Breakdown: Kids are bored and disengaged because we focus too much on the facts and content. Too much focus on the "what" and not enough on the "how". We can reliably measure whether a student can regurgitate facts, yet we ignore the that this is not a valid measure of that student's education. Education, now more than ever, needs to revolve around constructing arguments with evidence based reasoning.The fundamental problem with articles like this is they presume the principal function of school is education. It's not. The principal function of school is indoctrination into standard culture and social mores. Schools exist so that children can learn how to adapt to each other in society. While they're there, they adopt the prevailing body of knowledge presented by their culture. Math must be taught this way because this is the way it is used from this point forth. Writing is taught that way because that is the system we all use. In 4th grade we have this common experience. In 5th grade we have this common experience. This is why history is always such a battleground: you're teaching "this is the way the world is, because of this, because our values are this." Likewise science. There's a reason evolution or not is the biggest sticky wicket of them all: you're indoctrinating the next generation into your philosophy, or the philosophy of the enemy. The stakes are high. Before someone raises an objection over objective truth, it should be pointed out that political systems care fuckall about objective truth. If you want to feel good about yourself, American, see Lysenkoism. If you want to feel bad, read Zinn. "But wait!" you say. "The article points out that we forget it all anyway!" Sure. Absolutely. But when we're shown the examples again, we remember we've seen them before, we remember the context, and we relive our initial experience. School is about priming, not about learning. You have no fucking recollection whatsoever what "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" means but just then, when I made you read it, your ass was in a beige chair, surrounded by 10th graders, listening to someone drone on about politics completely irrelevant to your life. And it doesn't matter what you hear, it doesn't matter what you think, because whatever someone else says about Antebellum politics, you will evaluate it in terms of that history teacher whose name you'd forgotten until just now ("Mrs. Schmidt!"). Look - kids take the summer off 'cuz they're supposed to be out bringing in the harvest. That shit hasn't been true for over a hundred years. The concept of "high school" didn't even exist until the 1890s and wasn't common until the 1940s. This marvelous touchy-feely "but think of the children" stuff is an evolution of the fact that we're finally coming 'round to the idea that maybe public school should function as more than indoctrination and warehousing of the coming proletariat. That teachers think this shit is somehow amazeballs speaks volumes as to the respect we accord our teachers.
Actually, with anything close to the current set-up, I would say yes. Or, maybe I'd have to flip that around a bit to say that the current set-up works best for indoctrination. Which makes sense. The bare basics of how public (and most private schools) work goes back over 100 years, which is a huge problem in and of itself. One of the earliest countries to institute public education was Bismarck's newly formed Germany in the 1860s and 1870s. The express purpose was indoctrination, to help create a single national German identity out of the myriad of small countries absorbed by Prussia in the unification. Other countries, including the US, followed. The system started for indoctrination, and has a very nice by product of creating a more productive nation as well. We can also look at some specific policies that would need to be completely reversed. Truancy makes no sense if public education were really for education. Being in a classroom doesn't make you learn. In fact, having kids who don't want to be there in a classroom often ends up hindering the learning of those who do want to be there. What making kids show up does work for is indoctrination, as they then must interact with others and are exposed to the ideas, even if they don't learn it. Other parts of the system, like required classes, grades, and standardized testing plays into it too. By requiring certain classes, especially in the humanities, schools help to expose students to ways of thought and ideas that are in line with society, and creates a common language for citizens to work with. By tying in grades to future success, the education system makes working within the system absolutely essential. Standardized testing works the same, but at much higher stakes. For all of that, I don't think the indoctrination is all that bad. It isn't necessarily indoctrination into a specific way of thinking (or at least, in many schools, and ideally, it isn't). The indoctrination is in how to function in society. I have some cousins who are homeschooled, and interacting with them can be frustrating and tiring because they just miss things like social cues, or manners, or standard forms of interaction because they don't interact with a large number of people daily. Seeing kids transition from being homeschooled to attending public school can be interesting as well, because they just don't really get how wider society works. They also tend to be less independent from their parents, which creates other problems in interactions. kleinbl00, I gotta warn you too, private school kids can be almost as bad. Private schools can be very homogenous, and so I've seen a lot of kids struggle with having to interact with people who they don't have as many shared experiences with—kids from different social classes, or races, or even just different parts of the city. So, since you're set on private school for your daughter, make sure she has some other social outlets, like a sports team or church group or Girl Scouts or summer camp or debate team or something. The kids I know who have transitioned best from homeschool or private school to public school, or even just to society at large, have been those who gained part of the social indoctrination they missed out on from other activities.It doesn't have to be, does it?
