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The Underground History of American Education
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
Over the course of the book, Gatto exposes many of the individuals, organizations, and crises (both real and manufactured) that helped to make our public school system what it is today. Such architects as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and a handful of teaching and management experts sought to benefit directly from a dumbed-down citizenry. Others contributed in a naive attempt at Utopian social engineering, mostly unaware of the harm that they were doing. There was never any master plan, though. The author puts it best:
With conspiracy so close to the surface of the American imagination and American reality, I can only approach with trepidation the task of discouraging you in advance from thinking my book the chronicle of some vast diabolical conspiracy to seize all our children for the personal ends of a small, elite minority.Gatto maintains throughout the book that all individuals have an innate curiosity and desire to learn. Examples are given in the first chapter of prominent historical figures who prospered with little or no formal schooling. But I found the examples of desire for substantive education on the part of "the masses" to be most compelling:Don't get me wrong, American schooling has been replete with chicanery from its very beginnings: indeed, it isn't difficult to find various conspirators boasting in public about what they pulled off. But if you take that tack you'll miss the real horror of what I'm trying to describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway-without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I'm correct, we're in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.
When a Colorado coalminer testified before authorities in 1871 that eight hours underground was long enough for any man because "he has no time to improve his intellect if he works more," the coaldigger could hardly have realized his very deficiency was value added to the market equation.The real function of the school system is not to empower people by giving them knowledge, but to crush this instinct toward self-improvement before it makes the workers too independent and troublesome. Another compelling example is the "Jewish Student Riots" described in chapter 9:
Thousands of mothers milled around schools in Yorkville, a German immigrant section, and in East Harlem, complaining angrily that their children had been put on "half-rations" of education. They meant that mental exercise had been removed from the center of things.
The book does have a few problems. Gatto is by his own admission somewhat casual about citing his sources. This is important because there are some assertions made that many will find dubious. For example:
Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered.This would be a great fact to toss out when trying to convince someone that schooling is unnecessary. But where does this statistic come from? What does "wherever such a thing mattered" mean? Some readers may be willing to simply take Gatto's word for it and accept this assertion, but skeptics will be left unsatisfied. According to historical census data from 1840, the national average literacy rate for white adults was indeed approximately 93%, and the literacy rate for white adults living in Connecticut was 99.67%. Why not simply say that the statistic refers to white adults? The omission hurts the author's credibility in the eyes of a skeptical reader.
The other thing that I found disappointing is that Gatto doesn't discuss solutions to the schooling problem as thoroughly as I wanted. Throughout the book examples are shown of educational methods which have worked well. As I read, I mulled these over, and anticipated that the final chapter (titled "Breaking Out Of The Trap") would be a comprehensive look at these methods and ways to promote their implementation. But that final chapter is mostly a collection of anecdotes. Gatto does provide a short list of positive suggestions and a promise to cover solutions more fully in a future book.
The picture that Gatto paints for us of our school system and society is frightening, but I also found it comforting to see evidence that ignorance and apathy are not the natural state of humanity. I found hope in the fact that things were once different. Having a clearly defined problem that can be solved is preferable to having a vague suspicion that something is wrong, but no clear idea what it is.
The ideas presented in Gatto's Underground History have the potential to change our society and our individual lives for the better. Even when we are trapped within the system, knowing how it works and what it is really up to can help us retain our wit and our humanity. If you are a student, if you are a parent, if you know or care about anyone who is in school, or even if you are just concerned about corporate and government control versus individual freedom, you need to read this book.
You can purchase The Underground History of American Education from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The sooner we get an education system which does not teach religion or political or patriotic based material the better.
it's no wonder he's written a tell-all book. Those who take the Vow of Poverty need to make a buck.
Wasn't this reviewed a couple months back?
First, the education system here is based on some industrial-conformity training system devised by industrialists in the 1800s, or therabouts.
It is not really natural or right for kids of a certain age to be sitting in a desk all day. Boys especially need to have a break at certain stages of their growth, usually about 13-15 yo, when they should be sent away from home to some sort of boarding school/military school/vocational school arrangement, at least for a time. It all depends on the kid.
Once again, Europe has us beat in this area. Just do what the most advanced countries in Europe do, and it will undoubtedly be twice as good as what we do.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Fans of Daniel Quinn should take note that this very idea has been around in both Ishmael and The Story of B. Our educational system isn't designed for learning, per se, but to train kids to be proper working adults, and to make sure they know how life "really works" in our culture.
There are always exceptions to the rule -- you will always find a teacher willing to go the extra mile, or a student who rises far above the rest. Mediocrity reigns in the American public school system, and it isn't going to change any time soon.
- oZ
// i am here.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
homeschool
Children should be with their parents and extended family. Having transient adult figures isn't the way to be raised.
Children shouldn't spend all day with their human contact being dominated by others of exactly the same age. A child should have contact with a wide range of age groups.
Children should be being taught by example.
Children should learn the values needed to want to learn and understand the reasons why they should. Passing an exam doesn't make a person a good person, nor productive, nor creative, nor caring.
The longer a modern education system is present in a society, the more the society dies.
I have been railing against the mis-use of the university system in North America for years. It is no longer about learning, but memorizing, cheating and begging to get a 'grade' so you can get a job. It's a system designed to keep young people out of the work force (because work is mostly illusory these days anyways) , to keep them in debt and create a class of permanent woker/paupers with the illusion of being 'educated'.
So they can get ready to compete against each other to curry favor with the dominant monkeys instead of enjoying life.
My mother is a school librarian in NY and she has told me how Bush's current plan means that teachers teach tests instead of lessons, but I agree with this guy; it seems evident that the school system was designed to make quasi-educated, but more importantly obedient factory workers. You want your workers to be able to read instructions, etc, but not much more; not think on their feet or anything. Its the only explanation for the disparity between college and primary school; and now that everyone is going to college, it's becoming the difference between a masters and a bachelors.
A quick intro to the ideas explained at length in the book may be found at The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, from an article by Gatto published in Whole Earth Review in 1991.
I haven't read Gatto's book (though I should). I do have a recommendation for a similar work though: James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me". It doesn't take on the whole education system (it's American history specific), but he does show at length that American history is deliberately taught in a way that discourages critical thought, heroizes the government, and suppresses historical dissent. Great read. Now I have to read the book actually reviewed...
If you've worked with little kids, one of the first things you notice is that almost every single one of them really, really wants to learn.
But somehow, during about K-4th grade, most of the kids in the US educational system seem to have that crushed out of them.
Personally, I don't think the schools are wholly to blame. Quite a lot of it is cultural. Kids learn early -- from TV, from movies, and even from books -- that it's cool to be ignorant, it's cool to be a wiseass, but it's never cool to be a nerd.
This is so on-point it's frightening. I was a high school teacher in Los Angeles from 2000-2001, and it's frightening how much of what is articulated in this exerpt I *experienced*.
We had a principal who was fantastic, because he was a former teacher from the area. But when he was replaced by someone with more "administrative experience" it was appalling how quickly things declined. Children aren't held to standards, parents come at odds with teachers, administrators point the finger at teachers, and the children are the ones left out in the cold.
In just one year there, I was chastised for
1) Driving students home to bad neighborhoods after dark.
2) Creating an extra-curricular dance program that "interfered" with the students curriculum.
3) Attempting to engage students with "dangerous" science demonstrations (i.e. using a bunsen burner constitutes dangerous, using 1 Tesla Magnets constitutes dangerous.)
4) Breaking up a fight with my bare hands (I was chastised for "laying my hands" upon the students.)
The list goes on. I truly believe that the entire system needs reform, from the bottom up and the top down. But without involved parents, administrators who take full responsibility, students who are forced to live with their choices instead of having excuses made for them, and up to date equipment and books, it truly is a lost cause except for the few self-motivated students.
I could agree with this, were my school more like a trade school, which it wasn't. Most of my elementary and later teachers actually encouraged some level of independent thinking and creativity -- others were often astounded whenever a student thought of 'the third way' One particularly poor teacher, 2nd grade, seemed only there for the money or until she could get somewhere else -- I was frequently on her bad side and grew to loathe school, prefering to be tardy by as much as 2 hours roaming woods and poking around a creek for frogs and snakes.
I'm more likely to believe the role of schools in NYC was to keep the little animals manageable by compressing their little minds into a one-size-fits-all mould.
I'd later find I had a very high IQ and did exceptionally well in college, after graduating highschool only by the merest of threads.
If you have a kid and your kid seems disinterested or hostile about going to school, you might consider getting more involved and learn about the teacher and the school. At an early age contending with a poor teacher can have a lifelong impact.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hammer. Nail. Head.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
for perspective on the educational system are the first couple chapters of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". While the book deals mainly with how to make money. There is a lot of good perspective on the usefullness (or lack of) a higher education in the U.S.
Interesting ideas.
My problem with current education is the ridiculous "leave no child behind" mentality. We don't need to send all these people to college. Let's be realistic about that and send some of them on the path to a meaningful trade. High school is all "college college college", and as a result, lots of kids get NOTHING out of it (and a bad side effect is that college is becoming the new high school with an influx of immature students). So, my proposed Triage:
Kids who want to go to college.
Kids who want to learn a trade skill.
Punks who are on their way to prison. Priority #1 is separating this group from the first two.
His verdict is not what you'd expect: the school system cannot be fixed, Gatto asserts, because it has been designed not to educate. Skeptical?
