The travesty of compulsory school

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Adapted from something I posted on Facebook (several teacher friends chimed in there, if you go to my profile you can read the whole discussion):

There is something very, very wrong with a world in which a ten-year-old child has more hours of homework to do each week than a full-time honors science major does. The common excuse given for this sorry state of affairs is that it "prepares them for college", which might be some sort of justification if it were true... which it is not.

Children coming out of the public school system today are less prepared for college than they have ever been in the past, and this isn't the fault of the teachers. It's the fault of a system that is so defective that from where I stand there is no redemption but to gut it entirely and rebuilt from the ground up, in a way that allows the educators themselves, people who have devoted their own educations and lives to understanding how to educate others, to make the calls and teach the children.

Why we EVER thought a one-size-fits-all approach would work in public education is absolutely beyond me. Here we have all these highly-educated teachers - people with Masters degrees who continue to attain higher levels of education annually - and for some reason, we decided that wasting their intelligence and expertise by requiring them to teach to the test and not to the child was a good idea. Are we freaking serious? What are we thinking?

This system is analogous to going to the doctor and requiring them to diagnose us based on looking things up on the internet. We have literally created a system in which highly trained professionals aren't ALLOWED to use their knowledge of education to teach our children. We are completely insane. We are churning out kids who can obey authority and take a test but have poor critical thinking skills and are afraid to use their inherent creativity, skills that are vital for college and for any fulfilling career, as well as for any nation's future success as a creator of innovation.

This link is old, but it's a sentiment I've heard echoed over and over again from public school teachers, and its flip side, the frustrating level of unpreparedness of recent high school graduates, from my college professors. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/09/a-warning-to-college-profs-from-a-high-school-teacher/

What I see, both as a parent of teenagers and as a college student sharing a classroom with the first wave of No Child Left Behind public school graduates, are people who have been trained to take tests. They may be angry, and they're right to be as their time and childhoods are being squandered, but they're obedient. They are also radically unprepared for a college environment. They want to know what's going to be on the test; they have been trained to memorize what's going to be on the test, not to understand and relate learning materials to their lives. The enormous, unrealistic amounts of homework - mostly pointless, grinding repetition - schoolchildren are expected to do in addition to being in a classroom for seven hours a day are also simply preposterous and bear zero relationship to what they can expect in college.

It's absurd. We've got all these educators, and we've rendered a system that effectively prevents them from educating.

Children literally have a biological imperative to learn; it's what they're designed to do. Somehow we have managed to invent a system that trains it out of them, and we call it "education". It's terrible. Worse, we all seem to have sort of agreed that even though it's terrible, it's necessary, so we keep on sending our kids to these terrible, ineffective schools to have a really unpleasant time for most of their waking hours, because we're convinced that if they don't, they won't learn. We are convinced that it's "better than nothing" even though study after study shows evidence that leaving a child up to their own devices, especially in this era when information is readily available over the internet, will usually result in a more comprehensive and deeper education.

Some references:
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Anniversary/dp/0865714487/ref=pd_sim_b_2
http://www.amazon.com/Instead-Education-People-Things-Better/dp/1591810094/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1383543408&sr=8-7&keywords=john+holt

I will post more tomorrow, along with some lecture links.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Related: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,34295.0.html

[Dildo Argentino]

I couldn't agree more with the OP. And first of all, my heartfelt congratulations to your mum. That was one ace move!

All our kids go to a Carl Rogers school. They like going ("Stay home, you are leaving a trail of snot and I think you may have a fever!" "Nah, I'll be alright, I'll go in" - sneaks out, grabs bike, off to schooel - is a frequent scenario), they get to influence what they work on a great deal, they play for hours each day, there's no homework at all until the 5th form (10-year-olds), and from the 2nd grade, each student makes individual contracts about what they wish to achieve with their teachers. The first contracts are for days or 2 days, then they are gradually extended until they have contracts for half terms. As you may imagine, I have to pay money for this, although, thanks to some very fortunate circumstances, not very much.