Of this I have no doubt. My interests are purely machiavellian - having observed the social curve that the private school kids are on vs. the social curve the public school kids are on, even the trailer-trash scholarship kids from Lakeside are kickin' ass over the Valedictorians. 'cuz here's the thing: we make much of all this multicultural, get-along-with-everybody bullshit and having grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, and having been friends with all those kids, I can say with no quaver in my voice that the culturally insensitive Buffy and Chip WASP twins with their tennis lessons and French tutors? Yeah, they rule the world. And those of us who knew how to get into the hispanic parties? We get to watch. I'ma let that kid do whatever she wants socialization-wise. But academia? Eyes on the prize. kleinbl00, I gotta warn you too, private school kids can be almost as bad. Private schools can be very homogenous, and so I've seen a lot of kids struggle with having to interact with people who they don't have as many shared experiences with—kids from different social classes, or races, or even just different parts of the city.
Your usage of indoctrination in a neutral context bothered me, so I checked Wikipedia. It turned out that socialization is the positive term referring exactly to what you note important in the modern schools, while indoctrination is seen as a negative activity. This is not to attack your point in any way - only to clear the air about the terminology. This is, sadly, what it may come down to in hands of a less than benevolent government. One might argue that exposition to, say, philosophy classes might broaden a student's perspective and perception of the world, which might lead to a more thoughtful living, and the more people life thoughtfully - regarding their impact on Earth, the society, the culture, the people around them etc. - the better society is, overall. Philosophy is, very basically, a set of ideas about the world, and finding one's best set is an important goal, if only because it allows one to understand their way of living better, which leads to more informed - which often means "better" - choices. I agree with you on that socialization is very important for a child, and it would take extra effort to find a source of it while being homeschooled, while attending a school gives you that for free. I also agree on that schools - public schools, at least - often provide a heterogenous environment in which a child will learn a lot more about how the world works than if they attended a homogenous, thinly-representing environment. However, speaking from experience, I'll say that schools don't always provide the socialization one needs or could use most, if at all. I had practically zero social skills before I was... what, 20? Helicopter parenting didn't help, nor did the low culture that so often comes with low income (many kids, including those in my class, were from the poorer neighbourhood across the road from my house). I had barely any socialization with my classmates due to various factors (including the sheer vast divide in interests, level of curiosity and intelligence between most of us), and because I was very socially anxious, I wouldn't attend any extra groups or events. My point being - different people require different attitudes. I didn't need encouragement to learn all the stuff they've been giving me - I were already soaking it in like a sponge and doing most well on the tests - what I needed was encouragement and information on how to deal with people, and there was no one to give me that. It only started to pile up - discombobulatingly quickly and stressfully - after the first uni try, after a few failed relationships and dealing with people in a different, non-forced way. I'm still nowhere near the level that seems to be expected of me, socially, and I'm not sure I'll ever be because of the vicious circle of social interactions: me being anxious leads to less interactions leads to more anxiety and no gain in skills leads to... Perhaps, then, school is not the only way to socialize, no matter the scale.By requiring certain classes, especially in the humanities, schools help to expose students to ways of thought and ideas that are in line with society
1) Indoctrination is the correct term. Socialization is incorrect. 2) There is no such thing as a benevolent government. 3) There is no one here who has not had at least some experience with "school." Whatever you may think of the socialization you experienced, you would have experienced less as a homeschooler. Even the homeschooled among us know what they are and are not getting. 4) What people do and do not require is important to you, and not at all important to that non-benevolent government that is indoctrinating, not socializing. This is not a system designed to pamper the disadvantaged. It is designed to reward those who adapt to its structures most easily. That it does not work for you indicates that you need to work harder, not that the system must change.