I've always thought that it was broken beyond repair. Even when I was younger and still in the system I thought it was a joke. Everything that was "spoon fed" to me during all of high school could have been covered in one year or less if I had been taught in a way that worked for me individually.
The current system must move all students of the same age along at the same pace. Thus everyone is treated as if they are the 'dummest' person, and the 'dummest' person is usually just being taught the wrong way for their personality type.
Outside of the most ardent libertarians no one is seriously talking about chunking the one tax funded public institution which is literally the closest with local school boards to the electorate, the public school system.
So for a public school system to survive what do we as a society need to do?
Are voucher systems somehow the silver bullet or does that simply stretch public funds to private hands and further deplete the money to be spent on public education?
Or perhaps what does real accountability mean? Or does it just mean more teaching to the tests?
Is it the teachers fault or does society blame the teachers too much?
What can we do?
ACK
Full text available here.... should read, "Buy book here."
-- No sig for you!
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
To anyone interested in this topic, I'd suggest also reading Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America . It'll make you want to homeschool your kids.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Gatto's got it almost right, and has a lot of good ideas. Like having kids work from 14 on.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Bummer that nyud.net cached the too-many-users error page.
Caveat: I did not read the whole book, just browsed through the online pages. However, this seems like a classic example of the "hasty generalization" fallacy (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/hasty%2 0generalization). The author extrapolates his personal experiences and assumes that they are representative of the whole nation's school system, weaving a conspiracy theory through it to further sensationalize it.
First of all, there is no "national school system" in the United States. Each state is responsible for public education within its own borders. I don't know about New York, but at least in Colorado, the situation is nowhere close to that described in his prologue. If a Colorado administrator had subjected a student to the verbal abuse described there, they would be subject to disciplinary action at the least, and possibly termination.
I know that education in the United States is not perfect. There are many areas that desparately need improvment, especially science and math education, but hysterical diatribes such as these do little to advance the dialogue and only serve to inflame the True Believers.
No, the full text is not available (as far as I can tell). From this page:
Each month we will post a new chapter on this Web site. If you are patient, in 18 months you will have read the book in its entirety.
Teach someone to think, and they can figure out Powerpoint and Word. Teach someone Powerpoint and Word and you have an idiot who can't do anything else.
Every homeschooled person I've ever met have been crazy geniuses because they were taught how to think and reason. Of course, they are also socially inept as they didn't have to deal with masses of other children.
Keep the population stupid, and they will be more apt to eat up your propaganda. Ignorance is bliss.
Teaching to tests is a bad thing, but since testing is used to judge how well schools are doing, it won't go away.
But seriously, large organizations have no single "true" purpose which determines their effect, but are composed of tens of thousands of people, who each have different goals. Much more important is what the people actually doing the work (all the teachers and principles, who actually interact with the children) are trying to do, what their purpose is. It's laughable that we are against "actual education".
Of course certain structural reforms could improve education. But to say that the true purpose of the American educational system is against education is silly.
I thought everyone knew this.
The whole point is to create armies of obedient patriotic worker drones.
Who would submit to being dehumanized by working a production line doing the same task over and over or for todays workplace sit in a tiny cubicle for 12 hours at a time if you don't train them from a very early age to sit at a desk and obey.
Can you imagine taking some tribal person out of the jungle and telling them you must sit in this little cubicle and stare at this screen for 12 hours a day for the rest of your life? They would run away in terror! But since we are "civilized" we start to train our children to be automaton drones from an early age.
You can't really fix it thought because industrial capitalism needs masses of obedient patriotic unquestioning workers in order to function properly.
Trade away half of your life working in a cubicle producing wealth for the shareholders and they will give you back enough money to live and buy some useless techno gadgets.
That's exactly what I'd expect. Our public school system grew out of the industrial revolution's need for people to have a minimum skill set and be regimented from an early age to follow a bell system. Ring. Lunch. Ring. Work. Ring. Leave.
Now that we're moving into a post industrial world (or that the industrial world is moving overseas) the regimenting is a bit less important and the skills taught have eroded to the point that McDonald's now has pictures of the food on the cash register instead of text.
The schools are great at producing people with stunted reasoning skills who can be content working at Wal Mart and make great consumers, and who vote (when they vote, if the system were perfect they wouldn't vote at all) based on emotion and often against their own interests.
There are some political parties who just can't afford to have an informed or educated electorate (hint: they tend to cut education spending and demonize teachers), and who's children never touch public school anyway.
-dameron
Why are we so hung up on the origins of things? The nazis invented the VW, was it a bad car?
love is just extroverted narcissism
1) A bunch of people who don't have a public school education are going to try to convince everyone else that because they haven't experienced public school, they are experts on the subject. They don't like public schools, of course.
2) A bunch of people with public school educations are going say their arguments against public school educations are intellectually superior. If they are so smart, they must have gotten that way in public schools.
3) A bunch of self-educated people are going to argue against public schools, claiming that they are educated _despite_ the system, not because of it.
4) Hardly anyone will bring up the points that our public schools are actually very competitive, bad-apples are unfairly overemphasized, and that the system of education involves parents AND schools together.
5) Voucher mania will play a role in the discussions here today.
6) Home-schooling parents will become indignant.
7) Exactly one person will change their opinion. Slightly.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
It makes sense in a way - why give the public access to more knowledge than they need? Knowledge is power, and if too many people knew the truth, the government wouldn't be able to pull off some of the stuff they are now starting to pull off...(KAFF patriot act KAFF taking freedom KAFF KAFF turning into what the founding fathers escaped from KAFF)
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77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
I think that the "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" essay by Paul Graham would also be appropriate here. Some people do try to learn and improve themselves, while others simply don't care or only want their piece of paper.
How many times have we heard about parents pushing for easier or non-existent teaching for their precious and sensitive whelps and yet demand that they "graduate" despite not learning a thing?
Ashamed to to say, I've seen this in my own family. A cousin of mine was coddled since he was born (hell he was in preschool an extra year, how fucked up is that?) by his relative caretakers (an aunt) after his mother died while he was a baby. Despite living in poverty, this person was spoiled continuously with toys. As I recall, he didn't stop playing with toys (complete Star Wars and He-Man collections, to name an example) till the 7th grade. Any attempts by the schools (throughout his schooling) to get him to learn or stay disciplined was met by a ferocious attack by his caretakers. Needless to say, he was socially promoted until he dropped out at 16.
He has worked a total of 2 weeks in his life (he is 32 now), in jobs given to him by relatives in an honest attempt to help, despite he not having training for anything. He quit them after complaining he was actually made to work, doing tasks as running sales money to the bank, etc. His caretakers were equally vehement in their condemnation of his kin/employer about their requirement he work for his money. To this day he subsists on $600 a month for diabetes disability, and will likely continue until he dies. For somone who has worked a grand total of 80 hours in his entire life, he has inexplicably owned more vehicles than I have. Last I heard, his aunt was saving up money to get him his latest toy, a truck, since he's never owned one.
It's also worth noting that of the whole herd of relatives I listed, not one still teaches. About half retired, and the rest moved into other jobs.
I imagine this on /. is a lot like running a piece critical of Microsoft in a teacher's magazine. A lot of people will agree with it based on their own experiences but had never come up with the conclusions before.
--Gus
...the public education system was very good to me. I'm a distinct individual who can operate independently and think for myself. The thought that I've been "bred" to be a "working stiff" in this U.S. economy is just a fabrica...
...Ooops, here comes my Boss. Gotta run....
The reason that the European system would not work in the USA is because people in the USA get all touchy when you try to say that "kid A is more capable than kid B". There is currently a witch hunt against such practices in the USA when it so happens that kid A is a suburbanite and kid B is a minority from the inner city regardless of any other circumstances.
The end result is that every kid is equally babysat, whether the they are destined to go to Harvard or to the local penitentiary until they graduate with their "everybody is equal" high school diploma. That is when kid B really gets screwed.
Here's a clue for you. Teachers spend so much time preparing students to take tests (Ever hear of a political candidate saying they've got a better idea on making schools accountable through testing?) there's scant time to teach outside of a packaged program, let along politics or patriotism (and religion, that's a livewire in the local schools, don't touch it.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
His verdict is not what you'd expect: the school system cannot be fixed, Gatto asserts, because it has been designed not to educate.
I agree 100%.
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
Again, I agree, but I have one thing to add. The US education system also serves as a babysitter up through undergraduate degrees. Education also helps keep unemployment down, and in the case of "higher" education, people are out of the workforce and they are _paying_ into the economy.
And yeah, educated people are a pain in the ass for the "establishment". Try to get some menial "regular" job with a PhD. Who wants a person who is skilled in critical thinking and independant thought to ask people "Do you want to biggie size that?"
In fact, education is overexaggerated. I routinely ask people "What percentage of the population has a college degree?" And I routinely get answers about 50-60% while it has been 20% for a long time, and it is increasing. I don't remember what its at now, but nowhere near 50%.
I consider myself lucky in that I have done standard unskilled services work (convenience store clerk) and manual labor (landscaping and construction). I did construction when I was in college, and let me tell you, I felt very stupid for a month or so, even though I'm a good "booksmart" kind of guy. One skill I was really lacking was basic teamwork. Plus I did not know the vocabulary for the work, and basic stuff like using a level, plumbob, tape measure, etc.
The reasons that I don't have a problem with the education system not educating are twofold. 1) People don't need to be educated and 2) those few that do need educating and are bright will get it.
