It is unrealistic to believe that the school as copied from the west can provide these experiences. Only if we recognise the need can teachers begin to provide activities which may give students experiences of the kind they need. (Something like the school technology centre developed at Sevenoaks School in the early 1960s might be an answer.)#(12)

The problems of English as a Second Language in schools are of the same kind as those of technology. The schools as institutions do not provide a wide enough range of cultural experiences to enable the students to handle the language adequately. The English Block represented an example of the ways in which the school can be enabled to provide a wider range of experiences. A similar approach could deal with science. This is not to claim that the English Block represents a wide enough range itself. On the contrary it only points towards the need for increasing the range of students' experiences.

How did the exaggeratedly respectful attitude to schools come about? Is it the West's secret weapon to continue world domination by keeping the former colonials ignorant? Not really. No committee of evil geniuses could bamboozle people into having such a reverence for the school system. Like most things it is a product of muddle and bad thinking. Most educated Westerners themselves have an exaggerated respect for their school systems and haven't noticed the important amount of learning which takes place before and outside the schools. (Many Americans, however, have grown exasperated with their own often rigid and unimaginative school systems and may be heard to claim that they have not learned much through it - often alas, true.)

It is the origins of the technological revolution in Britain which throw light on the mode of transmission of technological knowledge. It seems reasonable to accept that the industrial revolution came from two main strands. The first was the expertise possessed by traditional craftsmen, including blacksmiths, millwrights and masons. (James Brindley the canal builder, for example, was a millwright.) This was the result of centuries of slow evolution. The development of building skills can be traced back to the 10th century. The watermill has been shown to have existed at least as early as the 13th century. The other strand was the scientific knowledge which in England was developed not in the traditional universities but in the dissenting academies (the colleges set up to cater for those who for religious reasons were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge), the ad hoc societies (such as Birmingham's Lunar Society or the Royal Society), and by rich amateurs. The point here is that all these people were "making it up" (creating new technological forms) as they went along. They were not using educational institutions copied from somewhere else. (The Universities, to some extent, tried to recreate the classical world).
This is not an argument for "deschooling" or abandoning the idea of the school as a place for learning but it is possible to argue that too much institutionalisation prevents the creativity which is an essential component of learning and development. (There are of course other components.) For example institutions in which the teachers entirely control what the students are supposed to do tend to lead to "learning" for the purpose of passing exams, much of which of course is forgotten afterwards, because the students did not want to learn it from their own choice or need. Societies in which this kind of learning - for which the best description might be "inauthentic" - dominates the schools tend to value the signs of learning - degrees and certificates - rather than learning itself. Students in such places may riot over the choice of examiner or the form of the questions in an examination. It is well known that there is a good deal of this false learning going on in all kinds of educational institutions. (It is discussed by John Holt in How Children Fail17 and How Children Learn18). This raises in turn the desires of governments to tell everyone what they should learn. If a centralised national curriculum, which is at present fashionable in many countries, results in a detailed description of what students should do in the classroom, there is a grave danger of this increasing the amount of inauthentic learning taking place. Industrial companies also like to prescribe in detail what students will do.

12Bob White et al. Experiments in Education at Sevenoaks (Constable) 1965
17John Holt How Children Fail (Pitman) 1964
18John Holt How Children Learn (Pitman) 1967