The sorry state of 'murrican education.

[Don Coyote]

I got out without European history and physics.

You can't understand American history without at least an overview of European history, and you can't understand any of the sciences properly without physics.

And you can't understand physics without the more advanced algebra, either.  Knowledge is crazy, how it all ties up together like that.

I think Dok means the basics of physics, like how magnetism occurs, electricity, basics of Newtonian physics, and stuff about the EM spectrum. You do need to understand the nature of atoms to know how they form compounds to understand chemistry.

[Scribbly]

I'm not an American, but I thought my school experience might be helpful anyway.

I live in Buckinghamshire, which is the only county left to still have the 11+ exam. This means that when you are 11, you take a test which determines whether you will go to Grammar School (the 'good' schools, at least that is how it felt at the time) or the Comprehensive - everything else. I was an arrogant little shit when I was 11, and assumed that I'd walk through it no trouble. Unsurprisingly, I failed.

The school I went to was actually the best Comprehensive in the area in terms of passrate, and the teachers they had were amazing. It was very much an 'old style' school in atmosphere, although we didn't have to sing hymns thankfully. Almost every teacher in the school was highly motivated to make the kids learn. They didn't get the gifted kids who made it easy, they got the relative chaff. I might be slightly biased in my assessment because I was at the top in all the academic classes, but I would say I was only there because the teachers really engaged with the class. If they can make you want to learn, they've won. Not everyone did want to learn of course, but a decent number did.

Part of it came down to school pride. It was damned difficult to inspire in a bunch of kids who have basically just been told 'you are the stupid ones', but for the first few years I was there, we had it. We were given a lot of freedom and encouraged to form clubs with the backing of the school, that sort of thing. We also had a uniform which was cheap and functional. It helped us identify as kids from that school, as opposed to kids from the other schools, and there was a rivalry and competition which helped.

The headmaster, unfortunately, was only there for my first three years - he was really the heart and soul of the school. I think he'd worked there his entire career in one position or another. When he left, he was replaced by a man who came in with buzzwords and rules. We were told we were 'stakeholders' rather than pupils, for instance. He made every teacher reapply for their position, and reorganized the school into departments. He applied for funding which turned us into a Business Specialist School. The kids clubs were stopped and replaced by teacher led activities.

By the time I left, every good teacher had moved, retired or been replaced. The school dropped down several slots in the rankings, and last I heard the uniforms had become elaborate and expensive; half the point of the old ones being that they were cheap and therefore helped families who didn't have huge amounts of money to (somewhat) remove that stigma.

There was also a scandal last year where the headmaster turned out to have been having an affair with the woman he promoted to deputy headmistress. I believe they've resigned, which probably means another of the new breed will come in, and shake things up with their own set of Byzantine rules and regulations.

I guess the point I was making is; if you want kids to succeed and learn, you need to engage them. You don't do that with 'making learning fun' initiatives and patronizing them. You do it by instilling a sense of common identity and mutual respect.

[Triple Zero]

Yes, but there is a limit to the kind of knowledge necessary using that tool. It's one tool and one used too heavily, IMO.
Very basic math, basic letters and such.

But its usefulness ceases very quickly and does not offer any lasting value beyond what it contains. By a certain grade lever students should already have those skills locked down and move on to things that require application of concepts. I was taught using rote memorization in the 8th grade. For phonetics.

Sorry but this reasoning sounds more like a whole bunch of speculation about a particular aspect in school that you (and a lot of people with you) didn't like, than anything based in fact.

Also, the first two years of physics is nothing but memorization.  Same thing with most of trigonometry, chemistry, and biology.

THIS.

its usefulness ceases very quickly and does not offer any lasting value beyond what it contains.

Nonsense. Memorization IS a skill, right on its own, in that sense alone it keeps offering lasting value as long as you train it.

Additionally, if you DONT have your multiplication tables memorized, you will suck at math, forever. Pretty much making sure you won't have any interest whatsoever in learning more about it.

Trick question: for solving quadratics, what's more useful skill, factorization or memorizing the quadratic root abc formula?

(Trick answer: only a very small fraction of quadratic equations with integer coefficients is actually factorizable into real numbers. You get a very skewed idea of this, because the factorization exercises you did only include these particular equations, and one that wasn't, often was a mistake in the exercise)

Not that factorization isn't a useful skill, btw.

But memorization is too!

[Triple Zero]

I got out without European history and physics.

You can't understand American history without at least an overview of European history, and you can't understand any of the sciences properly without physics.

American History is godawfully boring in comparison to European history, also.

-Suu
Might be slightly biased.