The response of most of my acquaintances and even many of my friends: "Well I went through the public schooling system, and it didn't harm me!" (seems to me it did, I think to myself, a little bit, anyways) and "That's all well and good, but I just cannot see myself moving the whole family just be near a particular school" (well, you should, your kids would thank you for it later).

My memories of school are a massive database of boredom, frustration, being trained like an animal, humiliation and coercion. The few things I have to thank my parents (particularly my dad) for are that he told me right off not to take it seriously, sympathised with me for the crap I had to deal with, didn't give a toss about my grades, and the fact that he went in to the school and physically threatened the one teacher who actually hit students as an educational tool - he never hit me again, but hated me for the 2 years I was in his class.

On an unimportant side note: I guess back in the day when it was fought for and achieved, a universal/compulsory education, which was largely about learning to read and write and do simple math, was a progressive and egalitarian policy. Had it been made universal but not compulsory, many of those that stood to benefit the most would have passed on the opportunity. But things have changed a great deal since then.

[Demolition Squid]

I'm not sure what the differences between the American and UK education system are, except that the UK one rushes kids through two years quicker, but its interesting to hear that justification is used so early.

Over here, there's a lot of debate around education largely because the privately educated Conservative fuckwits are in the process of destroying all the advancements made in the public education system since world war 2. They want to get rid of coursework and reduce or eliminate the ability of kids to retake tests, driving it back to a system where one fuck up on one day will result in an even more meaningless qualification. They justify this on the basis that people leaving education are well qualified but 'lack basic skills', something that most teachers vehemently disagree with, but they've repeated the lie so often that large sections of the public agree with it.

When I've talked to my dad about education (I use him as a good measure of what Thatcherite tories tend to think because he's swallowed that completely), actually educating children is very far down on the list of what he wants a school to accomplish. Up to GCSE level (16), he wants the school to prepare kids for work. That means instilling discipline, socialize with people from different backgrounds, and I suspect 'being miserable 8 hours a day is the norm'. It isn't until they stay on to further education (A-levels, 16-18) that he expects the school to start loosening up and preparing kids for university.

When I was at school, it was at 16 that we started to get freedom. We could wear what we wanted, we didn't need to be on the premises if we didn't have lessons to go to, and teachers started encouraging us to read around the subject if it was interesting to us. Up until that point, I tended to ignore most of what my teachers were telling me because in every subject but maths I'd usually read all about it already. Up until I hit A-levels, I never really thought the system was working for me.

I think a huge amount of the issue with education is that so many people think they know better than the experts. People generally seem to assume that the way they were educated is the best (thus why our Minister for Education wants to force kids to rote memorize poetry. Because 'by god that's how it was for me!') or at the least, that it is all 'common sense' to stick kids in a classroom and read out the textbook.

[Reginald Ret]

The unfairness inherent to this medieval way of dealing with our youths¹ has only one not-horrible effect: It prepares you for the feudal nature of corporate culture.



¹  A concept that hasn't always been connected with learning. I would think that Infants would learn best, followed by those people who have developed their interests and personal motivation. Youths can not be considered motivated, at least not under the current system. Ivan Illich proposed² replacing schools with a computer that you give a subject you wish to talk about and the computer then gives you a list of people in your area that have registered an interest in the same subject. You meet, you talk, and if neither of you is insane or socially retarded you will most likely learn something. This takes a few hours whenever you feel like it instead of 8 hours a day for 12 years and it will probably work better.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society

[Suu]

Thank you, Nigel, for this great OP.

I'm having such a hard time considering if I should even go into teaching. It's not that I can't do it, I love giving lectures and panels at events, but with the actual system we have in place right now nationwide at our public schools? I can't see that I would be accomplishing much. Everybody is the victim here. Not just the students, but the teachers that have to take the fallout, and then the adults who have to work side by side with these inadequately educated kids who honestly don't know any better. :/

[Trivial]

http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/10_Education.pdf

We're keeping them in longer though.

[Reginald Ret]

http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/10_Education.pdf

We're keeping them in longer though.

For fun, plot a graph of Literacy and such against average years spent in school.