You can also see the role of being educated in our breeding habits. The more educated one is the fewer offspring they will have, and the inverse is true as well. Poor, uneducated people here in the US have tons off kids. Since kids when they are young are a liability, they tend to keep the poor poor. But one thing that I've noticed about the poor and their offspring, is that the children are more likely to take care of their parents when they are older. Whereas the wealthier/educated crowd are more independant in their old age because they do "smart" stuff like invest their money, have retirement funds, etc.
Comments?
The European system is even more overtly designed to train good little workers. In many countries, you have to pick a career by the time you're 16, and rather than receiving any sort of further general education, you at the age of 16 start receiving specialized education to train you for that job.
Same with higher education: whereas in the US people who want to be doctors get a general undergraduate degree, and then go to med school, in Europe they go straight to med school.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I spent the latter years of my high school life basically pondering the meaning of it all. Why am I being shoved through a system that tries to make all of our minds think alike? What possibly can be the good for society to do this?
I went to a diverse school - many middle to upper income students, and a lot of poorer, immigrant students. I made friends with both groups and I came to this conclusion -
Many of the poorer students are quite content doing something like auto repair, construction, etc. for a living and they can actually make good enough money doing so. Why do these students need to have all these classes that they are going to get nothing out of, that teaches them things they don't need, and basically makes them even more frustrated with life because they are probably learning from Dad/Uncle about cars or constuction after school and probably already have a job anyway?
The main problem I had as a student was the fact that school administration does not care about the student. They only care about power and control. Notice how these administrators always listen to parents (becuase of pressure from elected school board members who might be voted out if the local management does not do what the parents want) but don't care about students, their concerns, their opinions?
What about the standardized curriculum that usually consists of worksheets and pre-fabbed tests that teachers just simply need to photocopy? Why does this count as meaningful education to modern educators?
I could go on forever here, but I think this is a good overview of the many problems with the system.
I distinctly remember thinking of how dim-witted my teachers in high school were and thought that it was because I was just a kid and should think that way. Now that I'm all growed-up and I meet these people I realize that I may not have been far off the mark. I know a couple down the street that has no desire to have children yet the wife is an elementary school teacher. This strikes me as odd in a profound way.
Stay tuned for new sig...
This is one of those books you have to let percolate a bit before passing (negative) judgement against it; I first read the book just as I was getting my Master's degree and it is hard to come to grips with the idea of just how much of your life has been wasted by the system. A lot of you are still in school and the cognitive dissonance can still be bad for you.
And I was even one of those who would attack the schools on other grounds, mind; I was open to the idea it was flawed, hell, I knew it was flawed, but just how deeply and how deliberately sent me into shock.
Give it a try; more of my opinion in the above link, though I won't trouble Slashdot with it. Gatto really puts his case together well.
Also, I observe there are a lot of Slashdotters who reflexively assume home schooling is some sort of evil. Make sure you first satisfy yourself that the institutional schooling we now have is not itself a form of evil, perhaps even worse. Having read both sides of both issues, at this point I consider not home schooling borderline child abuse. Most of the homeschooling flaws pointed out by people, such as the ever popular (and unfounded in my experience) "lack of socialization" is correctable, with parental effort. The flaws in institutional schooling are not; indeed, they are assumed "beyond reproach". What amazes me about the human spirit is how many escape the system as I did without a crushed spirit, not how well it works.
I hope future book reviews on slashdot follow the care that this one took.
.....The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail
by Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt. From the sounds of the review of this new book, it's very similar, and has a lot of the same conclusions. What makes it very important is, it is deliberate, done on purpose, and still on going. 21 reviews, 4.5 star rating, BTW.
One of the things forcibly impressed upon me from wasted years of "education" is the way school actively decieves you about the nature of the workplace.
Medical education is my latest nightmare. It fills the student with theory and visions of how things "should" be done, and informs them not at all regarding how things ARE done. Pity the poor medical student on their first hospital placement. The garbage colectors know more about what the score is than they do.
I've been out of public school for so long that I can't comment on how things are now, but higher education baby, that I can. What we have here is what I call Certification Syndrome. You aren't worth a damn to anyone unless you are Certified in some subject or other. Like a Certified Microsoft Engineer has a clue why XP screws up on one PC but not another.
The unholy alliance of lazy large busineses looking for replaceable cogs and schools willing to crank them out is what we have these days. Unfortunately people trained to be good little cogs don't do great things. Bill Gates for example is not a good little cog. Bill doesn't have a CME either, I bet.
Bottom line, if you want to be educated instead of trained, you have to WORK your ass off at it. Same for your kids. Teach them how to think, give them the tools of rationality or put up with them when they become Radical Vegan Socialists for Peace with a CME or an MD. Because that's what's fashionable at school this decade.
Next decade it'll probably be Radical Christian Conservatives For War. I don't see that as an improvement. You got a brain, you should get some decent software for it. God forbid you should have an origional thought.
I have to wonder if this situation is not what drove my best physics teacher to alcoholism...
I can't imagine what it's like to have to perpetuate a system you don't like because you're a slave to your house mortgage, car payments, etc.
Oh wait...
I work in education, and never has a truer article come along in my memory. Schools are not here for teaching students; they have become self-perpetuating job-producers for people unable or unwilling to pursue "hard" jobs. Incompetent teachers are protected by unions and simultaneously given raises just for existing. Billions of dollars are poured down the drains of "technology" and "special education" with little or no accounting and rationale for them. In short, though, you will never change the system now. It is too entrenched. Much like the governmental system in general, it now feeds off itself. Try to run for President saying that you will dismantle the Education system...it's similar to saying you're going to get rid of Social Security. It is so entrenched in society's collective mind that it will never change without a revolution.
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
I figured they were just trying to generate more Democratic voters.
In all seriousness, most of the business-people and employers I know despair at the state of public education because they need free-thinking creative people to meet the demands of a more challenging, knowledge-based workplace. If anyone is responsible for the degradation of education in America, it's the governments we've entrusted it too who have turned it into a way to sap more public funding.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
It's not just the format of American education that's the problem, it's the content and the objective.
I think of American public schools like I think of American prisons. We really haven't figured out if we want to help the inhabitants improve, or babysit them to keep them from hurting others or themselves, and so far, we've done a shitty job of both.
But perhaps that's oversimplified. There are many different pieces that join together to form the whole problem.
1) Teachers - underpaid, underappreciated, and undertalented. We need to train, pay, and expect the best from teachers, and treat them with the respect and admiration deserving of the people who nurture the minds and interests of the next generation, because they are.
2) Parents - underinvolved and unwilling to do their part. It used to be that if you got in trouble at school, it was nothing compared to the trouble that you'd get into when you got home. Conversely, parents used to be much more active and supportive of their children's education, and "active" is not defined by putting pithy stickers on the minivan.
3) Students - "some children left behind." The hardest problem is that we have the mindset that school has a plethora of solutions for children with problems. It doesn't. Those places would be called "juvenile hall" or "psychiatric ward." Some students are going to misbehave, cause trouble, underperform, or fail, and we should let them. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up, and you don't get increasing results by applying declining standards.
School was pretty boring and unchallenging for me, but it wasn't miserable. It seems like it's heading that way, though.
In the end, we get what we (as a market) ask for. If you think our system sucks, look at yourself and your neighbors to find the reason, not to some silly conspiracy.
I set up a mirror here, from my "offline reading" copy. Please use the main site when it comes back up.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
According to historical census data from 1840, the national average literacy rate for white adults was indeed approximately 93%, and the literacy rate for white adults living in Connecticut was 99.67%. Why not simply say that the statistic refers to white adults? The omission hurts the author's credibility in the eyes of a skeptical reader.
Because using your website I couldn't find the literacy rate for black adults because even though we distinguish his data probably didn't ditinguish between black/white and that wouldn't be a point to kinda think should turn people away just because they knew how many blacks were in the state and how many could read...
A couple of points came to mind. First, literacy today is much different than in the 19th century. There's just more sources of knowledge, more types of knowledge, hell, just more stuff period.
To argue that "hey, people were okay" back then without formal schooling leaves some questions open. Imagine what TV would do to people from the 19th century, and you see what I'm driving at here.
Also, firstly, I like the notion that the role of "socialization" is uniformly a bad thing. Frankly, I don't think America has a problem with people being overly conformist yet (compare us to say, China). I still see plenty of signs that free thinking is still pretty common here.
In fact, sometimes I think focus on the "be yourself, whatever it takes" vs. "be nice to others and get along". Not that has to be a conflict, but it often is.
Finally, there is a terrible Catch-22 in education. Teaching is not an honored profession. The pay reflects that. So, we need to increase the social and economic status of teachers.
But the problem is that many professional teaching associations protect too many bad teachers. There are many states in which it is almost impossible to fire a teacher after he/she has taught for two years.
The profession has to look seriously at itself and get over the view that all teachers are saints. There are truly great teachers, but there are truly bad teachers, and as long as they are seen as equals, then we will be stuck with suboptimal education.
For me, the teachers are the key. A good teacher can overcome amazing obstacles, and a bad teacher can spoil the best of resources.
