World of the Child

[ionelv]

CBC Rewind today covered the 2nd episode of the World of the Child series from the early 80s CBC Ideas radio programme. I caught only the last third of the episode but a few things stood out:
1. Way back in the day (before the 80s), children under 16 without adult supervision caught by police were arrested for truancy and held in a facility not different from prison until they could be returned to their parents.
2. Some psychologists taught that society was making a mess of the child’s needs for both socialization and individualization, for example by overemphasizing the former through institutions such as schools that were good at one size fit all molds and abuse.
3. Adults are failing miserably at rearing children.

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[ionelv]

Today, I caught the end of the 3rd episode on CBC Rewind (recorded in 1983). They were talking about unstructured or undirected learning, I.e. let the child direct learning based on their interest instead of a school setting. One of the interviewees was very optimistic about how computers are a positive factor in learning because it creates interest in the child, can push child to learn alphabet (I.e. by having to learn the keyboard layout) and can deliver more dynamic information based on interest. Another interviewee, John Holt delivered a whopper: how a teen can contribute to quantum physics research by skipping all foundational physics learning and going directly to a lab that does cutting edge research in quantum physics. The reasoning was that an unnamed quantum physicist thought that that would be wiser than learning all foundational stuff because none of it was useful to him when he reached the pinnacle of research and that he and his friends were willing to experiment on young minds and find out if that would indeed work as he thought it would. I am speechless.