Skip to main content

DIFFERENT TYPES OF SCHOOLING

 

Today I have spent some time studying the different school systems and I would now like to write a little bit about them.

I have done some research on compulsory schooling, home schooling, world schooling and unschooling and I have learned some things that I thought were impossible.

Let´beginn with the compulsory schooling.. It is by far the most common form of schooling in the world. You go to a school that is normal for us. There you sit with your classmates in a classroom and the teacher teaches material with the aim of preparing the students for the Matura. In Austria this system lasts 9 years. At the right age you start the so-called primary schools and learn the basics like reading, calculating and writing. In the fifth  to the eighth school year, pupils attend the lower school of a Gymnasium or a new secondary school. After the new school year you can decide whether you want to continue your schooling or whether you want to learn a profession.
The second type of school is home schooling. Here the parents teach the children from home instead of sending them to school. More and more parents refer to the possibility to teach their children. There are many reasons for home schooling, but the most common is that parents believe that their children cannot develop optimally in normal schools. Often there are also religious or historical reasons.
Next I would like to write about world schooling. This system has surprised and fascinated me the most in my search.World schooling is a form of learning in which the children do not go to school but learn by travelling the world. In this way they learn one of the most important things in our society. Knowledge of human nature. The students learn at a very early age that it cannot be taken for granted that clean, fresh water comes from the tap and that there is not a supermarket everywhere in the world where you can buy everything you need to survive. The aim of this form is for the children to get to know so many cultures and tribes. This way they learn how to deal with people, no matter what colour of skin they have or what gender they are. I think that this form of learning is very cool and sounds very interesting.
The last type of school I was involved with is unschoolin. The children do not go to a classical school like homeschooling and worldschooling. They choose a certain subject area that they would like to get to know better. They are supported in this by their parents but also by external teachers.

Furthermore, I have been working with a very interesting man. His name is André Stern and he is a guitar maker, musician and author from Paris. He himself says of himself that he has never attended a classical school and that his son would never do so either. In an article I learned a very interesting opinion of André. He said that if a child played happily and said the sequence of numbers 1,3,5,7, many parents would correct that this sequence is wrong. Parents want the child not to train in the wrong order. But Stern thinks that this is exactly the mistake. By constantly fixing it, you take away the joy of learning from the children and that is exactly how it is at school. In classical schools, the pupils are always mended and only trimmed for the Matura, and this is exactly what takes away the joy of learning something new.
Miro and her son Lainie did a form of worldschooling and got to know the whole world. Of course Miro has a similar opinion as André about learning, otherwise she could have sent her son to a compulsory school.

I think it's a pity that such great forms of schooling are being lost under our classical school system. In my opinion, they are worth more attention. I also think that world schooling, unschooling or homeschooling would have saved a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of worries and nerves for many students.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The gaps that we need to fill

  I presume that I need not introduce anyone to COVID-19 . It is the reason why you cannot see your friends and also why you can wake up at 9 am on weekdays. And this is precisely the premise of today's blog post. How did the lack of regular lessons influence us, and did we indeed waste a year of education?  We are not going to lie to ourselves:  this school year has been extremely overwhelming . The back and forth between going to school and switching to distant learning left not only me but a lot of others very confused. Until November we were all together as a class, and then we had to shift to online education. After that, it was just a mix of online lessons and  class attendance, with only half of the students present.  Nonetheless, I can tell from my own experience that when it comes to new skills, this year has been very productive. I think that the most important one is becoming  a more independent learner. It is difficult for teachers to check on t...

Covid – A student’s dream or educational disaster?

  As we surely all have understood by now the past year has been drastically different due to the global pandemic, for adults as well as for students. In this blog post I will show you the viewpoint of an affected student from Austria. First of all, schools only partially closed down. For the most time online classes were held, then when things got better the government decided to switch to a system with half of the students physically going to school every other day. Unfortunately, this led to more covid-cases, resulting in a back and forth between online classes and “real” classes. One of the major differences was in the amount of work that we got assigned. Not only were the teachers much more generous with homework but as a student I had a lot more time to manage, and efficiently do, all the tasks. This might seem like a big advantage for everyone, but the actual online meetings were much more stressful than I could’ve ever imagined. Over time, however, things changed. Teachers ...

The status of our environment is getting worse and worse!

  Don’t you think our environment is in big trouble? Because I do! There is this huge hole in the ozone layer which has to close again for example. But this only works if we finally decide to do something for it. Planting trees would be optimal. But this hole isn’t our only problem. There are many other problems like the pollution of oceans and seas. Many fishes are dying because of that. But the list of bad things doesn’t stop here. There are many other disasters we have to do something about as well. To fix those things we need every help we can get. So why don’t you or your school contribute something good for the environment? For example, by going to demonstrations. Starting an environmental-protection school project would also be a great idea. There are many other options to do something good for nature as long as something changes. Even if you only start separating waste. But to start helping the environment people have to know what they can do about it. Therefore, it would b...