If the kids had the time, a lot of American curriculum is focused on memorization and facts not analysis and critique. I remember seeing a comparision of European math and science school books compared to American schoolbooks on the same subject (Algebra vs Algebra. Chemistry vs Chemistry). The European schoolbooks were 1/3 to 1/4 the size of the Americans yet Europeans generally score better in math and science. The difference was that the European books emphasized theory, analysis, and techniques and not graphics and exercises.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but I think this is the real principle behind your school's success (and other schools like it): the school culture explicitly promoted learning and education as a value.
This is the fundamental difference between such schools and public schooling, no matter what school board members, teachers, administrators, and teacher college PhD's say to the contrary. Learning and education is not valued in the public school culture.
In non-government schools, kids are there first and foremost because their parents care enough about education to spare the money for it. Moreover, every student's place in that school is conditional: fuck up, and you're out!
There are good teachers, good students, and good books in both government and non-government schools. The fundamental difference (that makes all the difference) is the above. Promote the value of education, and the work is half done.
This will not happen in American public schools, except for rare exceptions. Government schools in America cater to discipline problem students, half-idiot students, and every half-baked educational fad that comes out of the ivory tower. Apart from the good students, good teachers, and good ideas that happen to make it in through the doors, the public schools are a dumping ground.
For what it's worth, I went through graduate school, earning an M.A. in education and currently substitute teach in several districts. I'm familiar with what goes on.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Mods:
Please mod up posts with low moderation scores so we may be inclusive of slashdotters with greater challenges. Now lets all group-hug without actually touching each other.
I also know a teacher who is constantly fighting with the school system to let the students learn, rather than follow the party line.
Background: My sister's original motivation for home schooling was to avoid some of the unfiltered acceptance of life-styles of which she disapproves. Also her expectation that the standard industrial schooling process would label her second child, a very energetic boy as having attention-deficit disorder and get "treated". I was pretty well concerned by this approach that my sister wanted to take. In the fullness of time, the positives of learning, self-confidence and genuine critical thinking will allow the children to become strong contributors to our society, probably a bit conservative but not rabidly dogmatic followers of some party line.
On the one hand, having schools churn out mindless automatons for industry is a horrible waste of human potential. On the other hand, not all alternatives are appealing.
so like read the article, unless you went to government school, and can't.
When I was in junior high school, my algebra instructor gave me a key that unlocked the "trap" described in the book (which I'm still reading). She told me and the rest of the class, "school isn't here to 'teach' you anything except 'how to learn'. The rest of the journey is up to you."
I believe that students aren't taught to nurture and in turn sate their natural curiosity. I consider myself to have received a decent education in the US, but I also know that my experience wasn't even close to a universal one. My instructors and my parents were committed, involved and enthusiastic about learning, but the system they operated in worked against them most of the time.
The students I teach come from some of the poorest sections of Southside Chicago, and a majority of the ones I've taught want to learn more than just making change for McDonald's customers. Teaching in adult education means that I and my colleagues have a chance to re-light the fire that their K-12 schools put out.
That's why I start off every semester with the quote from 7th grade Algebra - they aren't here to 'learn' anything except how to learn, and that one spark will see them through the end of their days.
- Jack
Schools are not about teaching. They are about money. School teachers have been weeded out of administration by politicians who campaign for money.
When have you heard, "We have enough money to get a good education for our students this year." ???
You will never hear anyone associated with education say those words.
But you will hear, "Our scores would be better if we had more money."
Kids are taught from an early age to equate money with education. They will not say, "You can't get a good education because there isn't enough money."
They will say: "Tell your parents to vote for the tax levy because we need a new $56 million dollar building, otherwise, you will not get a good education." Or, "We want to buy new _____ so they can learn better."
Kids equate money with education.
They're taught that school teachers don't make much money.
They need new textbooks, and textbooks cost a lot of money.
Money is the problem. "We need to cancel music or art because we don't have any money."
The truth is, there will never be enough money in the universe for education. "We need to close a few schools because we don't have any money."
Money solves all problems. "If we paid more money, we would attract better teachers."
Administrators pass this stuff down to the teachers, the school board, and the newspapers.
Teachers pass it to the kids. They send notes home to the parents.
With all this talking and crying about money, no one gets an education. Teacher unions are squarely focused on money. They have no concern over quality education. In fact, it's quite the opposite. If quality came into play, then teachers would be judged, and unions don't want teachers to be judged.
Another common statement, "We need new books."
I hate to say it, but math hasn't changed much. Neither has reading or writing. Yet every year, the textbook gets a new revision, teachers simply have to have it to "stay current." Good teachers are weeded out of administration to be replaced by politicians who can campaign for budget.
-- No sig for you!
I've read all of the comments posted so far, and some of the linked book. It all echoes exactly what I experienced in public school. Public schools are holding pens, more interested in making sure you know how to stand quietly in line and say the Pledge. I've been thinking and saying this (and more!) for years.
OTOH, my wife spent K-12 in a private school, Kinkaid http://www.kinkaid.org/ , and she and her classmates were taught how to govern. Their teachers actually made them think!
Great hook!: An insider take from a decortaed teacher on what's wrong w/ U.S Education.
I started reading the prologue and after a few paragraphs like the following:
"If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?"
I decided to stop. It is all silly rethoric BS.
Only an idiot turn their kids into a school without being convinced (and that means lots of research) that the their daughter/son is in good hands. Thus anybody who kept reading and recomends the lecture must be an idiot or has a lot of idiot friends and share their idiotic dilemmas.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Book was published in 2000, so it'a really out of date in this day and age, and is not available for the most part (out of print or in limited printing). The author has published several more works since then, and any one of them could be the "solution" book that was mentioned. Too bad the reviewer didn't mention that in his review.
It really depends on where you go. Some places have a high poverty/unemployment rate, and the schools there have a 1:35 ratio (instructors-to-students). Many others show a problem on the board, assign homework, and leave it there.
The morale of the instructors is just as important as the students. I see more and more people home-schooling their children, all the time. I know of one specific group where the father has a mechanical engineering degree, and the mother is a general practitioner. He has about 6 kids in his home, every single day (along with the baby). The other parents do the "field trips" and weekend getaways, or so I understand.
That's pretty much what it has come to. Federal law says you can't be paid for teaching, unless you hold a license. So everything is going to the barter system.
That is the future of "education" in America. Couple that with a useful second language (read: Mexican), and you've got kids scoring 1100's on the SAT...
From the review:
"Why not simply say that the statistic refers to white adults?"
It is important to use white adults as the baseline because in 1840, it was illegal to teach blacks to read. Gatto should have pointed out, as well.
That's where I found out about it. Why was the parent post modded down?
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No, that is an awful book. Did you actually read it?
It's just a regurgitation of the classic capitalist propaganda that poor people "just aren't working hard enough."
Whoa! $600 a month for a diabetes disability? Where do I sign up?
http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html/
The above link is for Dorothy Sayers' Lost Tools of Learning.
It's geared toward the traits of children and has a proven track record. Many schools, primarily Reformed Christians, are getting back to this method.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule. My father is a first rate teacher but I always felt that I didn't learn much from him.
My experience in school was that of boredom. But that didn't prevent me from educating myself. I read, as mentioned above, 'Rich Dad Poor Dad', James Loewen's 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' and I read the first eight chapters of this book as well as 'Dumbing Us Down' and 'A Different Kind of Teacher' also by John Taylor Gatto.
It's apparent that the solution is to remove the bureaucracy of the school system by separating school from the state http://honested.com/. Homeschool (as I do), enprentice, work study, independent study. Give kids a chance to explored and think. Because of the rigid confines of he system that is public education, there are not enough opportunities for the children and young adults to take their educations into their own hands.
end of message
No offense but that sucks. He needs ot be kicked in his ass. I dropped out around 16 or 18 and was told if I wasn't gonna go to school I would have to work. And work I did. Some 13 years later and I work a straight 40 hour week and do side work every Saturday. On the brighter note 10 years ago I went and got my GED, and now I'm going for my CompSci degree. My time in between school was spent learning what I wanted, reading books tech manuals anything that I could learn something from.
I agree about the school systems. My reason for leaving was that I didn't feel I should have to sit in a classroom for 7 hours a day wasting my time, while someone shoved crap that I had been learning for 4 years down my throat. Seems like every year I learned about the revolutionary war.
And to top it all off, the last 3 years I have spent in college maths have been to catch me up to where I should have been. Seems 2 years of high school and all they wanted ot teach us was COnsumer Math. Ironic how the author talks about a society of workers, should have added consumers too. They didn't want me to know how to solve and equations with two variables and two unknowns, but they damn sure wanted me to know how much I was saving at a 20% off sale.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Amen! It's nice to have control over your kid's schooling if at all possible. We've made our home a very cheap private school with one student.
The West is moving on past Christianity. It's interesting for historical reasons, nothing more.
You could have ordered this book four years ago directly from Odysseus Group and it was to have been originally released in an "official" edition in January 2001. No publisher has wanted to publish this book for years for some reason.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
You're right. But, consider our modern "service" society. What if everyone "self-actualized" their free-thinking, intellectually-curious, self-motivated selves? Who'd work the cubicles? Who'd work the phone support? Who'd flip the burgers? Drones are what we get because, in the end, drones are what we need.
I recommend "The Technological Society" by philosopher Jacques Ellul. Basically, he argues post-industrial revolution, the whole Socratic notion of "know thyself" as the raison d'etre for the human endeavor was replaced with "make it faster, cheaper, easier, more convenient." The cult of "technique" as he calls it.
