If you go to a new school/place and be with kids for couple of days and then meet their families or just know the personality traits of each one's parents. I am sure you can map the parents to their kids with a very high rate of accuracy.
Most of the kids are photocopies of their parents. Parents have maximum influence on the kid's thinking process, behavior and personality. This is sin on parts of parents, committed mostly unknowingly.
It seems to me that under most cases - schooling and education is almost insignificant in terms of defining who the child becomes. Schools might add certain skills or habbits but the major trends in the child's personality are dictated by family , primarily parents.
Perhaps, on the surface the child might look different but if we go deeper we will start finding strong influence of parents. This is irrespective of what school he/she went to, Summerhill free school or St. Mary's factory model school. This is also true of most of the adults especially till their mid age. When we begin to discover that schooling is more or less insignificant in shaping who we are, we need to really rethink our reality and purpose of education. What impacts today's children most are parents, media, internet.
I am reminded of a couple I met in Auroville, Pondicherry who said that the first thing we need to understand about our children is that "They are individuals themselves".
We assume kids to be like clay to be moulded to our wish instead of human beings with their own intristic nature. This fundamental shift needs to happen both in schools and at homes. Parents concerned with real education of their kid will take every possible care not to transfer their own baggage onto their kid. The baggages of beliefs, religion, opinions and habits.
Each child should be seen as an individual, as a seed who knows its destination, its true nature. Parents, home,schools and teachers can at best act like soil to provide certain favorable conditions like love, care, protection to assist the growth. They should not try to control the growth and take in their preferred directions. Only then we will have real individuals. Only then we can have a world that's not like ours where we have more or less 6 billion carbon copies. Only then we will have schools making human beings not labor for industry or researchers for army.
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