Demographics

Someone recently quoted to me an insightful comment by a teenage girl. She had been asked to describe her transition from attending a cozy small-town high school to attending a much larger high school in a larger community.

She summarized,

"I lost my mentors, and in their place I gained role models."

...

It doesn't sound to me like a value judgment in favor of one or the other. Others may read it differently.

Forest Kindergartens

...are fabulous, I think, not only for general studies in kindergarten, but as a source of ideas for general studies in the upper grades, too.

The basic idea is that the school day takes place outside as much as possible.

There is some footage of a Forest Kindergarten here:

School's Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten

Sudbury

Here's an article about Sudbury:

Would You Send Your Kids to a School Where Students Make the Rules?

...which I've always thought is an interesting model.

I don't believe that children are naturally better able to educate themselves for life than people who have experienced more of it. I think my second-grader's Chumash teacher has a much better idea of what she will need to know in life than she does.

I do think that you get extremely interesting results (the Hebrew word for part of what I have in mind is chus  - the special love a person has for something he's sought out for himself) when you offer this kind of autonomy anyway.

Why Animal Training

I like reading about animal training for the same reason that I like reading about very ancient history: it's relevant to the material that more often concerns me, but there are fewer factors to keep track of.

Animal training is focused on how to create new habits and reinforce them and... not much else. No one is concerned with equipping dolphins with such lasting inspiration that in a moment of crisis they will be motivated to make self-sacrificing moral decisions -- as we are in educating humans.

On the other hand, educating people also involves establishing and reinforcing habits (say please). So it's interesting to me to see which techniques do and don't work for other creatures in this one specific area.

Questions.
1a. Maybe because humans are moral creatures, it's not right to draw comparisons after all.
1b. If the answer to 1a is that it isn't, what would the Kuzari say about Jewish education?
2a. Where is the line between training in good habits, and manipulation? -- in other words, if I fling fish at you every time you remember to say please, does that make me a cult leader?
3. If the answer to 2 is yes, is it because I have reduced what should be a moral decision to an animal instinct?