Howard Gardner in The Unschooled Mind campaigns for the reimplementation of the apprenticeship model. After the child has learned their fundamentals, company's would adopt/train those students for whom were interested in acquiring a trade and in exchange, the student would give X years of service.
In a time where classes are overflowing, this model may be a way of getting us back to one on one learning.
I agree. It used to be the draft that kept the young out of the work force; now it is just as you say. The "subjects" people learn in college are laughable, and people graduate knowing, in most cases, nothing.
College has become largely vocational, and students learn things that would be better learned on the job. The entire economy and society have been distorted however by so-called "higher education" and the student loans that make them "affordable." Apart from the few who go into the construction or home repair industry, auto mechanics, and so forth, most people would eventually find themselves at a disadvantage if they did not have that piece of paper, leading them to a roadblock in their career no matter how intelligent and capable they are.
Nevertheless, most people are indeed at a disadvantage, having either placed themselves in debt or having spent their parents' money on college rather than having that money or credit on hand to apply at some significant juncture in their lives towards some business endeavor -- say, after working 5 or 10 years in some line of work for someone else, they then strike out on their own at some opportune moment.
Higher education (and its friends in the banking industry) has turned into a giant money-making scam on the clueless (which turns out to be most of us). The public school system of the United States serves as a giant marketing tool for this "educational-financial complex," promoting college as the sine qua non for success.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
There are opportunities for those who put the effort into it. Advanced placement classes, competitions and scholarships, etc. It's not the school system's responsibility to deliver opportunities to your child. It's the parent and child's own responsibility to go looking and find them. In the US, they're everywhere.
For gradeschool kids, for example, there are science fairs, there are "4-H" programs (which aren't just 'farm stuff'), academic competitions sponsored by nationwide organizations like National Geographic, and more! ASK the school counsellors, ASK about highschool and college outreach programs and university extensions.
Criticizing "the education system" for failing to develop a child in some particular direction is like criticizing a buffet restaurant for not serving each customer exactly the quisine that they will relish. You can get complete nutrition at almost any restaurant but if you want something special then you've got to find where to get it and go there. Same with education.
Students who really want to learn are hardly being prevented. The horrible truth is that the majority of people are not like that single coal miner or that one group of Jewish mothers. Only a tiny minority really views education as tools of understanding. To most it's just a path to be trodden and forgotten in persuit of a diploma.
I'm pretty familiar with Gatto's writings (though haven't read this book, but from the article it seems to follow from his other writings--no surprises). I've taught "Dumbing us down" annually to graduates and undergraduates.
What's missing in his "telling" of history and analysis of the structure of schools is a sense of the role of social movements in shaping schools over history. It's not just visible elites (e.g. Bobbitt) who have created schools as we know them; its also the pressure of communities, unions, religious groups etc. It's the interaction among elites and these more "on the ground" groups that result in the often confused, layered, and even seemingly intransigient structure of schools. In other words, it's a more democratic process than he lets on, though one in which the constituents bring radically unequal resources to the discussion: education seems like stupid business prep? Well guess who brings the most $$$ to the table? Will they change, yes, but not without the consent of these other groups who do not necessarily want the most creative, independent, excited populace in the world.
I learned in High School,
It's a wonder I can think at all
though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall
-- Paul Simon, Kodachrome, 1973
BAD IDEA!
I would have fallen into that third category of 'punks on their way to prison', had I been triaged in such a manner in high school.
Now that I'm a ways out of high school, I haven't been in trouble in a decade and am a productive member of society.
I think all this standardization is useless, i don't see why a person who's going into Computer Science, or Electrical Engineering, is required to do the same things as someone going to lawschool.
I think many kids by time they enter 9th grade, they know what they want to do, so their courses should reflect what they want to do for a job.
Not all kids think the same, not all kids learn the same, not all kids work the same and this "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT" just makes the problem worst, it requires standarized tests.
Uh, did you actually read it?
If that's the point you received from it then I think you missed the point. Sure its a book about how to get ahead and make money in this world (not something I completely agree in), but it also has a good point about working smartly. I like to sum it up in one saying:
Work smartly and work hardly.
A nice double entandra there depending on how you want to look at it.
talking about related topics from a learner's point of view....
d =9 9
www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html (see the last third of the artical)
slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml?ti
(sometimes "teen angst" may be justified)
Note not put in link format to ease the lives of the servers....
-Ben There
There are other books indicting the US educational system, where politics are often more important than education. Try "Inside American Education" by Thomas Sowell (ISBN: 0029303303).
If anyone wades through all the chapters and links (the printer friendly pages stop around chapter 6) can the post a link to a text file?
That hurts! I was taken out of public school because of problems with peers. After being homeschooled I was much better at dealing with people. If only I hadn't been unschooled I'd be good at math and spelling, too.... :)
I don't think being put into a position where your only social contacts are people of your age is healthy.
Also, the social problems of some homeschoolers may be based more on the reason they were homeschooled to begin with than the homeschooling itself.
I went to public school, I don't think they are unfixable. I think that the "lump all the students together" and educate to the lowest common denominator is the problem.
There is a population drags down the learning of the rest of the students. Because kids are forced to go to school, and teachers are forced to not "leave any child behind" it drags down everybody. Throw the dead weight aside and let most of us learn!
Luckily my school district offered a public highschool that was specificly for more advanced students (not just math/science, but also music & literature). This made the environment in the classroom for students and teachers more conducive to learning. More importantly, the teachers could teach more advanced concepts. Rather than doing a report basically summarizing "Frankenstein", you had to interpret the underlying messages. I learned more calculus in highschool than my first year of college.
I had intelligent friends from jr. high who went to "normal" high schools and it ended up screwing up their lives. A few got in the wrong crowd and became alcoholics or total stoners, or the pace of their curriculum was so slow they'd get frustrated and quit learning. Some also went on to college, but lacked study skills so were slower to keep up with the faster pace of learning.
Once we recognize that not all students are equally intelligent and that we shouldn't hold the more advanced ones (or even the average students) back so the slow kids "feel good about themselves" the better our school system will be. We do this for sports, if you're not good enough to make the team too bad.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Read Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular and tell me if this article suddenly sounds familiar.
good shit. paints a picture. i like how it stresses that our condition is not result of minority trying to slave us.
Didn't Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society make similar points in the 60s - getting an education vs learning skills, with schools being focussed on neither and so doing both badly.
The federal government has hijacked local public schools systems economically. They have to toe the line on the ridiculous social engineering dictates or they lose thousands per student in money that was first removed from the area via federal taxes, then skimmed off to support the department of education, then some of it released back to the school districts. There are probably some exceptions that run entirely on locally collected money, but I'm not personally aware of any.
So, to answer the question what might a solution be, ELIMINATE the entire federal department of education. It's not needed, and it's actually harmful, and it wastes billions in tax payers money. Just shut it down completely. Let the states and local communities and the parents themselves deal with their own children and education.
Gatto has been saying this - that the American educational system is fundamentally broken - for well over a decade. Speaking and writing about the broken state of American education is what he does, and has done since a 1991 op ed piece he did for the Wall Street Journal.
It's nice of slashdot to give him some exposure, sure, but that the American educational system is broken certainly isn't news in the sense of being new information.
Perhaps the majority of Western Countries based their laws on the tenets of Christianity, but America is one notable exception. Our rules were based largely on Deistic principles and on general ethics and were specifically engineered not to value religion. Dubious? Read The Godless Constitution. Or consider this: despite the fact that many Americans claim the US Constition was based on the Bible and that it was founded by Christians, so we are a Christian nation, the founders specifically chose not only to exclude Christianity from the Constitution (which was a cause of debate throughout the States), but to specifically prohibit religious tests as requirements for holding public office. One can be ethical and can have morals without religion.
Live free or die
You must be a fine example of a former student of the "not a national" school system. By jumping to a conclusion to support the status quo without actually investing the time to understand what the guy has to say... well, the system worked! Now go flip some more burgers.
Even if you disagree with me, what would be the actual harm of having a trial program where all schools within a city force their students to wear a uniform?
First off, I think we should cut the military budget dramatically, and use that money for healthcare, medical research and education.
Now, when as for military school, perhaps quasimilitary would be more appropriate. THe point is that young men at that general ago are hardwired to NEED some sort of rigorous disciplinary training. For hundreds of years, corporations and governments in collusion have have taken advantge of this and have cooked up nationalism and patriotism through fear in order to profit off of war. Young men have sought this military experience out, many of them, and having the job doesn't hurt, either. But they are basically hardwired to need this type of experience.
But we should address that need without actually training them for war.
As for other replies in this subthread: with respect to European education: I don't know all that much about it. But from my studies of some European political economies, I am convinced that many of the European countries have their act together in a way we can only dream of, e.g., Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, etc. Just follow their lead--we could hardly do worse.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
free whites: 301856
free blacks: 8105
slaves: 54
so about 2.7% of the population was black in 1840's Connecticut, assuming all 54 slaves were black.
I've come to the conclusion that nearly all of human behavior can be summed up by the following two apparent facts about humanity (taken as a group):
This applies to teachers as well as children - and dealing with the "smart kids", who tend to come up with odd, novel ways of looking at and asking about things makes the teachers have to think. Really good teachers LIKE that sort of mental challenge, but I think most are just ordinary people who don't like to "work". Discouraging time-consuming, thought-provoking smartness just makes their lives easier.
(Someone once told me that one of the few college degrees you can get that does not require ANY science classes is...a Bachelor's degree in Education. That, right there, says something if it's true. Can anyone confirm or refute this claim?)
