This is not a debate thread, or a thread to post justifications for the practice, which are largely obvious for many of us with a traditional Western education.
One of the interesting features of the educational systems in much, if not all, of the English-speaking world is that secondary education (e.g. high school or equivalent) is sharply divided into institutions or programs for children and institutions or programs for adults. For example, the United States has a very large network of public and private high schools where children (and, in some cases, adults under a certain relatively low age such as 22) may work toward a high school diploma. People who are over the “cutoff” age to attend a regular school, but who did not, for whatever reason, complete a high school diploma or equivalent, but want or need to, are referred to a parallel system of education (adult high schools, continuation high schools, the GED, etc.) that is normally closed to children. The end result is similar, but the process is completely different.
This sort of dichotomy is notably not common at the university level here. Middle-aged or even elderly people are allowed to apply to, enroll in, and attend nearly any degree program. There probably haven’t been more than a dozen octogenarians who have attended Freshman Composition at Virginia Tech as freshmen, but that’s due to social realities rather than institutional policies or local laws.
Are there any countries or areas of the world where the division of secondary education between children and adults does not exist, or exists only in a much more diluted form? E.g. a country where there is no compulsory high school education and people enter and leave high school studies according to their own needs and availability, and some people complete it as children while others drift in and out and don’t finish until 35 because work pressures keep pulling them away, but everyone who does attend attends the same school, institution, or program.
Are there any countries or areas of the world where there is an age stratification system in place at the university (or similar higher education) level? E.g. a country where only people under 35 are allowed to attend regular Medical School, and people over 35 who want an MD must attend the Nontraditional Medical School For Old People which is in a different neighborhood, uses different pedagogical techniques, etc.
I do not have factual answers to your two questions but as food for thought it seems the dividing line is the age of majority which in the US is 18 and I think in most countries about the same.
So, the society does not want adults mingling with youths in an educational environment. So no 30-somethings going to high school with 15 year olds (and we can get creepier than that).
But at the university level everyone is legally an adult (barring a few special cases) and everyone pays to attend (or gets a scholarship). At a university a 20-year-old sitting next to an octogenarian seeking a degree is no big deal. Unusual maybe but not “weird”. But that 80-year-old in a high school class would seem really weird.
TL;DR Separate the underage kids from the adults else creepy things can happen. Once an “adult” all bets are off.
Yes, I know, and I had mentioned that there were “obvious” reasons in my OP. What I’m not convinced of, though, is whether or not these “obvious” reasons are universally held and followed throughout the world, which is the nature of my OP. E.g. I could imagine, say, a small, remote farming community in Nepal where everyone knows and trusts each other (those who are not trusted meet an early demise in an unmarked grave or at least run out of town with pitchforks) and the adults who never finished their diploma get invited to come sit with the high school kids for a few weeks to brush up for the next season of exams.
P.S. The idea of an adult somehow ending up in a classroom full of kids was a common trope in many of the shows I watched as a kid. For example, one episode of TaleSpin involved the discovery that the main character, a commercial pilot, had somehow skipped sixth grade. He was promptly removed from his flying career and made to sit with all the little kids in sixth grade.
That is a world of difference from a first-world country so as to be an apples and oranges comparison.
If all you have is a one-room school house in the middle of nowhere then all bets are off.
I am willing to bet though that in such communities the older people never, ever try to attend the one-room school for the purpose of advancing their education.
You don’t teach five year olds in the same way, and using the same techniques, as you use for fifteen-year-olds. Same goes for fifteen-year-olds and twenty-five-year-olds.
It’s not just that they are learning different things; it’s that they are at different stages of development, and they learn differently, and require different educational/pedagogic environments.
But once they reach adulthood, age differences become much less important.
So the reason for not putting adults in, say, a year 8 class, is not primarily, or at any rate not just, that it seems a bit creepy. It’s mainly that it won’t be a good educational environment for them. Whereas there’s much less of an issue with having a 20-year old and a 60-year old in the same lecture hall.
Here in the U.S., there are some colleges/universities that limit themselves to admitting “traditional-age” students, and some that have special “adult programs” for students who are older than this. But that’s up to the institution.
You don’t teach five year olds in the same way, and using the same techniques, as you use for fifteen-year-olds. Same goes for fifteen-year-olds and twenty-five-year-olds.
It’s not just that they are learning different things; it’s that they are at different stages of development, and they learn differently, and require different educational/pedagogic environments.