I dont know if thats a bug of a feature. After all a lot of jobs people do later in life are boring uninspired and useless. My wife thinks that's a good thing and helps prepare kids for the adult world. The article itself is ironical boring uninspiring and useless. It fails to address your second point which I think is most important, that schools fail at teaching the boring material. Lack of resources is a huge problem (I think there are probably enough net resources but they are allocated poorly within the system) but also lack of order in the classroom. Every time I read accounts from teachers who work in inner cities it sounds like the spend every day working in a literal war zone. Disruptive students that fight, yell, threaten etc without the ability for teachers to properly discipline those students. I really do feel like we need laws and systems in place that allow for effective removal and punishment of students who are severely disrupting the learning environment and threatening teachers. Were really failing the basic problem of safety which is the second bar on the need scale. And until we solve that problem I dont think we can ever really even begin to address the teacher quality and lack of student learning problem. Teachers want to go out, make a difference and teach students but not many are going to do that at the expense of personal safety.There's really two problems with education that are tied up in this article: The first problem is that the material we're teaching is boring, uninspiring, and useless
I don't disagree, but I also don't totally agree with you. I think there's a certain amount of resistance you'll get out of making children do things they don't want to do, all day, 180+ days a year, making the issue of "inspiring, useful material" moot. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 11th grade. I stopped after 30 pages and would've been content if this asshole Kundera shut the hell up and never wrote another goddamn thing. I then reread the book 4 years later (remember you nudging me to read some Kundera kleinbl00?) and it rearranged the contents of my skull. I have reread it several times now, including stuff by different authors my higher level English teacher assigned us, and I have a qualitatively different reaction to all of it. I think you say it later in your post that "Education not being inspiring is a firmly upper-middle class problem..." and I agree. It's a luxury to follow your academic curiosity, be tested and challenged by able teachers, when you go home to roaches crawling through your hair at bedtime, a screaming match between Mom and her boyfriend, and McDonald's for dinner -- maybe.The first problem is that the material we're teaching is boring, uninspiring, and useless, and that problem exists because boring, uninspiring, useless material is the easiest thing to teach.
It is also the thing that pushes the disadvantaged classes further into disadvantage and the advantaged classes higher into the stratosphere. This is part of the "charter schools" feint - white liberal parents are likely to support it because they love hating on the school system they live in (guilty!) so if they just got some vouchers the world would be a wonderful place! But they can't really fathom the idea that a voucher for less than 100% the cost of tuition and ancillaries isn't going to be any use whatsoever to poorer families who are going to be going to a public school system that's since been impoverished by those wonderful voucher programs and charter schools. You have to be a pretty conscious liberal to recognize that you want the schools your kids don't go to to be great so that the overall crime rate goes down, the employment rate goes up and everybody benefits. If you don't have the stomach for magnanimousness across the socioeconomic spectrum, you are legitimately part of the problem.It's a luxury to follow your academic curiosity, be tested and challenged by able teachers, when you go home to roaches crawling through your hair at bedtime, a screaming match between Mom and her boyfriend, and McDonald's for dinner -- maybe.
We've been very fortunate to find our way into a publicly funded Montessori system that goes all the way through high school. So many of these elephants are addressed by Montessori methods. Lest I sound like a zealot - I acknowledge that Montessori is just ONE methodology that works for some students. There are pockets of educators who work within their pedagogy to address these elephants too. This was a great read. I think it deserves a companion piece that talks about all of the elephants in regards to kids' family lives that effect learning. There's only so much a school/educator/mentor can do.
