Philosophy

Today in Philosophy the kids started designing their own school.  The last class they talked a bit about what it means to be educated.  Is it training?  Is it knowing a lot of facts? Is it being able to think for yourself?

Today they continued with this discussion and they talked about The Summerville Experiment.  A school experiment in the 60's that was a Free School.  In a nutshell: It operated on the theory that kids should be able to follow their passions and decide what they were going to learn that day.  The kids turned out well educated but one thing that stood out at the end was that the kids lacked job skills.  With that in mind, as the class was designing their school they tacked on a class about job skills.

This in turn led us parents to have an interesting chat about job skills and people who know how to think.  For example: People who know how to think for themselves but lack communication skills will be unhappy in office drone type jobs where you often have to perform mundane tasks that make no sense over and over and over.  The constant challenging of directions without proper communication skills will leave you unsatisfied and probably fired frequently.  If you have proper skills you can turn your challenges into promotions and increased job satisfaction.

While the kids are designing their school I am turning my thoughts to how to teach some of those important job skills.