If you are a par­ent of school kids like me you’re most prob­a­bly won­der­ing whether this kind of school­ing is the best pos­si­ble way of edu­ca­tion. Most of us would agree that there’s a lot of improve­ment poten­tial in nowa­days west­ern school sys­tems. Ok, there are pri­vate schools — but, in most cases they are expen­sive and — at least in Ger­many — the edu­cat­ed con­tents have to be exact­ly the ones defined by gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, fed­er­al state wide so-called curriculums.
Most of my friends would agree that today school­ing means to change an inno­cent, curi­ous, cre­ative human being to an indif­fer­ent, uncrit­i­cal, obe­di­ent con­tent spe­cial­ist. Too harsh? Maybe. But we might agree on one thing: we all feel that our kids deserve some bet­ter school­ing than they actu­al­ly get. Then let’s watch this TED Talk of Logan Laplante, a 13 year-old boy who was taken out of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem to be home schooled instead.

Fas­ci­nat­ing, isn’t it? What­ev­er you might think about this “extreme” form of school­ing — tak­ing your kid out of school and do every­thing at home — it cer­tain­ly has not harmed Logan. If you are inter­est­ed to learn more about alter­na­tive school­ing you might start with this talk of Dr. Ken Robin­son to which Logan refers.

What are your thoughts about school­ing and the actu­al edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem? What duo your kids think? Do you have the impres­sion that school is prepar­ing them in a good way for their adult lives?

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