We toured, applied to, got accepted into and received financial aid from an International Baccelaureate academy. The kid would be going there in the fall except that the aid wasn't quite enough. She's three. I went to public school but I went to a public school set up for nuclear scientists' kids run by nuclear scientists' wives combining the resources of the city, the state and the Department of Energy. I hated the fuck out of it but hot diggity damn the curriculum had some rigor. My wife went through the challenge program here and got a full ride to college. She's whip smart but she doesn't know a lot of things for the simple reason that she was never taught. Dated a girl. She went to public school up here. Her sister went to Lakeside. Girl I dated hung out with drug dealers, worked at the pea plant, dated a long string of physically abusive men and has been divorced three times. Her sister hung out with the children of CEOs, taught math in Switzerland, dated two guys I'm still friends with (one of which runs a 20-person software company) and is a tenured professor at Berkeley. I'm not about to shoot down any levees or tax packages designed to improve the state of education around here, but I'm also planning on private school for the kid from before she knows how to read.
Wow. This is really sad. I went to a public high school and loved it. (It's actually an IB school, too, for 11th and 12th grades, a program I enrolled in. I also now coach at this school.) And while it wasn't as good a school as Park, Gilman, Boy's Latin, Friend's, or McDonogh -- some of top-tier schools in and around Baltimore, private, where the rich parents send their kids -- I loved it. IB was a rigorous program, even if only a minority of students went through the program. That number is growing. But I mainly attended class with poor or middle-class black kids. I was disappointed in hearing how assured a decision it was to decide on private school. But I'm thinking about it, and it's undeniable: while I may have had a very good experience at a public high school, most students do not, and nary a one of us got the experience of rubbing shoulders with the children of CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and rocket scientists, not to mention sitting in front of the teachers those tuition dollars secure. And if I get past the initial defensiveness of my own public school experience, I realize how, even at a magnet high school, there was some woefully inadequate schooling going on in some parts. Sigh.
Right? Thing of it is, I know teachers. I know tutors. I know educators and I know administrators. And the misadventure that was No Child Left Behind exacerbated the problem and the whiplash of Common Core isn't fixing it. If I had the ability to make it better for everybody I would. Knew a guy who spent half a day every week being the science teacher for whatever class his daughter was in; he'd work with the teacher, buy the supplies, come up with a curriculum and volunteer 10% of his work week to be Bill Nye, effectively. And I admire the fuck out of the sentiment and I won't say a single bad thing about the guy but it shouldn't come to that, you know? Education is so much more political than educators want to admit and it's been losing for decades. Even the glorious misadventure that was my high school is no more; about a year after I left the Cartels moved in and it got gutted by black tar heroin. Meanwhile everybody that wears black and listens to Marilyn Manson is probably going to take a shotgun to the gym one fine day so you can't even be a reasonable miscreant, despite the metal detector. I know my kid would rip ass in public school. I know she'd get an "education." But I also know that the people who will be buying and selling everyone else won't be in class with her unless I fuckin' pay for it because that's the way the world runs.
You had mentioned somewhere previously that the never-in-a-zillion-years solution to this might be to stop anchoring school district funding to local property taxes, but instead pool property taxes nationally and provide for an egalitarian education that way. And the reason, as you said, that that will never happen? Politics. And while do-gooders and well-wishers us all will continue to decry the sorry state of things around us, no sense in not setting up our progeny to receive the very best education, which happens now to be at a private institutions.
Not my idea. Elizabeth Warren's. She wrote a book about it more than a decade ago. But then, she's a marxist/socialist/anarchist/whatever so who cares what she thinks.
