Everyone knows that America's education system is broken. It's the one thing that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Committees are convened, grants are dispensed and new studies are rolled off the educational assembly line every few months that purport to change everything by showing that the entire process of educating children from medieval to modern times was wrong.
Education has come to be a science of its own with a jargon full of nebulous pseudo-scientific
terminology impenetrable to the ordinary person. The majority of public school teachers now have master's degrees because it takes more than some ignorant BA to tell little Johnny to shut the hell up and pay attention in class or he'll never amount to anything in life.
Unfortunately the majority of teachers were also so busy getting their graduate degrees that they didn't actually put in any classroom time. The students of tomorrow are being taught by other students who have an MA and papers on educational unleveling through cognitive disequilibrium across multiple modalities but very little actual experience with students.
Educational reform has become a ridiculously popular topic. Documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" have convinced everyone that they have what it takes to reform education. Everyone includes M. Night Shyamalan (the director of that movie where Bruce Willis was really dead all along) who has his own book out claiming to have the five strategies that can save education.
Only one of them involves ghosts and aliens.
But what if the surprise twist ending for education reform is that education doesn't actually need reforming? What if it doesn't require teachers with graduate degrees, a billion dollars worth of studies and endless hand-wringing and helicopter reforming by liberal tycoons?
What if Bill Gates can stay home in his mansion and M. Night Shyamalan can go back to making bad movies? What if the American educational system is doing about as well as can be expected considering the social conditions that it has to work with.
Most educational reformers would agree that’s a dangerous heresy right up there with not believing that the planet is about to go up in smoke because of cow flatulence. They point to how much better children in Japan or Finland are doing at math and warn that if we don’t spend billions more on studies that will tell us how to improve education, America will fall behind.
We’ll no longer be the country that invents things. Instead before long we’ll be ignorant savages fighting over scraps of raw meat in the back alley behind a Taco Bell. That is if we can’t put enough teachers with graduate degrees and mad text scaffolding skills into the classroom.
But after decades of these warnings, America is still the country that invents things; even if one of those things is an obsession with turning the little schoolhouse into a nightmarish blend of experimental psychology, sociology experiment, diet club, police state and TSA line at the airport.
It's an article of faith that our schools are failing our children. But most educational reformers don't mean that schools are failing their children. They mean that urban schools are failing minority children. Like gun violence, failing schools are largely an urban problem being passed off as a national crisis. And it's not the schools that are failing. It's the students.
The gap in test scores between America and other countries goes away when broken down by race. White American students top those of most European countries. Asian students come out ahead of them. It’s not that Asian students somehow have access to better schools. Often they go to the same urban multicultural schools that are “failing” everyone else.
The difference is that they are determined to succeed because their parents want them to.
Our schools are badly run and awash in ridiculous theories and worse budgets. But they aren't failing our children. They are functioning about as well as any part of government can and they are for the most part doing their core job. Any student who makes it through twelve grades without achieving basic math and literacy skills hasn't been failed by the school. He has made a choice not to learn. More often the choice has been made for him.
A school cannot take the place of the family. It isn't meant to. Nor are educational theories the determinant of whether a child learns or doesn't learn. Learning does not begin in the classroom. It begins at home. The first explorations of language and space take place in the nursery. And they determine more about the child's future than all the synergistic educational strategies for 21st century learners.
The school is not the most vital element in education just as the government is not the most vital element in the economy. Systems don't take the place of human relationships. Governments cannot replace families. Schools aren't failing children in Detroit or Chicago. Families are failing their children and the schools by not holding together.
Children from single parent homes are at double the risk of dropping out. That is a simple fact that no amount of educational jargon can plug.
Children with never-married mothers score worse than children with divorced mothers. Across the world, regardless of race or creed, children living in a normal household with a father and mother performed better in school than their counterparts.
It doesn't matter whether the MA's in their twenties who have spent more time being students than doing anything else manage to agendize their dynamic action plans or not. It does matter whether there is a father in the house. And that father can't be Uncle Sam.
It does not take a village or four administrators and three teachers, two school psychologists and an educational theorist to raise a child. It takes a family.
If the American school system is a mess, it's because it has been reformed to death until it has stopped being a system for educating children and become a system for educating teachers and administrators about all the latest trends in educational theory. The classroom has become an ER where all the children are assumed to be coming in with fatal educational traumas and can only be saved by using the latest techniques developed by a study funded by Bill and Melinda Gates.
Like so much of the nonsense that bedevils America, educational reform is based on the progressive assumption that students are static objects and that government education is a dynamic system. With enough research, the code to teaching students will be cracked and every student in the country can then be educated to become a supergenius leaving the People's Republic of China in the dust.
Progressive educational policies have as little to do with real life education as their economic policies have to do with math and human affairs. Progressive policies fail by ignoring human choices. They try to centrally plan everything and discover belatedly that they aren't in control because their plans are undermined by individual choices.
Education is not a science. It is a relationship. And like all relationships, it works best with a healthy beginning. In its truest sense it is not something that is inflicted from outside on a child, but is the expansion of that child's worldview.
Learning is not something that someone does to us. It is not the mere acceptance of teaching which is, for the most part all that schools can do for students, but applied curiosity.
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers invented the modern world as we know it. They have one other thing in common. None of them actually finished their schooling. To the extent that they did attend, their grades were poor and their behavior would have landed them in Special Ed in any modern school.
Orville Wright was once expelled from elementary school and dropped out of high school to start his own printing business. Alexander Graham Bell was a bored and bad student. Thomas Edison hardly saw the inside of a school. The education of all three men came from a combination of self-directed learning and family homeschooling.
Any number of tech titans today were college dropouts who spent their high school years avoiding class and playing around with computers. Our educational system didn't fail them. They chose to accomplish their education in different ways.
Bill Gates has sunk a fortune into educational reform and yet he's a college dropout who by his own admission barely did enough work in school to get by. Does Gates really believe that Harvard and his upscale prep school failed him? Doubtful. When he talks about educational reform, he assumes that other children are machines who can be educated with a combination of new theories, but that his own experience is unique because he is an individual and everyone else is an interchangeable robot.
Big schools or small schools. Large class sizes or small class sizes. Recontextualize the paradigm or don't. These things don't matter very much.
Education is not a system. It is not a technique. It is a culture. The medium of education matters much less than the message. The content matters much more than the techniques used to teach it. Education teaches techniques, but it need not be a technique. And when it becomes a rigid set of techniques then it has already failed.
American education is only as strong as American culture. American culture isn't a technique. It's a way of seeing the world. It's an attitude, a sense of confidence and optimism, and a determination to tackle the difficult things. It's an art, a history and a literature that comes from these qualities.
Systematizing educational techniques cannot take the place of the family values that make for a healthy child and the national values that make for a healthy adult.
Education has come to be a science of its own with a jargon full of nebulous pseudo-scientific terminology impenetrable to the ordinary person. The majority of public school teachers now have master's degrees because it takes more than some ignorant BA to tell little Johnny to shut the hell up and pay attention in class or he'll never amount to anything in life.
Unfortunately the majority of teachers were also so busy getting their graduate degrees that they didn't actually put in any classroom time. The students of tomorrow are being taught by other students who have an MA and papers on educational unleveling through cognitive disequilibrium across multiple modalities but very little actual experience with students.
Educational reform has become a ridiculously popular topic. Documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" have convinced everyone that they have what it takes to reform education. Everyone includes M. Night Shyamalan (the director of that movie where Bruce Willis was really dead all along) who has his own book out claiming to have the five strategies that can save education.
Only one of them involves ghosts and aliens.
But what if the surprise twist ending for education reform is that education doesn't actually need reforming? What if it doesn't require teachers with graduate degrees, a billion dollars worth of studies and endless hand-wringing and helicopter reforming by liberal tycoons?
What if Bill Gates can stay home in his mansion and M. Night Shyamalan can go back to making bad movies? What if the American educational system is doing about as well as can be expected considering the social conditions that it has to work with.
Most educational reformers would agree that’s a dangerous heresy right up there with not believing that the planet is about to go up in smoke because of cow flatulence. They point to how much better children in Japan or Finland are doing at math and warn that if we don’t spend billions more on studies that will tell us how to improve education, America will fall behind.
We’ll no longer be the country that invents things. Instead before long we’ll be ignorant savages fighting over scraps of raw meat in the back alley behind a Taco Bell. That is if we can’t put enough teachers with graduate degrees and mad text scaffolding skills into the classroom.
But after decades of these warnings, America is still the country that invents things; even if one of those things is an obsession with turning the little schoolhouse into a nightmarish blend of experimental psychology, sociology experiment, diet club, police state and TSA line at the airport.
It's an article of faith that our schools are failing our children. But most educational reformers don't mean that schools are failing their children. They mean that urban schools are failing minority children. Like gun violence, failing schools are largely an urban problem being passed off as a national crisis. And it's not the schools that are failing. It's the students.
The gap in test scores between America and other countries goes away when broken down by race. White American students top those of most European countries. Asian students come out ahead of them. It’s not that Asian students somehow have access to better schools. Often they go to the same urban multicultural schools that are “failing” everyone else.
The difference is that they are determined to succeed because their parents want them to.
Our schools are badly run and awash in ridiculous theories and worse budgets. But they aren't failing our children. They are functioning about as well as any part of government can and they are for the most part doing their core job. Any student who makes it through twelve grades without achieving basic math and literacy skills hasn't been failed by the school. He has made a choice not to learn. More often the choice has been made for him.
A school cannot take the place of the family. It isn't meant to. Nor are educational theories the determinant of whether a child learns or doesn't learn. Learning does not begin in the classroom. It begins at home. The first explorations of language and space take place in the nursery. And they determine more about the child's future than all the synergistic educational strategies for 21st century learners.
The school is not the most vital element in education just as the government is not the most vital element in the economy. Systems don't take the place of human relationships. Governments cannot replace families. Schools aren't failing children in Detroit or Chicago. Families are failing their children and the schools by not holding together.
Children with never-married mothers score worse than children with divorced mothers. Across the world, regardless of race or creed, children living in a normal household with a father and mother performed better in school than their counterparts.
It doesn't matter whether the MA's in their twenties who have spent more time being students than doing anything else manage to agendize their dynamic action plans or not. It does matter whether there is a father in the house. And that father can't be Uncle Sam.
It does not take a village or four administrators and three teachers, two school psychologists and an educational theorist to raise a child. It takes a family.
If the American school system is a mess, it's because it has been reformed to death until it has stopped being a system for educating children and become a system for educating teachers and administrators about all the latest trends in educational theory. The classroom has become an ER where all the children are assumed to be coming in with fatal educational traumas and can only be saved by using the latest techniques developed by a study funded by Bill and Melinda Gates.
Like so much of the nonsense that bedevils America, educational reform is based on the progressive assumption that students are static objects and that government education is a dynamic system. With enough research, the code to teaching students will be cracked and every student in the country can then be educated to become a supergenius leaving the People's Republic of China in the dust.
Progressive educational policies have as little to do with real life education as their economic policies have to do with math and human affairs. Progressive policies fail by ignoring human choices. They try to centrally plan everything and discover belatedly that they aren't in control because their plans are undermined by individual choices.
Education is not a science. It is a relationship. And like all relationships, it works best with a healthy beginning. In its truest sense it is not something that is inflicted from outside on a child, but is the expansion of that child's worldview.
Learning is not something that someone does to us. It is not the mere acceptance of teaching which is, for the most part all that schools can do for students, but applied curiosity.
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers invented the modern world as we know it. They have one other thing in common. None of them actually finished their schooling. To the extent that they did attend, their grades were poor and their behavior would have landed them in Special Ed in any modern school.
Orville Wright was once expelled from elementary school and dropped out of high school to start his own printing business. Alexander Graham Bell was a bored and bad student. Thomas Edison hardly saw the inside of a school. The education of all three men came from a combination of self-directed learning and family homeschooling.
Any number of tech titans today were college dropouts who spent their high school years avoiding class and playing around with computers. Our educational system didn't fail them. They chose to accomplish their education in different ways.
Bill Gates has sunk a fortune into educational reform and yet he's a college dropout who by his own admission barely did enough work in school to get by. Does Gates really believe that Harvard and his upscale prep school failed him? Doubtful. When he talks about educational reform, he assumes that other children are machines who can be educated with a combination of new theories, but that his own experience is unique because he is an individual and everyone else is an interchangeable robot.
Big schools or small schools. Large class sizes or small class sizes. Recontextualize the paradigm or don't. These things don't matter very much.Education is not a system. It is not a technique. It is a culture. The medium of education matters much less than the message. The content matters much more than the techniques used to teach it. Education teaches techniques, but it need not be a technique. And when it becomes a rigid set of techniques then it has already failed.
American education is only as strong as American culture. American culture isn't a technique. It's a way of seeing the world. It's an attitude, a sense of confidence and optimism, and a determination to tackle the difficult things. It's an art, a history and a literature that comes from these qualities.
Systematizing educational techniques cannot take the place of the family values that make for a healthy child and the national values that make for a healthy adult.
Comments
Meema in a standing ovation! I cannot give you a bigger HURRAH! for this one.
ReplyDeleteAnd I must recommend Robin Eubank’s new book - Credentialed to Destroy - How and Why Education Became a Weapon. You’ll find it on Amazon. Eubanks did her research, went deep. It’s an agenda. It’s been tried before. In the 60’s, then the 90’s. The object is socially engineered education, not educated children.
"American education is only as strong as American culture. American culture isn't a technique. It's a way of seeing the world. It's an attitude, a sense of confidence and optimism, and a determination to tackle the difficult things. It's an art, a history and a literature that comes from these qualities."
ReplyDeleteBeautiful! Seven stars (and smiley faces) on your report card.
Keliata
I attended a parochial school for the first eight years of my formal education. I don't think any of the nuns (in the1950's) had a degree in anything, never mind in education, other than being vetted by their order. They did not tolerate nonsense in class. Some of them were amusing, some were certified terrors. I did well in school, and picked up study habits that paid off years later. Then, in the early 1960's, I was sent to two public high schools, reputedly the best in southwestern Pennsylvania. I learned absolutely nothing, did not like or respect the teachers, all of whom behaved like they had BA's or MA's in teaching, but not necessarily in the subjects they taught, and learned absolutely nothing of value. I was imbued with a life-long contempt for public education. It was more a social education than a learning education My education as an autodidact continued after I graduated from high school. Other than auditing some literature courses at NYU, which I never completed, I never went to college. I consider myself fortunate for having made the right choices and reached the right conclusions.
ReplyDeleteThere was a study done called Project Follow Through form the mid 60's to the mid 70's and what they discovered was that Direct Instruction gave the best results. It was buried because the last thing the Education Mafia wants to do is actually teach.
ReplyDeleteI'm 63 and have been teaching children for close to 30 years. There are 4-year-old children who come to my classroom and soak up the information and experiences I make available to them, learning naturally and easily. There are children who come to my classroom and struggle because they do not come to school ready to learn. Today I was observed by an administrator during my math whole group and small group instruction time. The only criticism I was given was that I did not incorporate technology enough. With close to $25,000 worth of computers, document camera, interactive white board with clickers, pens, touch screens, and I-pads etc. in each classroom, we are pressured to make continual use of these. No one notices that my little ones are already tech savvy, but what they really need is concrete experiences with direct instruction in order to learn.
ReplyDeleteMost of all, they need family and good solid home training. My newest student hit his tantrum record, throwing himself on the floor 11 times in one day last week. This week, we are beginning to see more self-control because we expect it and won't accept less. I spend a lot of time teaching young parents what they didn't learn as children.
God Bless you and keep doing what works :-D
Delete"Education is not a system. It is not a technique. It is a culture. "
ReplyDeleteBingo, It's the cultural expectations, stupid. There are four cultural values that determine a group's success in America. The degree to which a group embraces these values exactly matches that group's overall socioeconomic success. They are; education, a strong work ethic, acceptance of personal responsibility and accountability and familial loyalty/obligations. Examination of American minority culture's degree of inculcating these four values in their young exactly matches the degree of success the group enjoys.
West Indian blacks are also descended from slaves but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites and are nearly 25% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks. Black West Indian culture embraces all four cultural values...
No amount of money or entitlement can substitute for the culture's embrace or rejection of these values.
My sister, teaching now 32 years, relates two surprising trends not normally ever remarked upon by the punditry:
ReplyDelete1) The ratio of staff to teachers has absolutely exploded. Decades ago, she taught K-6... and the staff was one principal and one janitor... all others were line teachers.
Today there is almost one staffer (unionized) for EVERY single line teacher in the system. Most of these are in the central administration -- which has grown like cancer. This situation goes almost entirely unremarked as the years roll by.
2) Off-the-clock Federally mandated paperwork has grown like topsy. She used to spend 1/2 an hour off the clock filling out DC's queries -- thirty-years ago. Of late she spends a staggering 8 hours a week -- every week -- filling out DC queries. It's these queries that are keeping the central staffers buried under a tide of pulp.
It turns out that DC's funding comes at a high cost: meddling, second guessing. The downtown staff is mated to the Federal drones back in DC. It's THESE unionized staffers that are sucking down the school budget.
All of the Federal largesse is largely consumed by this phalanx of tabulators. The union keeps them in clover. Without such a guardian, the ENTIRE hive could be well replaced by few Python scripts nested in smart pads!
There is a consequence of such 'control-narcissim.' Education, human contact, is deemed far less important than getting the reports in on time. The system becomes the primary object of the union, lest the largesse be clipped.
The universal sanction of DC is reduced funding. Blanks within forms are apostasy against the DC formalisms. (You'd also lock up DC's COBOL programming code. Everything is high tech in DC -- if your standard is 1969 -- and ferrite cores are still the main frame way to go.)
This is but a sub-set of the larger, modern, multi-variate, paralysis: lacking ANY working theories that hold up, the Spenders that Be try and back calculate correlations based upon multi-variate statistics. It never occurs to them that system information was destroyed on the path to their tabulated results. Like a motorcycle, it's IMPOSSIBLE to ride it backwards to the driving conditions.
The entire crowd is light on information theory. This is that segment of humanity that never did well in arithmetic -- let alone sets, number theory and mappings.
the growth of administrators has been noted, but not as much as it should be, since all the educational reform solutions involve more monitoring and tampering
ReplyDeleteDaniel-
ReplyDeleteIt's worse than that on the administrators. The nature of the education degree programs was changed dramatically about 20 years ago to shift the focus from the transmission of knowledge to changing what students believe and value and feel. What they are to be allowed to know is very much influenced now by what concepts are useful fulfill a role as a worker drone and believe in the need for fundamental social transformation. I'm not guessing here, as Meema kindly pointed out, I have the books and documents where influential people openly declared their intentions for social engineering and noetic change.
The administrators now act as enforcers and many have spent little time in the classroom. The more aggressively they push bad ideas, the faster the lucrative promotions come. Because retirement pensions are frequently based on last 5 or 3 years of income, being an aggressive administrator in pushing bad ideas is believed to guarantee a 6 figure salary and benefits courtesy of taxpayers for life. And then if you pushed the right toxic ideas you get the lucrative thousands per day consulting contracts.
It is a racket where the more aggressively someone is willing to push harmful ideas or is simply oblivious to the consequences, the more they earn. And it is killing us as a culture. And with the Common Core implementation being so poorly known and understood, this is all getting much worse and fast.
Thanks for the timely story. 2014 is intended to be a hugely transformative year.
Yet again, splendid thought slicing through the burdensome layers of educrats.
ReplyDeleteIt is about controlling people and curtailing their rights and beginning at an early age.
ReplyDeleteIt is about making children property of the state rather than parents.
The use of the words "lockdown" in conjunction with schools proves that this has gone beyond educating children to the state wanting full control of children and the ability to separate them from their parents.
I agree with a lot here. It seems like you are endorsing the obvious position, contrary to conservative orthodoxy, that teachers and teachers' unions are not the problem. The problem is fundamentally parents and the home environments of kids.
ReplyDeleteI have long said how can people expect a teacher to make up for the early upbringing of a kid who comes from a house where there are no books, where the family uses a limited vocabulary and does not converse except to engage in conflict, where there is no such thing as quiet study time, and who has never been taken to a museum or library? It is ludicrous to suggest that schools can remedy the cognitive deficiencies resulting from that child's early upbringing, and ludicrous to blame teachers or unions when they fail to do so.
I'm not defending teachers. They're drastically overpaid and the current generation is being trained to promote social justice, rather than education, as other commenters have pointed out. Teachers' unions are economic parasites that destroy entire cities.
ReplyDeleteBut a large part of those problems come from educational reform, rather than a lack of it. Now the wheel is tilting toward reforms that undo those reforms.
But they're not what's wrong with education. Education is just not that hard. If the USSR could manage to teach basic skills, even the worst American schools can do it too.
The system is corrupt and mismanaged, but the failure to learn is largely on the part of families.
lemon, that has been the educational vision for some time. It's why we have centralized education.
ReplyDeleteI agree that social issues are a big part of education, but what else can we do but try to create a better system in the hopes that receiving a better education will eventually help our society as well.
ReplyDeleteShould we just give up, throw our hands in the air, and stop pushing for more school choice or better educational standards or holding teachers accountable for doing their jobs?
I'm certainly not going to.
Absolutely Lemon. I think that's been the agenda all along.
ReplyDeleteBTW, good to see you!
Keliata
As you say, teaching children to read is not complicated. It is hard, perhaps, in the sense of taking some stamina and passion. But it isn't complicated. The level of high theory surrounding elementary education is absurd. Here's a taste from the Common Core web site:
ReplyDelete"Content standards and curricula are coherent if they are: articulated over time as a sequence of topics and performances that are logical and reflect, where appropriate, the sequential or hierarchical nature of the disciplinary content from which the subject matter derives. That is, what and how students are taught should reflect not only the topics that fall within a certain academic discipline, but also the key ideas that determine how knowledge is organized and generated within that discipline. This implies that “to be coherent,” a set of content standards must evolve from particulars (e.g., the meaning and operations of whole numbers, including simple math facts and routine computational procedures associated with whole numbers and fractions) to deeper structures inherent in the discipline. These deeper structures then serve as a means for connecting the particulars (such as an understanding of the rational number system and its properties)."
Do you have a headache yet? I have a degree in philosophy and have read some pretty high-level nonsense, but that still took me a few tries to understand. Does anyone really believe Koreans do better at school because their government pays education PhDs to write things like that? Or do we all deep down know it's because Korean students spend 12 hours a day studying?
Teachers' colleges have become Marxist. The attack on lectures-and-tests in favor of "group projects" is an attack on individual rights and individual achievement. An example from my personal experience in the early 1990's: Volunteering in a small town Midwest school, I was told by the excited teacher that I'd get to participate in an important experiment "to prove" that minority kids learn better in group projects. ( "To prove," mind you, not "to find out if." ) This totally rigged "experiment" used the deprived black free-lunch kids (title something or other, they called them) as the control group, while engaging the middle class black kids, some of whom were excellent students already, in a "group discussion" while the free-lunch black kids were out of the classroom. Guess who performed better? Further, the deprived black kids were exposed to reading and lecture only, while the middle class black kids got additional exposure to the subject matter through their group discussion. How is that fair? - I got nowhere with the teacher when I questioned the biased structure of this pseudo-experiment. She told me the instructions to use the very poorest black kids as the control group came from one of the nation's most highly teachers' colleges. Ironically, I think there were one or two students in that class who understood the scientific method better than the teacher and the "experts" at the teachers' colleges. Beware the government-educational complex!
ReplyDeleteAnon, if the solution is as easy as teaching and studying, then suddenly all the educational theorists are out of work and teachers no longer need graduate degrees
ReplyDeleteOver, a very revealing story. I wonder how many other experiments are similarly biased
Sultan, I agree that the culture is broken. But there are major problems with education as well.
ReplyDelete1. Everyone is told to go to college, mostly learning light liberal arts subjects that have limited applications outside of school.
2. Apprenticeships are discouraged, I wasn't even aware how to get one when I was in school. I think skilled trades, many of which are facing a shortage of workers, are a viable option for many students who dont do well in school.
3. This isn't really about education but are you concerned that continuing automation will make most jobs that schools prepare people for obsolete?
I teach public school in rural New Hampshire. In most states, all the M.Ed. does is get you better pay which is why so many teachers get it; not because it is required. Since less than 1% of the state is black, the diversity in the classroom is cultural. While I could go on and on about the insanity of "Race to the Top," Obama's even worse replacement of "No Child Left Behind," the premise for the last 15 years has remained the same: If you categorize children, you can devise an educational plan for them, test them, categorize them again, test them, and then label them again. Anyone who does not fit the description of the categories that have been created are tested for special ed. We have tiers in the classrooms, tiers in the grades, and tiers in schools. You're not allowed to be different (remember the kid who ate paste? He'd be slammed onto an IEP in no time!).
ReplyDeleteNo one is told to go to college; kids are told that if they don't have a marketable skill they will work for Dunkin Donuts, and we all know just how pathetic that is. Despite the fact that IEPs disappear after high school graduation, there are lots of students who opt for tech institutes, community colleges or single year job training because their parents think four year schools are either too expensive or not necessary. Lots of parents want their kids on IEPs if they struggle with a subject because teachers can't fail them and the kids won't get homework. Parents hate homework -- it forces them to spend time with the kid and after a hard day's work, a long commute or (up here) a snowstorm, to hell with that... just don't do it and tell the teacher you forgot. It pandemic.
The point is, it takes two to tango. Education is reactive -- it has reacted to the cultural collapse of America's families. We have dozens of elementary students seeing the school psychologist because their families are broken and they can't deal with it. We hire more and more professionals to deal with the culture collapse and don't fix a thing. Whose job is that anyway?
So you're saying that if there are two parents to rasie a child then it doesn't take a village?
ReplyDeleteWell, that is the rub. PhDs and MAs get prestige by doing research, not by using tried and true techniques or simply moving to master practitioner. Problem is their experiments are conducted on children. I wonder if they have an affinity for twins?
ReplyDeleteOne interesting aspect I became aware of last year is obvious in retrospect. The one thing schools do not do is teach students how to do their job, i.e., study. Sure they offer some vague advice but no actual instruction.
But if you read 'How to Study and Teaching How to Study' (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, you find a very good list of factors and a great discussion of why and how this can be taught starting in 3rd grade. But how to process reading, parse a lecture and assimilate the knowledge is decidedly not presented. The opening paragraphs of the book could have been written yesterday rather than over 100 years ago. McMurry's book was considered something of the bible in education up till about the 1920s, but then seems to have been forgotten.
"It is, perhaps, unnecessary to collect proofs that young people do not learn how to study, because teachers admit the fact very generally. Indeed, it is one of the common subjects of complaint among teachers in the elementary school, in the high school, and in the college. All along the line teachers condole with one another over this evil, college professors placing blame on the instructors in the high school, and the latter passing it down to teachers in the elementary school. Parents who supervise their children's studies, or who otherwise know about their habits of work, observe the same fact with sorrow. It is at least refreshing to find one matter, in the much-disputed field of education, on which teachers and parents are well agreed."
"In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar "school helplessness"; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks."
"So you're saying that if there are two parents to rasie a child then it doesn't take a village?"
ReplyDeleteOnly if you want the child to grow up to be the village idiot.
The decline of Education started with Dewey in the 1920s. He believed that to get children to accept socialism, they would have to be "dumbed down" through the school system. So, he found a way to infiltrate the "normal schools" (places where teachers learn how to be teachers) so that the teachers being churned out were slowly indoctrinated into leftism. The teachers' unions also had a hand in this. Once a bunch of teachers were compromised, it was only a matter of time until the curriculum shifted as well. Dick and Jane is an example of the kind of claptrap that Dewey hoped would dumb down the kids. Whole Language (as opposed to teaching phonics) was intended to teach the deaf how to read; it is not intended for teaching children who can hear. This crap was pulled in Russia but it made the soldiers too dumb so they had to discontinue it.
ReplyDeleteThere is a sickly sweet smell permeating the halls and classrooms of our schools these days. It's sweet because it's feminine and its sickly because it isn't healthy and doesn't work. Especially not for boys. Consider the following.
