Wide context
Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)
/^t/Individual guided study allows the children to choose subjects they want to study. Very young people are not able to do that because they do not know their preferences. 6-year-old children in a kindergarten in Cracow were asked: "What do you want to be or do in the future?" Almost all children wanted to become policemen or policewomen, firemen, Hercules or Zorro. What is the most appropriate education for the future Zorro? With very young people that way of study seems not to be very adequate. At the first stage of learning very general abilities should be taught and practised. The child and his parents should have time to find child's interests and preferences. Another drawback of an individual study can be found, namely almost each student should have his own, adjusted to his needs, syllabus. That sounds rather improbable and can cause a lot of trouble and a great amount of additional work for the teachers. Children can choose subjects for themselves and they can specialise on them. The idea sounds nice but the results are rather unpredictable. Students can find themselves in the situation that they possess only narrowed knowledge without being familiar with even basic information from other subjects. Having the freedom of choosing school subjects some children can choose such subjects as craft, music, art etc. and after the graduation they are not able to write or read properly. At the same time they have the same school diploma as those students who study chemistry, physics or maths. Too much freedom can sometimes be as dangerous as the lack of it.