It's a nice article about the collective and coldness of the modern curriculum, but it holds it's faults. For a start, school education are favouring, more and more, a more individualistic approach to teaching. An approach where your opinions do matter, but the method has to be prescribed. Sociology exams at A-Level, for instance, isn't about knowing the facts but rather arguing a point with citations (especially true in A2, the second year of A-Level). However, I do see the point he's trying to make about the coldness of schooling, however, the alternative is worse. You could have 12 years of learning discipline and to think in a prescribed manner so you can get a slip that says you're a good boy so you can spend the rest of your life working for a certain wage, which without you suffer and collapse in the capitalistic society we have. However, there is an alternative.
The alternative is something a psychologist called Carl Rogers put forward: Humanism. No more prescribed lessons where you're taught what you're told to learn. No more forced learning. No more written exams. No more coldness. A more warmer community where morals and values take a stronger emphasis than today's curriculum. No more learning to beat the exam, but rather learning for the sake of learning. The catch is this: It is useless in a capitalist society which values having qualifications as proof you can do the job right and do it well. Sure they offer the chance to take qualifications, but you get bogged down with the "let's learn empathy!" stuff. The good thing, however, is learning ceases to be a chore, but rather an enjoyable activity. There was reports that when they discussed what punishment a child should have, the other students elected for that child to be banned from lessons. However, the Rogerian view, despite being utopia on the child's emotional development (creating someone who is kind, helpful, happy, so on), creates something impractical. Unable to get a high paid job and unprepared to the harshness that is every-day life.
There is a UK school that uses the Rogerian view that is constantly under attack by the government due to poor educational achievement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School
