Where is balance Academic priorities 299

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qui bono ? i suppose one must first decide on what the schools are supposed to do, who they are supposed to benefit.

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that must have been terrible i dont know what i would have done without books...

agree that in some particular instances my lessons were valuable. nevertheless, i maintain that most of my schooling was wasted on me

Ignatius Loyola never did say 'Give me a child until the age of seven, and I will give you the man.' but he might have sympathized with the statement

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mmm...i try never to underestimate how observant children are...

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agreed, i am not trying to say that my schooling was comparable to field labor. but there might have been other schemes of instruction, that would have interested the students at least a little more often. i am not a educator by profession, (altho i have taught my share of college level clbuttes), so i ought not speculate here on what these alternative schemes might be.

such laws exist in most places today, but they are often ignored. lately, however, it is becoming very clear that there are huge correlations between women's education, declining birthrates and percapita incomes.

perhaps. it was certainly the only period where i consistently learned new material in a clbuttroom. one might call that 'real work'

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i think i was wayward and stubborn and only 'worked' at things that interested me. results were mixed. for example, i tried to read Russell and Whitehead's Principia when i was about ten years old. this was futile, i had not then the capacity to understand it, but i was familiar with Russell's more chatty essays, and i plunged in. i continued the effort for months, reading and rereading the arguments, writing them out in longhand, trying to correlate them with what i already knew. to little avail. not until many years later did i understand all of the book. no sane teacher would have set me such an buttignment, but i might have responded if one had set me a research project whose reach did not exceed my grasp.

the teachers were themselves limited, by the educational structure, in what they could teach or demand of children, almost as limited as the children were.

i started many things early, but as you see, many came to naught...

sidd