Tolstoy did not believe in modern medicine and had his own ideas on education. It may be that Levin is wrong, and that it is a good idea to have medical dispensaries for the public and compulsory education. Certainly politicians have pushed us further and further in that direction.
We are living longer and are better educated than before. I have benefited from both public education and the public health system, but then I pay a lot for them.
Education and health are seen today as rights, or entitlements, with no limits, and with no corresponding responsibility on the part of citizens to stay healthy and educate themselves. The government quasi-monopoly on these activities has spawned powerful professional groups that can threaten society with strikes and job actions since we are so dependent on them. Despite their vested interest in the existing quasi-monopoly, these representatives of the establishment in education and health like to present themselves as the only experts, the only ones with the moral authority to talk about these issues.
Levin's comment made me think. I looked up some statistics on the Internet.
In the average OECD country, governments spend over 5% of GDP on education and over 7% on health (and this is projected to double in some countries). Since government expenditures are about one third of GDP in most of these countries, it means that these two items combined amount to around 40% of government expenditures!
Japan and Korea have much lower than average expenditures and higher than average results in health and education. Expenditure does not equal results. How much of health and education outcomes are real y dependent on the actions of individual citizens? Should we not be expected to look after our own health and education more?
Library expenditures are around .1% of GDP whereas "higher education" expenditures in Canada in 2003 were listed as 6.14% of GDP. It costs around $25,000 per year to keep someone in university in Canada. How effective is that? A motivated learner in social sciences (assuming such a thing exists) and humanities, including language and literature, could learn most of what he/she needs from libraries and the Internet. Should we not take responsibility for our own cultural development?
I attended, as an observer, a national conference on education where the directors of 40 school districts across Canada met with each other and with the suppliers of products and services to those school districts.
The subjects discussed were largely determined by the nature of the products and services that vendors wanted to talk about. Nevertheless it was possible for me to understand the major preoccupations of the most senior administrators of our national education system. I was impressed by the dedication, professionalism, and vision of these educational leaders.
I was struck, however, by the fact that foreign language training was not a part of the discussion. Directors of school boards were concerned about teachers getting older and retiring, about the cost of training and the need for better professional development models, the difficult choices in the introduction of new technology, (although they continued to spend over 90% of their budget on staff rather than other solutions). They talked eagerly about new "buzz-words" of "student engagement," "parental involvement," "student success," rather than just teaching to the curriculum.
In terms of the subjects taught, basic literacy and numeracy were the main preoccupations.
In other words the focus was on getting more students to graduate through the system. They also were interested in teaching "character" which I kind of gathered meant some ideological browbeating of the unsuspecting students around the prevailing slogans like multiculturalism, environmentalism, respect for diversity etc. Since teachers are now overwhelmingly women, I wonder how effective this al is with the boys, who are a bigger and bigger problem in schools.
I feel "character teaching" belongs with the family and not with some teacher with a political agenda and should be based on the examples of the behaviour of adults and a few simple principles of respect for other individuals and responsibility for oneself. Anyway I digress.
What real y struck me was the lack of interest in language study. We live in a global vil age.
We can travel anywhere. We can access books, movies, television and radio in any language.
People who speak other languages are sharing our world and our lives with us. The benefits of being able to access these other cultures, the enrichment this brings to youngsters for their whole lives is so obvious to me, but it is not a concern of educators.
Modern technology may final y bring about a democratic revolution in education. I was reading a discussion on ESL the other day on another website. Some teachers were talking about al the "interesting" things they had their students do. One teacher was asking students to read about the recent South Asian earthquake on the web. Then she had them design a toilet using only the kind of materials that would be available after an earthquake. This was a form of solidarity with the survivors of the earthquake, I would imagine. I guess she was teaching her students to reach out to these unfortunate people. I presume the resulting toilet would be "organic".
However, what if her learners were not interested in the subject? What if they had no desire to get involved in a make-believe project to build a toilet? What if this was meaningless for them? Why not let them use English to learn about something that interests them? If the goal is to help them improve their English, then we need to make the language relevant to them, not to impose subjects and tasks at the wil of the teacher.
Modern technology, the Internet, MP3 players, podcasting, etc. wil enable learners to decide what they want to learn about. Rather than listening to a teacher drone on in class, they wil be able to choose to listen to something that really interests them. The chal enge for the teachers is to make a variety of relevant and valuable content available. Of course it cannot just be anything. It needs to meet certain educational goals. But let us give people choices.
Stimulate them. Do not treat them like mindless objects that can be force -fed whatever nonsense the teacher happens to think up.
I have been a little harsh perhaps. However, if I were asked to design a toilet as a means to improve my Korean I would not be very motivated. Power to the learner!
My grandchildren go to French immersion schools. I am happy to hear them speak in very nice French. I look at their homework, written in French. I really get a kick out of that.
On the other hand, for a group of English speaking children to go to school and learn in French is unnatural. They speak to each other in English. They speak to their parents in English.
If they are real y interested in reading about something, they read in English. I have read that there is no difference in French fluency between children who start French immersion at grade 1 (early immersion) and those who start in high school (late immersion). I have heard that these immersion school children do not necessarily become bilingual.
Why? Because in the end it is the motivation of the individual learner that is key. If this
"unnatural" immersion experience motivates the child to learn, fine. If it does not then it is a bad thing. I would favour an approach that gave children an exposure to several languages in the early years, through listening to stories and reading. In other words a LingQ like approach that worked on words and phrases and avoided grammar and did not bother testing the kids.