How about some brainstorming how to make better schools? [View all]

[DetlefK]

In your opinion, what would a better school-system look like?

Let's just brainstorm and throw some ideas out there.

For example:

- I wonder why so much effort is put on delivering information to the students and so little effort is put on teaching them how to handle information.
Why not teach students learning-techniques, time-management-techniques?
Why not teach them mnemonic techniques how to memorize long lists of boring trivia? (The swiss mind-artist Gregor Staub has taught his kids a modified version of the "ars memoriae"-technique by passing it off to them as a game about storytelling.)

- Why not a philosophy-class?
It could teach the students about various different philosophical concepts:
* For example, the concept that things are "good" or "evil", originally posited by the persian philosopher Zoroaster. (Then ask students whether it makes sense to split the world into good and evil, how to tell good from evil, whether good is always good and evil always evil...)
* For example: The religious concept of the will of a god determining the world vs the concept of a demiourgos (gods + laws of nature) vs the concept of laws of nature without gods.
* For example: What the scientific method is, where it comes from, its tenets and limits... And a few simple experiments ("Do things fall down? How do you know?&quot to show them how to apply the scientific method.
* What is religion, what is believing, what kinds of religions are there...

- What is a discussion? How to hold a discussion? How to gather arguments? How to weigh arguments against each other? How to hold a speech in front of an audience?

- The philosophy-class could veer off towards mathematics and IT:
* Boolean algebra, logic structures (If A=B and B=C then A=C) ...

For example:
Remember the Windows-game "Minesweeper"? It's possible to use this game's elements to simulate the workings of a logic circuit-board: You can recreate a wire, a "NOT"-element, "OR", "AND"... If you have some space available, you can build an addition-element: You enter the first bit at one entry of the maze, the second bit at another entry of the maze, and at the exit of the maze you get both bits added up.
http://www.formauri.es/personal/pgimeno/compurec/Minesweeper.php

For example: This is how you build a wire in Minesweeper:


And this is a NOT-element: