Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
The indirect beneficiaries of the education-industrial-complex are: spouses and other relatives, subcontractors and suppliers to the schools, and even other businesses seemingly far removed from the government schools. For example, my dentist and his office staff depend on government school dental insurance for a living. Ministers in my town depend upon the collection plate offerings of those benefiting from the education-industrial-complex.
Then there are privately employed workers who benefit by not having young people compete for their jobs. These jobs are often union domininated. The more years a young person is a slave in a government school desk, the less competition there is for many high paying jobs.
So?...What is the result? Answer: We have infantilized our teens so that others can suck a living from them.
Much of what is considered "normal" teen behavior is **not** normal. It is pathologic! Behavior that is written off as being "typical" of the teen years is generally **not** seen in homeschoolers who have been homeschooled from the beginning.
I have a few suggestions:
1) Try not to institutionalize your child unless there is absolutely no other alternative. Homeschool if at all possible.
2) I would like to see a private company develop at test similar to the GED. This test could be given to any child at any age. If they passed they would be issued a state high school diploma.
The problem with the government administered GED is that the states in which I lived will not allow youth to take it until they are 16 or 18. This makes it impossible for them to qualify for government ( and many private) scholarships to college and trade schools.
3) I would like see a private company develop tests for each grade. Then employers, colleges, and trade schools could know for certain that a youth or adult really does have a 4th, 7th, 10th, or 12th grade ( for example) education. Most important parents could **know** if their children really were earning the A's and B's the government was putting on their report card. If a youth passed a certain grade then a business, college, or trade school would know they had the academic skills to succeed on the job or in the program of study.
>> What education looks like now is an artificial construct. It was not created by people who knew or understood children or teens.
Funny ... I never thought education was about US understanding children and teens, but getting children and teens to understand things.
This is precisely the problem. Too much “understanding”, not enough teaching.
H
That was me alright. Of course, my serious interests were beach, beer, and babes.
Such reactionary, right-wing statements are not allowed, Comrade. Off to the re-education camp with you.
/sarc
Aren't the official tests already produced by private organizations? That's what I always thought... I'm asking because we're at that point now, trying to decide how to proceed. (We're considering CLEP.)
AKA: undisciplined.
Good luck with that pony business, toots.
Try not to institutionalize your child “
Excellent way to accurately refer to sending your child to government school!
If you do not want to be contacted *please** let me know, and I will remove your name.
I surely wouldn’t wish to bother you, but I don’t want you to miss these education articles, either. Those managing the Public Education Ping list might fail to notify you due to my being the author of the thread.
I will call this ping list:
“The All Opinions Welcome Government Education Ping List” ! “
I don’t know if this is still the case, but it used to be, in England you could legally leave school at age 14-1/2 if you had an apprenticeship. That has always made sense to me. Seems to me a law like that would help the young lady in the story. People can always go to adult school and get more education later if they change their minds about what they want to do with their lives.
If you would like to be on or off this list, please freepmail Amelia, Gabz, Shag377, or SoftballMominVa
Can you give some examples?
Home schooling is best, but it is unable to meet the challenge of scale needed in “public” education. For this, private schools are the best. However, in the future, they will have to take elements from home schooling, and advances in technology, to create an “education for the future”.
Technology will have to replace “group” education with individualized instruction, but in a group situation. The way to envision this is clear:
1) Each student will have a personal thumb drive that is their own curriculum, selected from any number of curricula available at the national level. When they plug it into the school network, maybe verified by a thumbprint scan on the thumb drive, the student will be “exactly where they left off”, when they last unplugged.
2) Curricula will be fully multimedia, interactive, and will teach multiple subjects simultaneously. For example, the student’s parents, above selecting a block of general education created by a particular education corporation, also want a block with the history of France.
While viewing the history block, the student is also being taught, reviewed and tested on English grammar, the French language, the geography of Europe, and seeing any number of images and people relevant to what he is doing.
With his keyboard, he are typing answers to questions, re-spelling new words they have seen on the screen, and directing the flow of the block into information digressions he are interested in. Say they see a picture of Louis XIV, with a brief description. They can follow it up with a mouse click and learn more about Louis XIV, before continuing back into the history block. They also have a microphone so they can practice pronunciations in both English and French.
The back and forth with the computer includes review of subject matter, and importantly, is paced based on how the student is learning. Slumps and spurts in learning are common, and the computer can adjust accordingly.
The education block can even produce suggested ideas that the human teacher can use later to go into higher levels of learning with the student.
Importantly, early on in the student’s education, they will be taught well known memorization and learning “tricks”, so they can learn to both store and correlate knowledge better than in the typical broken linear manner most of us use. This will spare their intellectual resources for higher levels of learning.
Because doing things this way saves enormous amounts of student time, curricula will have to expand to more subjects and more advanced learning in study subjects.
Curricula will be created by any number of sources, and reviewed for quality like books. Optimally, parents will have broad choices to select their childrens education.
And once the thumb drive is taken out, the student can move to any similar school without losing a day of learning, instead of the months of review and adjustment needed today.
Again, teachers will still be needed, as they will monitor and certify student performance, troubleshoot problems, maintain discipline, and teach higher levels of learning.
The cardinal sin is to waste a student’s time. Something done far too much today. And while not all students will prosper this way, the great bulk of them will.
The thing is, what was public education designed to do in the first place? The truth is, it was not designed to create intelligent people. This is especially true with the case of high school. Speaking for myself, I have needed nothing that I studied in high school, yet four years of my life were taken away from me because the law said I had to attend it.
The original intent of public schools were to create semi-skilled, emotionally & intellectually dependent people with a high tolerance for mine-deadening, repetitive work that involves a lot of sitting or standing in one place. All of the structures in place (the bells, the rigid time blocks, the dull, repetitive tasks, the boring schoolbooks, the endless waiting for permission, be it from teachers or bells) were designed for that specific purpose. Reforming it is like trying to reform a brothel or a concentration camp.
There is a saying that a fish rots from the head down. Well, public education is a gigantic, rotting fish, and it always has been, and the nation’s young people are gagging on it. It’s time to chuck it.
Give schools back to the local school boards. It worked well when that was the case.
Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
getting out was enough for my kids... and we, as a family, are redefining education... today, during our summertime homeschool, my boys studied math, history—which covered Bible, Greek Mythology and Famous Men of Rome—and a fun geography lesson that included online learning... they spent a couple of hours reading, then they went out to play baseball... on top of that, we spent 2 hours at the local nursery looking at olive trees and other plantings... while we were there, they found a couple of sticks on the ground and pretended they were knights... they had so much fun, they want to do it all again tomorrow... except they want to include poetry and Latin... i love our family life...
The main heritage robbed from them: a quiet confident self-reliance.
That internalization must be achieved before a kid can learn -- otherwise they are like a cup full of holes. No matter what is poured in, it will be lost.
I think the first thing that people have to do is to get over the idea that education is limited to school, or stops after high school or college.
Since we as a culture aren’t prepared to do that, nothing much is going to happen.
I feel like one of those callers on radio shows “Long-time listener, first time caller” :-)
Just a few thoughts on education in America today:
1) The public school system is incredibly unlikely to ever disappear. It will change over the longterm because there are clearly plenty of public schools that are lousy. We live in DC, are expecting our first child in the fall and there is no way that we would ever send our kids to public school here. We would either have to move or send our kids to private school (which can cost as much as college, on top of the $10K a year we pay in property taxes). On the flip-side, Montgomery County in MD and Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax counties in VA have some very good schools, including a couple, Thomas Jefferson and Behtesda-Chevy Chase that are as good as any private school in the area.
2) Vouchers haven’t gotten much traction around here- good schools raise property values in their respective communties. People in those communities aren’t too eager to let people from other areas enroll their kids in “their” schools. Vouchers may be attractive for younger couples just starting out who can’t afford homes in the best school districts, but they hold little benefit to those who have bought into the good school districts.
3) I’m a product of a public/private school in Canada, but I did spend one year at a very good public school in suburban Michigan. My wife attended public schools in suburban DC and got a very good education. I am the first to admit that some public schools are a disaster, especially in inner-city areas, and should be re-vamped from the ground up. But there are also plenty of very good public schools. The majority probably fall somewhere in the middle, which is to be expected of any large undertaking. Completely dissolving the public school system is attractive to only a few Americans, and would be like throwing the baby out with the bath-water.