Colby Cosh has written an eloquent piece on the anomalousness of school. It's long, but well worth an attentive read: he both captures the utter peculiarity of an institution we too readily accept as natural, inevitable, and good; and sketches a vision of a school-less future in which education is personalized, de-centralized, and far more effective overall than it is today. Cosh doesn't explicitly include college in his vision, but his arguments are readily extended to higher ed, where the assembly-line standardization of study and the passivity-inducing structure of coursework all too frequently do more to prevent learning than to encourage it. I for one would love to be a part of a future where the schools--like the proverbial state--had withered away.

Link via Joanne Jacobs