@neologist,
Quote:This is just another example of how laughable your assertions are, Frank.
It is not laughable neo. It is pitiful. You ought to sympathise.
The most important principle of the progressive education is that no child should feel a failure as many do under the academic and scholastic systems. The child is to be manipulated into feeling good about himself and being prepared for a life in the midst of others educated in a similar fashion. Life adjustment was the label it often went under.
Essentially it represented a rejection of the European model. It focused on the backward child which, in a truly democratic system, is the equal of the bright child and in need of more empathetic attention. He was to do "sums" and call it "maths" for example. He was to "graduate" from school rather than just "leave". He majored in subjects he knew little or nothing about. It was all rigged in the form of chucks under the chin with the objective of making the little illiterate monster feel as if he had emerged from a German university with high honours. By the tens of millions.
The most expensive "public" school in the UK is Someville and the progressive system is in an extreme form there. The students can do what they want as long as it's legal I gather. They are being adjusted to life as a rich person because that is what they would become. The parents had to send their kids to school under the law and they wanted them off their hands anyway but they also preferred them to not be troubled by anything they didn't want to be troubled by. Basically child minding. The thought of their little darlings being rapped over the knuckles with a 12" ruler for failing to do their Latin homework was something they couldn't bear to contemplate.
The trouble is that life in reality is not at all like the life the soppy teachers had in mind and thus the assertion is needed, yes needed, to plug the yawning gap that looms up as soon as life on the street is ventured into. The rich kids of Somerville are not going to have that problem except possible in relation to the opposite sex but most of their wives will be so pleased to have landed the job that even then the assertion will be fact as well as everywhere else where money talks.
The only fear I detect on here is Apisa's utter dread of being wrong and of being thought a failure and he can never be either if the assertion is a fact in his own mind thus protecting his self-esteem.
If God appears in our midst to reveal himself and his plan and explains it all on TV an atheist would be wrong. On the other hand if Science proved God did not exist and explained it all on TV a believer would be wrong.
Not wishing to risk being wrong, which is absolutely mortifying for the products of progressive schools, agnosticism is the obvious solution.
So I understand the condition but have more sympathy for the companions of progressively educated persons than I do for them.
Have you ever seen the education scene in Amarcord? That's all metaphor and all the more amusing for it.