ReplyDeleteIn the original Star Trek series in an episode entitled 'Turnabout Intruder', captain James Kirk's body is taken over by a woman who wants control of the Enterprise. It was an interesting but exaggerated look at gender difference with this new Kirk struggling to make decisions and responding emotionally and hysterically to a crisis. The takeaway being that there are gender differences and thank god for the enterprise that Kirk regained control of his body, just in time. Positive role model for boys.
Today women need not worry how they are portrayed on television and in movies. Women are the superheroes and the smart ones.Men are villains, rapists and are ridiculed. It is men who need to worry about their role models.
How is it possible that the very nature of gender and gender roles have changed so drastically in such a short time.
Has there been that much evolutionary change in less than 200 years.
Boys are growing up without male role models looking at the world through a feminine prism and seeing men all around them being marginalized. Now they go to school where the feminine herd mentality naturally acquired over thousands of years is exerted in group and non competitive learning, 'we don't keep score, we're all winners here' . Boys are naturally competitive and more individual. Want to get a boy do to something in class, try "Bet you can't" instead of "Would you please".
There is plenty of proof that so many more boys than girls are on drugs for ADHD. Mustn't fidget while cutting and pasting and talking about the flowers you picked in the school yard.
I just wanted to add that of all the progressive ideas that conflict with reality,to me feminism has to at least be discussed. It seems to be running in the background and like a bad smell you get used to it. I'm surprised how little attention it gets.\Some have said that it is leading to cultural suicide as in matriarchal societies don't last. Its not helping in education. Can't you have a rational and reasonable discussion without being called a misogynist.
Feminism has greatly contributed to the breakdown of the family unit and is now exerting a negative influence on education and especially the education of boys.A recent article here on the deconstruction of marriage and gender roles examines some of these issues.
Today What I'm trying to get at is that this with superhuman stren feminism has gone too far in trying to dispel these earlier perceptions. The negation and minimizing of gender differences has contributed to family and societal breakdown and in the classroom this has had a particularly detrimental effect on boys.
Rich G, it is mainly men who populate prisons. Men are rapists,etc. That's isn't fiction but fact. Women don't go around raping , it would be a rarity.
ReplyDeleteThe world turned the other way was no better than it is today. And, women still do not rule the roost as you believe. The Glass ceiling is firmly in place, it is a man's world. Women are still the object of murder, beatings, rapes and female infanticide and female child abortion is a worldwide holocaust.
It isn't about man VS woman. It is about all people being better than they are now.
What was the norm is why things changed. What replaced it is just as bad.
A new world is what is necessary to right these wrongs not a battle of the sexes.
Please describe this new world It sounds somewhat utopian.
ReplyDelete"The opening paragraphs of the book could have been written yesterday rather than over 100 years ago. McMurry's book was considered something of the bible in education up till about the 1920s, but then seems to have been forgotten."
ReplyDeletethat seems about the time when the Frankfurters gathered up every last copy and SET THEM ABLAZE... well, just guessing.
there's something curious or foretelling about the self-absorbed, amateur-psychologist, philospher john dewey that really got a thrill up his leg for european socialist professors that he enabled them to find work all over the [[ nice work, D.R. ]] then to the ones of lesser influence
continuing communist creepiness
danfan
Understand that a more appropriate term would be STATE schools, rather than PUBLIC schools.
ReplyDeleteThen, too, the goal of state/public schools has NEVER been education, but INDOCTRINATION. The best way to do that is via turning young brains to mush, such that they never seen through the veil that has been wrapped around their heads.
The left´s poster child in ed schools is Constructivism. Here a definition:
ReplyDelete“This dramatic change of role implies that a facilitator needs to display a totally different set of skills than a teacher. A teacher tells, a facilitator asks; a teacher lectures from the front, a facilitator supports from the back; a teacher gives answers according to a set curriculum, a facilitator provides guidelines and creates the environment for the learner to arrive at his or her own conclusions; a teacher mostly gives a monologue, a facilitator is in continuous dialogue with the learners.”
Consequences are two-fold: firstly teachers need not know anything granting ill prepared minorities in the profession and secondly children think their teachers are morons and rightfully so. Disrespect follows suit...
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