DEATH OF THE CLASSROOM: GO BACK TO WORMS AND EARTH AND WATER AND RETIREES HANGING OUT IN BALCONIES

Schools are completely out of touch with technologies and the modes and ways of children in the post-modern world, unable to understand and implement differences between directed lessons, discussions, method guided studies, and free for all seminars; incapable to distinguish between the role of a grand master’s lecture and the function of a graduate student guiding discussions. In elementary schools teachers are better prepared than college professors (trust me, I was there), yet, often, they spend too much time on paper work or meeting State mandated curriculum standards (regardless of their value). At this point, all students should abandon classrooms, go back to nature, walk around their communities, and see how life goes from phase to phase, how nature either feed us or kill us, and then, those students must be able to link what they know to whatever else they want to know or wish to learn more about it, making connections to other aspects of life. For that, they do not need classrooms; instead, get help from some cultured, well established retired old lady in the West End of Frankfurt or from a widely and well read, placid and phlegmatic old man in Santurce, guiding them from their balconies.