Some nerds still try to fight against that tendency, though. One of the nerdliest humor publications I know of is The Annals of Improbable Research (yes, the same people that host the IgNobel Prizes every year...). Every issue of their magazine includes a very short, concise "teaching guide", which begins with:
"Three out of five teachers agree: curiosity is a dangerous thing, especially in students. If you are one of the other two teachers[...]"
Personally, I'd love to see copies of this getting plastered all over every "educational" institution, everywhere in the world (I find it hard to believe that the US is the ONLY place in the world with this problem, fundamental human nature being what it is everywhere...).
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
So you're saying that those who believe in Christianity (or perhaps Judaism, Muslim faith, Buddhism, etc.?) should be told to "get with the program" and have their freedom of religion stripped from them?
Or should the state declare the official religion as atheism? "You must believe that there is no higher power, and that you are worthless and have no purpose other than a product of the Universe's machinations."
1. That would be unconstitutional. It's in the first "right" granted to every American for a good reason. For those of you who have forgotten it, it goes something like this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
2. I submit that if you think religion is dying (especially Christianity), you aren't paying enough attention. Many of those around you are quite possibly of a faith, but choose to keep it to themselves instead of beating it over your head in an inappropriate forum.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
http://www.geocities.com/james_sager_pa/love7.html
Check it out, computers instead of books.
Movies. Music. Computer games. in addition to books on computer.
The curriculum is then calculated on effectiveness through standardized testing results, and the teacher can be rated too.
Trust me its revolutionary and WILL happen.
God spoke to me.
Recent events in certain states advocating a mix of intelligent design along with ummm the other curriculum based on science have blurred the line between teaching teaching a student to be religious and teaching a student the facts. No historian would want to remove talk of religion, I think that you presume this to be a problem.
Photos.
It is up to individuals to have the desire to learn what is not taught in the school system. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. -Mark Twain
Pinky, Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering? I think so Brain, but "instant karma" always gets so lumpy.
I feel that like most thing in America, education in America is a hyped thing. Like $40,000 per child education expense per year is ridculous. I know most of it is infrastructure cost, but still it is stupid. I studied in India, we had a teacher, a blackboard, some homemade education material, pencils and notebooks. Yet, I am as intelligent and well-informed as any other average American. I do not know why does a 2nd grader needs a laptop to study. Yeah, having a ibook for 2nd grader is fine, but then do not complain about not having enough funds for education. All this is wasteful. The apparently uniform education funding just pumps money into a system where rich schools prosper and poor neigborhood kids suffer. This just makes sure that the class divide is amply maintained under the garb of egalitarian education. Further, till Brown v. Board of Education, America did not even bother about having optical equality in education. Separate but equal of Plessy v. Fergusson was thought be sufficient for black kids. And such America wants to impose its "values" on the world ! KMA.
It is interesting to note that the U.S. has about 40
million illiterates, 10 million greater than the entire population of Cuba. This is a poor, U.S. embargoed country whose adult population, by UN estimates, is about 98% literate.
Go figure.
School takes thirteen years because that's how long it takes to break a child's spirit.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
Are voucher systems somehow the silver bullet or does that simply stretch public funds to private hands and further deplete the money to be spent on public education?
The money becomes an issue in this case for a different reason. When schools become a commodity, capitalism and, more importantly, customer satisfaction comes into play. You see, private schools simply do not want to fail people. It's not a matter of helping that student reach its potential--it's a matter of passing that student at all costs. Now, we've all heard of high schools and universities with coaches pressuring or negotiating professors into augmenting some student's grades. Well, I've heard and seen much worse inside Catholic schools.
I spent five years at a Catholic school. In one particular incident (after Columbine I might add) a student said he was going to stab an English teacher (to her face, I might add) and was merely given a week-long, out-of-school suspension. In another case, another classmate of mine failed each and every exam in his American history class and happened to pass (he was confused, too).
It's not all just horror-stories with this. There are also problems related to the smaller class sizes. When you've got only 100-150 people for each year-class, you can't have much specialization. You are going to see the jack-offs in the same English class as the bookworms. The teacher of course has to adjust the level of difficulty to some necessarily evil middle-ground. So, for people such as myself who in theory care about education, it will be like clubbing baby seals.
As for the customer satisfaction, remember that this is rarely a good thing when it comes to education. The one paying for this service is of course completely seperate from the person to which it is rendered. The happiness or unhappiness of the parents is entirely dependant on the opinions of the child. If both the children and the parents were mature enough to look at the actual education, then there would be no problem. But, kids will always dislike school work and parents will always dislike their kids' whining.
Or perhaps what does real accountability mean? Or does it just mean more teaching to the tests?
Such tests can be a disaster for the learning process. Spending entire class periods learning methods for standardized test-taking is rediculous and sophist. Many countries have educational systems which entirely miss the point by doing this. However, when you make teachers accountable without some kind of standard, their accountablity becomes dependent on how much little Timmy's parents complain about the fruits of his laziness.
The teachers in such schools are a sight. My science teacher, whom I knew informally as well, has taught for decades. In this environment, he has resigned himself to arbitrarily assigning grades--none of the tests, labs, or projects are figured into the final grade.
Too much "rethoric" around here!
Chalmers: Well, I've got to hand it to you, Seymour: these drab student coverings have created the perfect distraction-free environment, thus preparing the children for permanent positions in tomorrow's mills and processing facilities.
The cached chapter list is available thru google.
My wife taught in a private school for 3 years, and just quit at the end of last year. While this may be about the public school system where parents aren't normally involved with their students, the opposite can be equally as damaging.
She taught 6-8th grade French. She has a masters in French, and yet some parents (who didn't speak French at all!) were suggesting ways she could improve her class. She had one parent who refused to let her son read "The Little Prince" because of what she deemed "questionable" references in it. Parents called her at home to complain about EVERYTHING. A lot of them asked for and expected special treatment for their kid. The administration wouldn't stand up to the parents because it was private and parents were on the board. It was a nightmare of stress and demands, and she didn't get any time away from that place. Weekends, nights, and even parts of the summer were taken up by this job.
While parents need to be involved, they also need to back the F off and allow teachers to do their jobs. For some reason, everyone expects them to go the extra mile just because they are teachers. They are also human beings.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Here is an article detailing the comparison.
Education is something you take, not something that is given to you. Unless and until you, personally, realize that, you have no hope of being educated regardless of what school you go to or how much money is spent on your behalf.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
My son attends a private school - It costs $13,000 a year per child (I pay half) local public schools spend $11,000 per student. My sons class room (first grade) has 12 students. Public is about 30, My son also has an art teacher, a gym teacher, a music teacher, Spanish teacher, and his regular teacher has a part time aid. My son left kindergarten reading, writing, doing addition, subtraction, and some multiplication at levels that are beyond beginning second graders in public schools. When he sings he can carry a tune, he has thrown pots and has the beginnings of a second language. What is more, he loves school, he can't get there fast enough in the mornings. I was exceedingly unhappy with Bush when he caved into the Democrats on vouchers. (note: my son would not have benefitted from Bush's Voucher system.) Democrats I expect to oppose any measure to get a real education to children - its in the demographics - the less educated a person and lower they are paid the more likely they are to vote Democrat. Next time you hear a Democrat espousing high sounding platitudes about why we must keep the present public school system remember the demographics. Fact is we know better than let the government run our food production or distribution system - we do not want to starve - food is just too important to allow the government to do it. Yes, let it regulate safety and cleanliness - but not do the production. Maybe it is time to do the same with education - have government set minimum standards, and requirements and and maybe set up a funding system to insure that all children have the ability to go to school and yes require it - but leave the doing of it to others. This would not be a totally new concept - Head Start in most locations in the US is not government operated. In Anchorage where I live there are two private nonprofit organizations supplying Head Start services. Yes, they are partly funded by the federal and state governments (also United way, and Native Corps, and many other funders). They must function up to a minimum set of standards to get these funds. And yes, the government checks up regularly.
This method, unfortunately, creates people who are often ill equipped to handle real world situations. All too frequently, I encounter individuals who have learned to do their jobs by simple memorization of procedures, with little or no understanding of what they're actually doing. Step 1, step 2. If this thing happens, do that. This procedural approach is extremely efficient assuming no problems are encountered. However, problems always crop up, and without a solid understanding of the theory behind the task one is doing, solving those problems is next to impossible.
What's even more scary about this is the hostility it breeds towards "real" learning. I can think of several situations where I tried to get the people who work for me to learn more about the underlying aspects of their jobs, only to have them tell me they didn't want to learn theory -- they just wanted how-to instructions.
This is something that can be solved. However, doing so will require a radical change in people's thinking, and that's not something that happens overnight.
I know two people exactly like that. One person I could blame it on enviorment. He was never made to do anything, and now he can not hold a job, nor can he take care of his own health issues, and is not using that to keep himself from a job and use the government instead.
But, get this. My own sister. Raised in the same house as me (2 years younger then I am) is a complete social misfit. She is just now 21, has 2 children, has been evicted no less then 6 times from different appartment complex's and steals from my parents (pretends to get a job and ask for baby sitter money, and uses it for beer).
My parents (mostly my father) ran a very tight ship. We were forced to do our work in school, and forced to keep our living area's clean. He gave us strict chores and just reward for our efforts. We had to use the money "allowed" to us to purchase our own clothes and toys (starting around the time we turned 12). And though this we were tought to handle money and credit.
