I, personally, always felt that smaller classes, like the special ones that prepared us to our version of the SATs, were much more productive than the normal, super-sized, ones. So, yes, make'em smaller. Dan Meyer, a math teacher, in his TEDtalk (http://tinyurl.com/323wup9), said this about his teaching subject: "I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but it's forced, by law, to buy it. It's just a losing proposition." So, in addition to make'em smaller, make'em interesting. In other words, allow the teacher to make the subjects as interesting as he can. I have a feeling that it's much more important to make the student care about a particular topic than to make him learn it. If he wants to learn, he will; the opposite is also true. As Roland Barthes wrote: "no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much flavor as possible." I don't think there's an easy answer to education problems. I also don't think they are anyone's specific fault. The system is broken, or maybe it just seems too screwed to fix. The difficulties are numerous: the teacher's low salary and appreciation, the schools poor infra-structure, the questionable effectiveness of the assembly-line model of education -- or, as thenewgreen put it, the "post industrial model of curriculum". These are hardships I know exist in my country and I think also exist in other parts of the world. Anyway, here are some good examples of alternative schools. Maybe they're doing better than the rest of us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escola_da_Ponte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School
The Results Only Project is an education movement. Project participants are asked to commit to any or all of the following ROLE strategies: -Eliminate worksheets
-Eliminate homework
-Use quizzes and tests as diagnostic tools only (do not count -scores against students)
-Stop all or most direct instruction, replacing it with discovery activities and brief instructional videos
-Design and use meaningful year-long projects that give students choice in how they demonstrate master learning
-Create a workshop setting
-Eliminate rules and consequences in your classroom
-Replace grades with narrative feedback
-Allow students to grade themselves
This is dead on. If students aren't interested in learning, they won't. And the desire to learn starts at home. Some lucky kids might be inspired by a teacher, but if they don't find motivation before they get to school age, it's usually too late. American teachers aren't failing as much as American parents are. (Speaking for the US, where I live.)
For example (taking the Japan, South Korea example): - Japan and Korea enjoy a certain (long standing) cultural attitude towards teachers that would render a super-sized classroom still manageable. - I can not imagine a student in Japan or Korea cursing their teacher when scolded for being late. + other unmentionables. Love to see a comparison of a typical class dynamics in say Andover vs your average public high school.
It would be better to pull problem kids from the productive classroom, and put them in a strict disciplinary program until they can earn their way out of it. Education is not a right for kids that don't behave.
Perhaps the root problem is not the classroom size, but rahter the scale of the socio-political unit.
Seriously. There are efficiciencies of scale, and then there are inefficiencies of scale. Sometimes we shouldn't enforce standardization not because the standards aren't good, but because implementing them isn't efficient.
School might save a few kids who weren't gonna make it past the intellectual inheritance that their parents gave them, but for the most part public school learning is some of the most boring, basest, catered to the lowest common denominator, soul crushing form of learning, done by teens who are pulsing with energy that is better smashed against drugs, skateboarding, partying, MTV, sex and what not then the blackboard. Most kids watch a shit ton of TV, play a bunch of video games, don't read and probably rarely attend cultural events. They don't do great on standardized test compared to some other cultures, and we look to blame teachers, class sizes, TV, Video games, Sex, Drugs ect. But if the kid loved learning from and early age the kid would continue to pursue knowledge for knoledge sake while it did all the other things that kids love to do that I have listed above.