Maybe public schools have become the employer of last resort while talented people found jobs however menial, elsewhere. Every teacher I talk to hardly speaks English. One told me she cannot balance a checkbook.That is why she teaches “math”. Have we sunk this far?
Damn the bells! Damn the routine!
Looks like they want to implement the Lord of the Flies. We know how that worked out.
Well that’s what you get when you let the Feds through money and the department of education control things
I do think education needs to be changed in some fundamental ways.
My friends who have home schooled their children report that having flexible hours and allowing the children to choose the order of study works very well.
I think homework is a lazy teacher’s crutch. If you can’t effectively teach a concept in an hour, sending them home with hours of “practice” isn’t going to make them any better. What is does do is give the children with supportive, interested parents a huge leg up. Kids that lack someone at home to help them become frustrated with school and are more likely to drop out early.
I could go on and on, but all you really have to do is check out the school systems that are kicking our butt. Some are strict and long (mostly Asian countries), but some, like Finland, have taken on a much different approach with great success.
bump
Wait a bunch of pussies.
I’ll bet, in five years, someone will open Snowflake U.
5.56mm
If I had been allowed to “follow my own interests” in school, I’d have played ball all day and never learned anything. It’s almost as if libtards want to sabotage our children to make America less great.
If you live in the north, big whoop.
Most schools dispense curriculum from the top down, from distant sources. Children learn best when the approach is learner-centered, based on their interest.
This actually is a problem.
Schools should choose their curriculum rather then having one forced on them.
Students are forced to stay in classrooms and are not allowed to leave….
Not a problem.
Children in most schools are forced to sit in rows of desks and not move around…
Also not a problem.
In most schools learning takes place in rigid periods, governed by bells. Research has shown that children need to learn according to their own rhythms….
So home school.
In most schools bullying is rampant and there is no effective mechanism to control it….
In prisons the guards make no attempt to control the top dog inmates.
In schools the teachers make no attempt to control the bullies.
In most schools, irrelevant homework is assigned, which students are forced to do at home and turn in at school. If students are following their own interests, homework is not necessary…..
I am flat out against homework before seventh grade.
In most schools children are segregated into classes of students who are their exact age…
This can be a problem but mixing ages is not practical unless you want to go back to the one room school house.
Which is not totally a bad idea.
In most schools children are forced to compete for grades in every subject. Grades have been shown to be a false motivator, based on someone else’s idea of what they should be learning, rather than their own intrinsic interest.
Nonsense. Grades measure how much you retained of what you were taught. And you can explore your interests once you have learned how to learn.
In most schools students are forced to take many hours of standardized tests, often without ever knowing whether their answers were right or wrong. Teaching to tests pushes students in exactly the wrong direction.
Tests are fine. Once again they measure how much you actually learned. Why would they never know if their answers were right or wrong? As to "teaching to the test" as long as the test covers what you were suppose to be learning there is nothing wrong and everything right with that.
(For truly bad things in education, see “Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.”)That link (which didn’t carry thru in your posting) lists those 10 things as
- BOGUS READING INSTRUCTION -- Whole Word, Sight Words, and Dolch Words (there are many aliases) have created 50 million functional illiterates, for the simple reason that this method does not work. (No one learns to read fluently with Sight-Words. Some people learn to read, if at all, IN SPITE OF of Sight-Words.) This hoax and the accompanying gimmicks known as guessing, picture clues, et al should be eliminated from the schools.
- REFORM MATH -- Arithmetic jumbled and mumbled. Reform Math is a monster with many names (Connected Math, Chicago Math, Mathland, etc.) created by the same people who gave us New Math and now want to give us Core Standards. Reform Math forbids mastery, requires spiraling from topic to topic, and promotes using a calculator to compensate for a lack of basic skills.
- COOPERATIVE LEARNING -- Students always work in groups. A good approach for fostering a herd sensibility; a dreadful approach for creating independent thinkers and self-starters.
- CONSTRUCTIVISM -- A destructive fad. Teachers are reduced to facilitators, their knowledge and academic training rendered moot. Students are required to invent their own new knowledge. This process will be long and slow. After all, the human race has been around for millennia and has collected tens of thousands of prime facts, insights, discoveries, theories, etc. What sort of loon turns a child loose with this order: try to recapitulate the intellectual history of the human race? (A far better approach is to give children a wide range of foundational knowledge ASAP.)
- WAR AGAINST CONTENT -- A witless policy pursued since the time of John Dewey. The apparent goal is to make sure that children learn as little as possible. In any case, that is the result.
- NO MEMORIZATION -- This is standard operating procedure in all grades and in all courses. It is an excellent policy if you wish to ensure cultural illiteracy and societal amnesia.
- SELF-ESTEEM -- Another destructive fad now rampant. Students must be praised even when they do bad work. Furthermore, a concern for self-esteem can justify eliminating virtually all content from classrooms, on the grounds that some students won’t be able to handle the material. A quiet plague.
- MULTICULTURALISM -- This sophistry requires children to learn more about faraway cultures, both in miles and years, than about their own. As the children have no frame of reference for understanding other cultures, little information is retained, other than the persistent message: your own country is no damn good. Multiculturalism helps in the war against content. Kids are kept busy, going nowhere.
- HOSTILITY TO GENUINE TESTING -- A helpful policy if you wish to conceal that children aren't learning much. (A complex point. If schools are genuinely trying to teach knowledge, they will want to find out how much the students are learning. Same as it ever was. Problem is, in the schools today there is a lot of disingenuous testing of trivial things that didn't need be taught in the first place. Common Core Math illustrates this phenomenon.)
- TOO MANY IMPOSTORS -- Ideologues pretend to care about education even while focused on manipulating the minds of millions of children. (Keep these extremists away from the schools, and the other nine problems will miraculously vanish.)