It still to this day drives me insane. But it is good proof that you can't have a single system to teach the masses. What works for one person will not work for another.
That's where I want to live. :-P
On a similar note, my sister taught at an inner-city school in CA, and once had to deal with the irate parents of a kid who she failed for not doing any work. They knew, and she knew that they knew, that this kid had never so much as touched a piece of work.
Their argument? "Well, he came to school, so you can't fail him."
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Let me first say that I have not read the book yet, but I have read the 6 Lessons and thought it was a very good read. Thought provoking. So, I have a question. Go figure.
If the current system was better. If it were all the things that Mr. Gatto says it should be... none of the things he says it shouldn't be... would we have enough factory workers?
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
He says:
This is more the way I viewed school. It never occurred to me that this is in fact the way it was designed from the start. In retrospect though, it makes perfect sense.
Do a search for the author in relation to the cult and see what you get:
As one Amazon.com reviewer wrote:
"As a Health Educator with Master's level training, I took an interest in this book. After reading nearly a third (200 pages) or so of the book, I began to realize that this was a propoganda piece by the enemy of free speech known as the Church of Scientology. Ironically, the Church is not a church nor is there ANY science behind any of their malicious claims and attacks. It may be true that there are abuses within psychiatry, medicine or the mental health fields, AS THERE ARE IN EVERY OTHER PROFESSION INCLUDING THE CLERGY. I strongly advise readers not to buy this cleverly crafted collection of half-truths, misinformation and slander. The internet is a great instrument for exposing the lies and fraud from organizations like "The Citizens Commission for Human Rights" which is analogous to Hitler's SS in its assault on psychiatry. "
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
This guy is just ripping off a Pink Floyd classic
He has also won the New York City Teacher of the Year award three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year award once during the final year of his career.
He did all that in his final year?
For those who would like a shorter essay by the same author on the same topic, he wrote an article entitled Against School in the September 2003 issue of Harper's Magazine.
..."Kids who have no idea what the hell they want to do at this point in their lives", and you'll have a winner.
Some people find out what they want to do along the way. So we should have a prep track, a trade track, and a ensure-general-competency track.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The author claims that school is a religion, so it is time to pass the hat.
Help out your local schools by donating school supplies at TrueGift Donations. You can donate cash on the "Paypal Donate" button, or ignore us and deliver what crayons, pencils, and scissors your local teacher needs.
In all of the commentary on our education system, no one has ever argued that having enough school supplies is part of the problem. Wouldn't you rather donate now than deal with the uneducated later? Once all the tax money has been spent on teachers, school buildings, administration, No Child Left Behind, etc., many teachers cannot teach basic lesson plans because of a lack of school supplies. School supply budgets for basic materials tend to run about $5 per student per year.
I strongly agree with your statement. Teaching religions in high school can help in areas where students seem to be lacking the most these days. I believe that if students are opened up to the different philosophies of the world, they will better understand human psychology and culture. Perhaps it will reduce racism and promote analytical thinking (why is any one religion any better than another?).
I went to a high school in suburban Pennsylvania less than a decade ago. There was very little racial diversity (my class was 100% caucasian), and almost everyone was a Christian. Since I am not a Christian, I was made fun of and repeatedly reminded that I was "going to Hell." All I feel is sadness now. Sadness for the students' ignorance and for how hard it must have been for most to see and live in the real world. I blame the educational system. I was never taught about anything else until college, by which time I realized how much high-school failed to prepare me for the diverse world.
Students coming out of our (America) high school system seem to ever increasingly lack the ability to think on their own. Problem solving is key to a productive career. If students were allowed to debate fundamental philosophical questions, it would only benefit them. Having seen what our current educational system is producing, I have lost faith completely in it. It is embarrasing to me as an American to see this. I would very much prefer to move to Japan to raise children, knowing that their attitude towards schooling is far superior to America's.
I am not sure how one would fix America's schooling system, but perhaps the problem is not so much with funding, but instead requires a fundamental shift of our values. Students should want to learn as much as possible and contribute to extra-curricular activities. Whether or not someone in IT has perfect grammar doesn't matter - they need to be able to solve problems on their own or in a group to be useful. Teaching various world religions can help open that door, IMHO.
I'm always bemused by people that imagine that a socialist school system would teach anything other than the supposed benefits socialism, rather than the benefits of freedom.
The problem with all these posts is that none of them question a federalized school system. There don't need to be federal standards for schooling. If anything, the idea of federally funded schooling should scare the living hell out of those of us that went through public schooling.
I would rather that my child never attend public schooling in its current form. Not because of the students, not because of the teachers. Rather, I fear public schooling because of the administration and bureacracy involved. The states do a horrible enough job teaching kids, why isn't everyone vehemently opposed to one federalized system?
My state's department of transportation (DOT) has long lines, bureaucratic idleness, and I still pay 35 bucks for my license, 135 for my vehicle, and 50 for my plates. They recently took away the privilege to register for my DL for up to 8 years too, so they can keep sucking me back every two to four years to pay that fee.
And I'm supposed to let these people teach my kids?
How convenient it is to pick on the system!! While I am not saying that the system is working as well as could be, let us not discount the parents who set the example for the kids. This includes the parents who dump their kids in "publicly funded daycare" so they can both chase the dollars needed for that new BMW, bigger house ...
How many of the over achievers are the kids whose parents spend time reading and working with their children.
We expect our teachers to be able to deal with the side effects of children who have "Bart Simpson" as a night time babysitter. Parents too wrapped up in their own selfish lives to do anything about it. How can the teachers and the school administrators fix problems that mangled home lives and the weak morals of society have helped create.
Turn off the TV and read a book with your kids. Even this book, read by parents and kids together is a start!!
Think of public school and then think of scuba diving.
In scuba diving training - everyone is required to 'get an A' on each part of the training, before moving onto the next part.
After completing all parts of the training, with an A or better - you can go scuba diving, get your scuba diving license, and have a great time.
If you die during training, (ie - fail) the instructor is responsible for your death.
(If your 'not getting-it' in scuba - the instructor will tell you so - and you won't go diving.)
The public school system doesn't care if you die, fail out, etc. - it just wants to grade you - like meat.
Grade A meat moves up to the leader class
Grade B meat will serve the grade A's
Grade C meat will get the burgers and fries for the Bs.
and all the ones below that, well - they are out of luck.
If public schools were based on education - you would stay in 1st grade until you got it - then move on.
If it takes 1 month, fine, you graduate early.
If it takes 2 years, fine, you graduate later.
Training and education should be based upon ability and experience, not upon age.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the use of prescription drugs to regulate children's behavior.
we need to get our sense of direction. Where are we headed as a species? Looming on the horizon are the consequences of overpopulation, pollution, deforestation, and a dwindling supply of energy (read fossil fuels). When I mention these things in conversation, most people either seem to be unaware that these problems exist, or have faith that somehow God or human ingenuity will take care of everything.
Do these subjects get serious attention in school? Or are we too distracted by shopping?
Eh?
More like: From the No-duh dept.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
If being really good at learning stood an obvious chance of (to grossly generalise) getting more (or higher-status) sexual and/or emotional relationships, high school would look very different.
As it stands, the most common term used for a guy who does well in school is not (in my day, or as far as I can see today) "nerd" or "dweeb" or even "brainiac"---it's "faggot". Oddly enough, though, doing well at school can get a girl called a dyke. (Black nerds supposedly get called "white", but I don't know any black people, so what do I know?)
Most home school graduates I have met are very smart and become bored with University classes...
It inspired a change of sig ...
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Even if that is technically true, the best students from the "best" public schools are a statistical anomaly, having far more to do with the student than the school, and certainly having to do with the vastly bigger number of students in the public school population compared to the private school population.
I will whole heartedly agree with you though that schools (public schools, in my opinion) try to scale bigger than they should. It always amuses me to see a school district of 30 thousand with high schools over 3 thousand students in size talk about the teaching the value of "community." The kids in these schools exist largely in anonimity and are in no way a part of any meaningful school community.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I read that in the 1970 book "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler.
Having read only a few pages of the book on-line I must say that I am struck by a) the broad-brush quality of its arguments and b) its unsubstantiated sympathy for a do-it-yourself approach in education.
The author obviously read far and wide, but what I miss is coherence and convincing arguments. In the part about schools in Hellas for example, the author neglects to mention e.g. the disasterous results of putting rank amateurs in charge of military operations. The Sicilian fiasco (Theucidides) comes to mind. And who can forget the mild ridicule with which Socrates treats the youth who feels that reading a single book on the subject qualifies him for military command? It is a consistent lack of consideration for facts that run counter to the narrative that marks this book as tendentious; a pamplet rather than a scholarly contribution.
Then comes the very 'American' insistence on abolishing centrally coordinated education in favour of a free-for-all system, with reference to the self-governing nature of driving a car. First of all, car accidents account for more than 38,000 fatalies per year (see http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/), which is more than all the Twin-tower victims put together. And err, how many of those crashes are purely due to mechanical malfunction? What does this mean for the strength of the argument in pointing to people's responsibility?
The grim fact of the matter is that contemporary society relies on a huge body knowledge and science which simply takes a concentrated and sustained effort to master. An effort that goes above and beyond what can be absorbed by mediocre minds in the course of play or self-teaching, and which definitely requires the services of a guide or a teacher. Having said this, elementary cost considerations preclude individual teaching for everyone, thereby requiring collective teaching, a.k.a. schools.