But there's much less of it, and cowboys! And you invented electricity, freedom, light switches and both historical re-enactment AND steampunk!

Instead you know how much SHIT happened in Europe?? Stuff was going on all over the fucking place. It was horrible! And things! Events! Countries! Royal families and smelly middle-ages diseases, renaissance, enlightenment, romanticism, then some more stuff and then the second world war which was not only terribly depressing but also apparently had about 500 years worth of STUFF and EVENTS compressed into just five.

oh god how I HATED History--even though I had a really really good teacher.

Like many here, I also wasn't really good at memorization, and unlike, say, physics or math, you can't just figure out history based on principles alone. At least, not the parts where there's all these fucking monkeys interfering with it. Before that, history was basically physics, and then biology. Those were the good bits of history. Good old times. Good old pre-historic times.

It didn't get much better until somewhere in my first year of university, I found the Reality Enhancement and Intelligence Increase homepage which quoted some book or other to inform me that the most important part of history is that it ALL happened five minutes ago. ALL OF IT. Phew, what a relief!




And Dok, in your list of important classes/knowledge, you left out Geography? And not just places and countries but also social geography, demographics, social planning, weather, climate, terrain types, all these fucking maps where pink means the ground is clay and dots mean the people are islamic and the size of the triangles indicate how much it snows in november, but at least green usually means there's a forest there. I had about 4.5 years worth of that stuff before I dropped it in favour of Even More Mathematics.

[Cramulus]

I work at an educational publishing office. Most of my coworkers are former grade school teachers. When I asked around about why they left teaching, there was only one answer, with varying degrees of vitriol. "No child left behind".

My favorite high school teacher quit because of that too. He got fired after throwing a bunch of standardized tests in the trash can. He never even took that shit out of the shrink wrap. He didn't talk about it, he just went on with the lesson plan - reading Walden with the class. American hero, that man.

The educational publishing industry is all fired up about test scores these days. They love standardized tests because it allows them to demonstrate, empirically, that their product is more effective than the competition. It sucks because it reinforces the validity of those measures.

publishers always laugh when they pass my cubicle because I make shit like this:

[Cramulus]

Here's a really good lecture about shifting educational paradigms. (It's the RSA Animate lecture, in case you've seen it already)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

I asked my boss about this stuff, he said that we're on the way...  the way he explained it: (paraphrasing)

The current model, based on business trends and the economy, is that companies swell up during a boom, and then slim down and shed fat during a bust. Over time, companies will breathe - expanding and contracting as the market allows.

This is good for the health of the company, shitty for the people who work for it. The new educational paradigm is based on preparing people to be laid off several times during their lives. (I prefer the old model, he said, where companies incentivize loyalty instead of treating everybody like temps)

So rather than specializing kids towards one career/vocation/field, educational publishers have been developing sets of skills that will be useful no matter what industry you work for. Like the ability to turn a complex conversation into a diagram. Or the ability to understand your own learning process and use that knowledge to pick up skill sets more efficiently.

[Doktor Howl]

Managing to make a decent meal without burning down the kitchen  ,

It was only a couple of times.  It's not like I make a habit of it.

[Triple Zero]

Cram pictures, nice You print those and hang them on your cublicle walls or something?

[Doktor Howl]

You guys DO know the actual reason for NCLB, right?

[Cramulus]

You guys DO know the actual reason for NCLB, right?

and what's that?

Cram pictures, nice You print those and hang them on your cublicle walls or something?

jah, I've got a bunch of married-to-the-sea style woodcuts + publishing satire

[Doktor Howl]

You guys DO know the actual reason for NCLB, right?

and what's that?

You take a standardized test, and apply it to schools in, say, Oro Valley, which is posh and has good schools, and to Buttfuck, Tennessee, which barely has schools at all.  Kentucky fails, and is punished by loss of title I funding, which then goes to the well-performing, posh schools.  Rich kids get an even better education, poor kids get to be peasants.

[Cain]

20th century European history is absolutely vital, if only as a reference point for not how to run a country, ever.

I was lucky, in some ways (and in other, minor ways, quite unlucky) as I was recognized as having an incredible capacity for learning at a fairly young age, and a house where no books were out of bounds and copies of everything from the Ecyclopedia Britannica to Polybius' history of Rome was available.

I also had some very good teachers, including my infamous philosophy teacher, whose classes were a strange blend of critical thinking, aimless rants and work-dodging (by us and him).  Our school library also had a restricted section which I was given access to within my first term there and, well, England has a lot of shitty weather and there were no rooms set aside for students to gather in when it was raining, so I spent my spare time in there.

