending further work. My wife objected and we compromised by agreeing that only the skull would be retained. I decapitated it with the garden spade and buried the head in the compost heap. This meant that a headless, decomposing fox became something of a feature at the end of the garden over the autumn. Another time, we were at the beach when my daughter and I found a dead seal. Do you think my wife would let me take it home in the back of the car? I still blame my wife for the fact that our daughter is studying the non-subject of philosophy at university, rather than medicine. If only she had been more supportive of the studies in biology, how different the course of events might have been...
This bit jumped out at me:
ReplyDelete'Does the education provide a balanced range of learning experiences, so that no one aspect of learning is emphasised to the exclusion of others?'
Balance sounds great in theory and, over the long term, that is what most parents would be aiming for, but it may not mean a little bit of every subject every day, or even every week.
I can imagine LA going to visit children who are going through a phase of, say, nothing but reading (possibly great quality literature) for months and the parents being told off that the child isn't doing Maths, Geog, Hist, Music, PE etc Well, I don't have to imagine it. It has happened to some friends of mine. They tended to have months-long passions. One passion was to find roadkill and boil it down to extract the skeletons. They did that for ages. It was a family interest. Another time it was nothing but chemistry (parents were chemists). One time they got a little obsessed with reading the obituaries of famous people. Odd at first, until you realised that these were springboards for further research and was obviously History.
So, some HE families do things in chunks. And why not, if it works for them? All the LA will see on a visit though, is a snapshot of what is happening at the time they visit and they would probably decide the education they were providing wasn't balanced.
'One passion was to find roadkill and boil it down to extract the skeletons'
ReplyDeleteAh, what memories that brings back! We started on things like birds and mice, progressing to squirrels and then ending up with my dragging a dead fox home by the tail and leaving it at the end of the garden, pending further work. My wife objected and we compromised by agreeing that only the skull would be retained. I decapitated it with the garden spade and buried the head in the compost heap. This meant that a headless, decomposing fox became something of a feature at the end of the garden over the autumn. Another time, we were at the beach when my daughter and I found a dead seal. Do you think my wife would let me take it home in the back of the car? I still blame my wife for the fact that our daughter is studying the non-subject of philosophy at university, rather than medicine. If only she had been more supportive of the studies in biology, how different the course of events might have been...
sounds like a re hash of crazy old badman ideas that you webb and your daughter fully supported.in other words a load of old crap!
ReplyDeleteWhat's up, this weekend is pleasant in support of me, because this point in time i am reading this enormous educational post here at my house.
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