But once they reach adulthood, age differences become much less important.
So the reason for not putting adults in, say, a year 8 class, is not primarily, or at any rate not just, that it seems a bit creepy. It’s mainly that it won’t be a good educational environment for them. Whereas there’s much less of an issue with having a 20-year old and a 60-year old in the same lecture hall.
Which ones are these? And do these schools actually have hard age cutoff dates defined in policy (e.g. “Sorry, the Master of Science in Important Stuff is only available to those born between August 1, 1995 and August 1, 2002 pursuant to Policy R, Subpolicy Beta, Paragraph 4, Sub-paragraph iiv, Sub-sub-paragraph cdxvii, line 390 of the Official Policies of Podunk University”), or is it more that they intentionally set things up to discourage people from the “wrong” age group from applying or sticking around? E.g. a mandatory “You must make at least three posts to your Facebook page a day under penalty of referral to the Dean of Discipline” policy to strongly discourage, but not outright ban, old fogeys who don’t grok online social media?
Yes, I understand, and even agree. However, we all know that there are some downright stupid teachers out there and perhaps even stupider school administrators who might actually think it was a good idea.
I take your point. But when you get to the point of asking whether other countries do this differently from the US, you’re not really asking about the idiosyncrasies of individual educators or administrators. I think you’re asking whether there is any country where, systemically, this reality isn’t recognised. And I doubt that there is.
What you might have, though, is relatively poor countries where resource issues mean that age-appropriate programmes aren’t available to more mature students, which will result in some combination of (a) more mature people not getting education that they want, and (b) more mature people getting education in an age-inappropriate environment. But I suspect this plays out only in marginal cases - e.g. you might find a 23-year old attending trade school with a bunch of 15-and 16 year-olds, but you won’t find a 35-year old attending primary school with a bunch of 11-year olds.
It’s not a matter of “protecting the children” as much as of assuming that someone who’s working towards a GED or whatever the local equivalent is, in his 20s, will probably have a job, kids, and other obstacles to spending 8 to 10h a day in school. Night school programs usually involve a lot less hours and center exclusively on “academic” subjects.
Add the different teaching techniques needed, and that the issues the students experience will be very different, and what wouldn’t make much sense is to sit a woman in her 60s who didn’t get schooled because her parents couldn’t be arsed send her to school in a toddler-sized chair.
Germany (as well as some other countries in Central Europe) has a traditional system of vocational training in which an individual who wants to learn a trade (not just in the technical field) is employed by a company for (usually) 3 years as an apprentice and receives on-the-job-training [1]. At the same time, he or she is required to attend a state-run professional (vocational) school once or twice a week. For instance, if you are training to become an electrician, this is where you learn about physics. If you are training for a white-collar qualification, your subjects will include accounting, business math, basic computer skills etc.
Usually, these apprentices start their apprenticeship when they are, roundabout, 16 years old (after 10 years of regular schooling). But occasionally, there are older folks who become apprentices (career change, university drop-out, former service member). So it is somewhat unusual, but not totally unheard of to have a 15 or 16 year old apprentice sitting in the same class room of a vocational school with an individual in his/her early 30s.
[1] read, for instance: Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers - The Atlantic
Another factor is that adults demand more respect than children receive, and therefore won’t abide the same policies that they tolerated up through secondary education (high school).
Dress codes are one example: Universities don’t have them. At that level, the only rules about what you can wear are those imposed by law, with the exception of certain class-specific policies created for specific purposes (such as, don’t wear certain clothes into a chemistry lab) and possibly uniforms for bands and teams and such. (Minor and joke “universities” such as Bob Jones vary.)
Eighteen-year-old high school seniors are subject to the same rules as their seventeen-year-old year-mates, but after graduation society has slotted them into a different, higher role, and trying to put them back down a notch is not feasible. I think this change in social role is going to be an underlying answer to a lot of the given reasons adults and children (as socially defined) don’t mingle educationally. The points about pedagogical theory are secondary to this basic fact.
Note also that most colleges and universities do not have a specific minimum wage. They have minimum required achievement levels, of course, but if a seven-year-old can demonstrate that she’s ready for multivariate calculus, she can take the class (and yes, I’ve seen it happen). More common, of course, will be a 16- or 17-year-old who started kindergarten early, or skipped a grade somewhere along the line, enrolling as a freshman.