The idea has an implied association that there is a very good correlation between money spent on education and outcomes. I don't think that's necessarily true I found conflicting data that seems to imply we dont have a really good way to compare school systems. A lot of the money is simply wasted on stupid shit like "technology", Ipads, administrators and non common text books. Also im going to take a soft stab at you and point out that if $spent per pupil is highly correlated with outcomes this program would benefit people like you that send their kids to private school by decreasing the pool of potential viable high performing competitors. (More people in the middle less on the edges where they can compete with private schools). I dont think that's what you were thinking of when you brought up the idea but I figured it would be worth mentioning. Ref:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-the-least-on-education-in-one-map/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/ Would imply poor correlation but i think their methodology is fucked http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/01/15/247-wall-st-states-best-schools/21388041/ would imply pretty good correlation. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/01/15/247-wall-st-states-best-schools/21388041/ medium good correlation
It doesn't, actually. It implies that when a school district's funding is determined by its property taxes, the wealthy will congregate in wealthy school districts while the poor will be marginalized into impoverished ones. Further, that pursuit of decent education becomes transformed into the pursuit of pricy real estate which further drives the stratification of education and society. I'm not going to go toe-to-toe on four links that refute an argument I didn't make. I linked to a book; you wanna attack "me", read the book.The idea has an implied association that there is a very good correlation between money spent on education and outcomes.
That makes more sense I guess I would have to go read the book to see what data she uses to support that argument. I always assumed wealthy people congregated in the same area even if that wasn't the case due to the safety, prestige and networking aspect but I could be wrong.
I grew up in Los Alamos, the son of two kids who grew up in Los Alamos, who used to go to Christmas parties at Carson Mark's house, with Norris Bradbury, Richard Feynman, occasionally Edward Teller and Stephen Hawking in attendance, and I have never before heard that term. My mother moved to Los Alamos in 1946. My father made his way there about 1947. Los Alamos was known by then but the guard towers are still up. They stopped checking IDs in '79 or so but started checking them again the last couple times I went back ('08, '11). Most towns had police; we had police, Pro Force (DOE contractors with machine guns), SWAT and Delta. During the Reagan era the guard towers regained 20mm anti-tank guns. On the plus side, I knew more Russians than the average middle American in the '90s.
Damn guys, this was good stuff. Education is always political in a very personal sense. I have a good friend that has family in Syria. His extended family in Damascus is currently hostage to Al Bassad's regime of soldiers that were indoctrinated as wards of Syyria that now do its bidding unquestionably. In fact, soldiers that might defect are shot on the spot by comrades. As a result, they are willing to do very horrific things to spare themselves and their families. This is the worst outcome of education. Is it time then that we, in the states, extend "All men are created equal..." and include some sort of guarantee toward an unfettered education in reasoning and logic?
I apologize in advance for commenting without reading the article, but it's the Huffington Post. And I feel like your pull quote is worth discussing anyway. This is one of the wonderful, modern sentences that I always use as an example of how far we've declined. Rarely do I actually get such beautiful confirmation. Oh, I see. But rephrased: too few opportunities to push agendas on children. Traditionally, you stuck with the 'what' and let kids discover the 'how' for themselves, as an educational exercise and a way to foster free thought. If kids are no longer bothering to do the second part (likely), that's a problem which needs a separate solution. You can't just skip the 'what'. I see this a lot. It conflates two supposed issues - one, that "knowing facts" is all students get out of their education, and more importantly two, that maybe students prove they can regurgitate facts for a week, but forget them two months later. The latter is a problem, I guess, but the former is not. Basically, this conversation seems like an attempt to meet our stupid, embarrassing youth on their ground. They can't learn facts? Well, luckily that's not important anymore! Convenient. My children, should I have any, will learn facts. Every person worth talking to I have ever met -- ever -- sat in those awful classes with the knowledge and memorization and tests, and... they listened and learned, instead of, I don't know, trying to overhaul the education system. Now they know stuff, which puts them way ahead of the rest of my lovely generation. Hmm. What's evidence? Like, a fact? Hard to construct any sort of argument about anything unless you have knowledge in your head.Kids are bored and disengaged because we focus too much on the facts and content.
Too much focus on the "what" and not enough on the "how".
We can reliably measure whether a student can regurgitate facts, yet we ignore the that this is not a valid measure of that student's education.
Education, now more than ever, needs to revolve around constructing arguments with evidence based reasoning.