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Some thoughts, first, on examples of collectivist versus leadership models in education...our conversation last week reminded me of an exercise we did about once a month during one of my classes senior year of high school. We would have Harkness discussions, a model of classroom conversation that began at some Ivy league university according to my teacher, I think it was Harvard. Basically, the teacher removed himself from the discussion, and it was the students responsibility, given a topic of discussion (we usually did the book we were reading for class) to engage themselves and each other in a conversation about it that was enlightening and the product of the group as a whole with no acting leader. Honestly, I never liked the Harkness conversations. We'd end up searching around for something, anything to talk about, not really knowing where to focus. It was sustained BS for the most part: we wanted to participate, of course, and to have a say in the course of our learning, but dissolving leadership to that extent didn't lead us to coming to a direction together, it left us going nowhere. What we looked at in class is the incredible effect of group intertia, but it goes in both ways. A group at rest will also stay at rest.

I had a similar experience this last semester when group presentations were the bulk of our learning of Joyce's Ulysses. There's simply only so much you're going to be able to "discover for yourself" without someone imparting a foundation and then leading you in potentially fruitful directions. It was really difficult material, and we didn't have thorough enough understanding to benefit from teaching and being taught by each other about it. We were, again, just desperately looking to have some kind of conversation, but we didn't have the raw knowledge about the book for our conversation to lead anywhere. Structure prevents aimlessness, even if it has to be to an extent at the cost of perscribing particular aims that, yes, limit you some.