I truly wonder about this movement to
practicality in schools.
In Ontario, under Mike Harris this is a crescendo. Local school boards have been deemed not to understand what children need in the world today; so the provincial bureaucracy does it now.
This bureaucracy is beginning to require children to have community service work, so they will experience the real world--the real business world I expect.
This provincial government has long been working towards partnerships with business to provide computers, etc, in the schools--and to guide the curriculum in business-friendly directions.
For a while now music, and art, have not been affordable--because of the influence of business thinking. When I was in school, these subjects were taught because of the joy in them, and because they are parts of interesting and interested citizens.
Now, in my piano school, we advertise that music develops the kind of intelligence that can program a computer--what an irony!
I have wondered why we can only get further and further into the box we are in, in the world today.
I think we should teach things that aren't practical, things that lead to whimsy, to idealism, to joy.