Heeheehee, I just tried to find some info on literacy rates in the USA. They say it is 99.99% but then i read this:

Methodological Issues[edit]Jonathan Kozol, in his book Illiterate America, suggests that the very high figures of literacy may be due to poor methodology.[6] The Census Bureau reported literacy rates of 86% based on personal interviews of a relatively small portion of the population and on written responses to Census Bureau mailings. They also considered individuals literate if they simply stated that they could read and write, and made the assumption that anyone with a fifth grade education had at least an 80% chance of being literate. Kozol notes that, in addition to these weaknesses, the reliance on written forms would have obviously excluded many individuals who did not have a literate family member to fill out the form for them. Finally, he suggests that because illiterate people are likely to be unemployed and may not have telephones or permanent addresses, the census bureau would have been unlikely to find them (and that if they did, these people might be especially reluctant to talk to a stranger who might be a bill collector, tax auditor, or salesperson).

hihihihi, they use written forms to ask people if they can read.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think the reason school was made compulsory in the first place bears mentioning.

Universal education only works when it is compulsory.  Otherwise, ways and means are developed to keep Those People (insert the subgroup dejour...Today, it is the children of "illegal aliens") out of the classroom.

And compulsory education works well in many places.  My early education was in Canada, and they did a spectacular job.  It doesn't work for shit, here, because unlike the Canadians, whose education system changes about as fast as the rules of chess, Americans simply MUST fix something that WASN'T BROKEN.

THAT BEING SAID

The American school system is a disgrace.  It has long since stopped being about educating children, and is now an institution that exists for its own sake, and the sake of the textbook and standardized test industries.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Compulsory education, maybe... but not only are schools no longer educational, but educators aren't even allowed to educate. So things need to change.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Educators' voices are not heard when politicians are making education policies. The people who are making these policies are not educators. It's a complete trainwreck.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Compulsory education, maybe... but not only are schools no longer educational, but educators aren't even allowed to educate. So things need to change.

I think the system needs to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt along more sensible lines.

But that last happened after the Russians launched Sputnik.  I don't see it happening for a little while yet.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Educators' voices are not heard when politicians are making education policies. The people who are making these policies are not educators. It's a complete trainwreck.

It's always a trainwreck when those in power assume they know more about a subject than trained professionals do.

In the states, it's because of the required dog & pony act, the need to show Those Other Bastards a thing or two.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I went to a public school that was in a very literal sense exceptional. Like, people would live in tiny shacks in the woods just to be in a town that fed into our high school exceptional. Putting my kids through school in a more typical district, I see a lot of differences. The insane amount of home work my third and first graders are bringing home, the confused way they're teaching math, the complete and utter denial of negative parts of history. My little man's struggling, but I'm scared that pulling him out of the system would be worse than trying to make it work. Kids need to do shit they hate, the adult world has a whole lot of that going on. Shit he hates 12 hours a day isn't right, though.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I went to a public school that was in a very literal sense exceptional. Like, people would live in tiny shacks in the woods just to be in a town that fed into our high school exceptional. Putting my kids through school in a more typical district, I see a lot of differences. The insane amount of home work my third and first graders are bringing home, the confused way they're teaching math, the complete and utter denial of negative parts of history. My little man's struggling, but I'm scared that pulling him out of the system would be worse than trying to make it work. Kids need to do shit they hate, the adult world has a whole lot of that going on. Shit he hates 12 hours a day isn't right, though.

BULLSHIT.

Kids need to do things that they may not like but are necessary. Like laundry, or dishes. Making kids do things they hate and which are not necessary is setting them up to fail at life. It's telling them the exact same thing about life that abusive parents tell them about relationships; "This is what it's like, kid, so don't look for anything better". And, no job I have ever worked in resembles the school environment in any way. For the most part, the only jobs that do are factory assembly-line jobs, and those largely don't even exist anymore. They're out there, they just aren't the norm.

I am angry that my exes won't let me take my very bright kids out of the schools they're miserable in, so that they can have a chance to excel instead of succumb to the grind. With education instead of school, these kids could flourish. They could become exceptional. It breaks my heart every day to send them somewhere they hate so they can be conditioned to be obedient automatons rather than the fiery independent questioning challenging discovering people I know they have the potential to be.