An educational system that works is vital to slowing population growth, encouraging economic growth and democratizing political power.  All of those things are heavily, heavily correlated with a high level academic system which focuses on critical and problem solving skills.  It is probably no coincidence, either, that the fastest periods of socio-political reform in history (1600-present) is also the one in which education has been most widely achieved at any time.

As such, education can worry certain unethical and short-sighted oligarchical interests (practically all the Anglo-American ones...Asian oligarchical interests tend to balance the pursuit of selfish interest against social stability in quite a strict way), as a world in which there is economic growth and a democratization of political power is one in which they are, relatively speaking, weakened.

And this is why American "conservatism" in particular tends to target education most viciously.  It is not enough to simply control education, like the Soviets tried to do, as education tends to find ways around these rules.  Short of sticking a political officer in every classroom, a good teacher will find ways to teach the cirriculum they deem necessary, not the one they have necessarily been taught to teach.  So you overwork teachers.  Give them larger and larger classrooms.  Cut their budgets.  Cut their staffing.  Put their unions under attack.  Do everything in your power to make the job less attractive, to the point the only viable teaching positions will be ones at elite academies...where staff are directly reliant on oligarchical interests for payment, and where dismissal of "inappropriate" staff is usually much easier.

Every good educational system is going to have elements of rote memorization, and of cross-subject critical thinking.  Rote memorization should come in especially hard in the early years of...well, every subject.  Later on, you introduce the more creative elements.  History, for example, can focus very heavily on source use, critical thinking skills and alternative viable interpretations....which is the reason I personally enjoy teaching the subject so much.

Cross-subject critical thinking, however, gets left by the wayside when students are "taught to the test".  Much of the success of British students in tests over the last 20 years has been due to this process of teaching, which is a little more complicated than the "exams are getting easier/grade inflation" whiners make out.  But not that much more.  Often, the students will be taught a narrow range of "acceptable" arguments, for subjects like English, History, human Geography etc which they will almost entirely rote memorize.  Because exams are fairly predictable in the kinds of questions they will ask, the format having hardly changed in generations, and with teachers under extraordinary pressure to "produce good league table results", often a teacher will have little choice but to grudgingly teach in this way, if they wish to retain their job.

[Luna]

Managing to make a decent meal without burning down the kitchen  ,

It was only a couple of times.  It's not like I make a habit of it.

  We all have our failings.  I don't make a habit of blowing myself across a room with electricity, or trying to fix a car with no clue what I'm doing, either.

[Disco Pickle]

And this is why American "conservatism" in particular tends to target education most viciously.  It is not enough to simply control education, like the Soviets tried to do, as education tends to find ways around these rules.  Short of sticking a political officer in every classroom, a good teacher will find ways to teach the cirriculum they deem necessary, not the one they have necessarily been taught to teach.  So you overwork teachers.  Give them larger and larger classrooms.  Cut their budgets.  Cut their staffing.  Put their unions under attack.  Do everything in your power to make the job less attractive, to the point the only viable teaching positions will be ones at elite academies...where staff are directly reliant on oligarchical interests for payment, and where dismissal of "inappropriate" staff is usually much easier.

I'm actually a little surprised to see you repeat that meme, Cain.  In my entire political lifespan and any conservative I have ever discussed American education with, not a single one has ever expressed anything other than a strong desire to see improvement, results, and accountability.  There is also a strong belief that DoE policies that result in teaching to the lowest common denominator have been gutting the quality of primary education since it's inception.  

Not a single person ever implied we should be making education worse to keep the poor down.

[Luna]

And this is why American "conservatism" in particular tends to target education most viciously.  It is not enough to simply control education, like the Soviets tried to do, as education tends to find ways around these rules.  Short of sticking a political officer in every classroom, a good teacher will find ways to teach the cirriculum they deem necessary, not the one they have necessarily been taught to teach.  So you overwork teachers.  Give them larger and larger classrooms.  Cut their budgets.  Cut their staffing.  Put their unions under attack.  Do everything in your power to make the job less attractive, to the point the only viable teaching positions will be ones at elite academies...where staff are directly reliant on oligarchical interests for payment, and where dismissal of "inappropriate" staff is usually much easier.

I'm actually a little surprised to see you repeat that meme, Cain.  In my entire political lifespan and any conservative I have ever discussed American education with, not a single one has ever expressed anything other than a strong desire to see improvement, results, and accountability.  There is also a strong belief that DoE policies that result in teaching to the lowest common denominator have been gutting the quality of primary education since it's inception.  

Not a single person ever implied we should be making education worse to keep the poor down.

They aren't going to SAY it... but watch what they do.