Of course high-schools leave much to be desired, as anyone who ever asked an average high-school graduate to explain the functioning of an electric motor, Ohm's law, why we see so many bacteria acquire resistance to antibiotics today, or even a coherent account of why a steel hull floats. My point here is the difference in comprehension (and working knowledge) between those who took courses in maths, physics, chemistry, and biology to those who did not.
It is a sad fact of life that US nationals seem to have lost their taste for studyng 'hard' subjects, as anyone who has seen the preponderance of non-US nationals in the graduate schools of e.g. MIT can attest, especially with respect to scholarships. Often careers in 'Management' or 'Marketing' seem to offer much better pay without the need to actually master difficult subjects than having to compete with loads of bright and ambitious Chinese and Indians on an equal footing.
And what about the transition between high school and college? Nowhere in the western world is the transition from a challenge-free high-school environment to the pityless selection process at college more marked. I admit that abolishing schools as 'hopeless' and 'designed to hold people back' instead of imposing rigorous nation-wide high standards and shunting all those who cannot meet these to vocational schools is politically convenient, as in not having to defend anything unpopular. Perhaps this is why the 'everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost' philosophy is so fashionable in the US today. Abolishing schools a 'hopeless' would be the perfect cap on this development.
I think that in the Western world education is *essential*, and that schools have more than enough merit to warrant their continued existance, if not their improvement.
I know I'm not an intellectual wonder. I realize that far greater than 99% of my own original ideas have already been considered by others way before I did. And while I'm no unique and beautiful snowflake, I still find myself wondering why I couldn't be stupid and happy like the majority of people out there. As this is the slashdot community, I suspect I'm singing to the choir.
I have only glanced over the text of this book for a few minutes and already I can begin to peice together my own recollections of my public school experience. But where did the "system" fail me?
Looking back, I realize that is was my own mother and father who had a profound influence on the way I see life and how things worked. I sought, no, I fought to understand things in a way I was comfortable and while it didn't always agree with the public system's way of doing things, eventually, I came to realize how incredibly robotic the rest of the public was in comparison to myself. Now I begin to understand how this has come about and that it's not "nature" that makes sheep of the people, but the system that converts the masses into public slaves.
This realization, more than anything, makes me motivated to become even more involved in my sons' education... not that I am not already, but I do trust the system a lot less than I did before.
I consider this book recommended reading for all parents who give even the slightest bit of interest in their children... those little people will likely decide whether or not you live your last years in a piss-smelling rotting dungeon, or comfortable within family surroundings... take care of them lest they not take care of you later.
s/who's/whose/
That's not a good point to try to argue. The schools themselves are already segregated, in the German system. You can get a minimum education, learn a trade, or prepare for university. There's no in-between, though you can improve your degree later on.
There is the Gesamtschule, which is the in-between you're looking for. However, I think that teaching children according to their skills is a good idea. If the breadth of capabilities is too large, some students will get bored while others are totally swamped with the demands. Or everyone sinks to the smallest common denominator. In the end, nobody gets what they need, an education that matches their intellect and challenges them the right amount.
I went to a religious high school. I left far less religious than I entered. But there's no denying that my education was of a higher quality than the public alternative. That is why it cost so much. And do not think for a second that the quality of the education was related to the religious environment. The "Religion Classes" were the easiest and most worthless classes they offered, and were manditory.
I went through nearly the hardest cirriculum the school had to offer, and actually exhausted the school in that had I not taken college courses half the time my senior year they would not have been able to provide me a full schedule. I worked by ass off for a 3.8 something out of 4 with no possibility of going beyond 4.0. Even so I only squeaked into the top 25% of my class in the last semester, thanks to condition termed "senior-itis" I was lucky enough not to catch.
My little brother went to a public school, and eventually started boycotting homework. He didn't do shit and ended up with the same GPA as me, only he was in the top 10% of his class.
Now when it came time to apply to college, I got screwed. They look at class rank like it means something, whereas one of my valictorians took the easiest path possible to get a 4.0. I had to settle for a middle-weight public college when I'd been trained for damn near ivy-league.
Now to the real point. The students in the school were about 33% heavily academic, 33% normal, and 33% rich little bastards who were inheriting daddy's buisiness anyway. Reguardless, the class difficulty overall was much higher than the analogous public school. You had to work your mind hard for an A in most of the classes; my brother slept through class.
There's also the attitude. My private school had all the teachers in your face, making sure you were learning and were prepared. To be blunt, they just don't give a fuck in public schools. My brother told me stories about the principal running around every day doing his damnest to get problematic kids (and these are good kids too, I know them personally) expelled just to make his life easier. My brother was included in that group. From my point of view, he's trying to ruin these kids' lives because he's lazy.
Religion has nothing to do with quality education; but if public schools don't shape up then parents have little choice but to cough up the extra dough for a real education. And we all know most parents don't have that extra dough.
I've always held the sneaking suspecion that the poor quality of public education had a more sinister source. It just seems so strange how impotent the institutions seem. There are countless things hammered into my head in my public elementary days that I view as transparent propaganda and in some instances outright lies. I can't say for certain whether or not this system has actually sold the poor down the river, but I can say for sure that an ignorant populace is easier to control.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Just because it worked in your case doesn't mean that it works in others. You make a valid point and I don't doubt the credibility of your school, its scholars, or its teachers - but just because you have a succesful institution implemented in your area doesn't automatically make every private school better than every public school.
I attended a public school in a small town and I'm not going to lie - most of my graduating class are total losers. Infact I would say around 80% of them. Maybe more. By "losers" I mean most of them will probably make less than $20,000/yr. for the rest of their lives and never leave this town. You get out of public school what you put into it - and therein lies the problem - we were never taught in school that it's important to excel at all. Most of the graduates from my class went on to college on sports scholarships. Most of those people have come back and are now working in gas stations beacuse they got injured, or cut because they found out that just because they're good in our low string school doesn't mean that they're as good as they thought they were when compared to everyone else out there.
For as many people that came out of our school like that though - there are atleast one other (given size to size relationship obviously) that came out of the local Christian/Catholic school as bad or wosre off. Our local Catholic school only runs until high school (9th grade) and then all of the Catholic school kids have to finish off their K-12 career in a public high school. All of the males were so timid and scared of the general population when they walked down the halls and saw something "different" (a gay kid, a gothic kid, some 'stoner punks,' etc.) That was all totally foreign to them so it scared the shit out of them. Eventually some of them adapted but not a lot. The girls coming from the Catholic schools were all so repressed by parents and were feared by many of the Catholic school males that they turned into huge sluts as soon as they found attention from the public school crowd. I can name 20 or 30 girls that graduated with me that had kids before the end of high school.
The Christian school kids had it just as bad in my town... there's a girl that works with me that graduated from an all Christian private school (not all-girls school either) that has the intellegence of a 7 year old. She can barely do basic math, her vocabulary is rediculously small for someone who is 20 years old (someone said "monitary" the other day and she asked what that meant... we work in a bank), etc. She was drilled that she should keep herself "pure" until marriage and she was so itching to have sex that she just reently (a couple weeks ago) married a kid that she'd known for two months. They're now living together and not able to pay any bills, and she wants to have a ton of kids and quit her job to stay at home and be "mom." She says things all the time like "If ____ and I have kids and I quit my job and stay home I'm sure the lord will provide for us." Her boyfriend graduated with me and is one of "those kids" (read above) so he's making $8/hr working at a garage. I cringe every time she says it - If Jesus was handing out cash to pay bills I would have asked a long time ago.
Apart from her being as ubersmart as she is, the slutty Catholic girls that pop out 3 babies every 2 weeks, and the crybaby catholic boys that run when they see a goth, homosexual, or african american - I'm glad I went to public schools.
http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/rudner1999/rudner4 .asp
or here
Of the problems identified, which will Kerry's plan for education fix?
[o]_O
We always hear aobut how bad the US school system and about how X and Y needs to be done, but I was wondering if anyone here could comment on school systems outside of the US?
The term patriotism is too often substituted for the more appropriate term, nationalism. We need to remember that a lot of the folks that we refer to as patriots in America - Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ben Franklin, etc. - were in fact British subjects guilty of treason, insidition, and various other crimes against the state. I'd offer that patriotism has a lot more to do with loyalty to an ideal than loyalty to a government. Nationalism, on the other hand, has everything to do with loyalty to a government, and can be a good thing. It can also be a bad thing, particularly when loyalty to ideals comes in direct conflict with loyalty to the nation. It is at these sad moments when we have to decide which is more dear to us. Our founders chose ideals, and they are remembered for that.
Take a look on my eigenpoll on books for accelerated learning techniques for a way to fix it.
Are voucher systems somehow the silver bullet
t ml
They sort of are.
The real silver bullet is an effective system of negative feedback. When the schools do a bad job, they need to be punished, and when they do a good job, they need to be rewarded. A simple idea.
Simple, yes, but hard to do in real life. Teachers' unions, educational bureaucracies all the way up to the federal level, politicians making promises... all of these things can complicate the school system to the point where incompetence isn't punished, nor excellence rewarded. And attempts to use standardised tests to guarantee that kids are taught well, just mean that teachers will wind up "teaching the test".
The best thing you can hope to do is to allow parents to move their kids around to the best schools. This will not, itself, fix the problem instantly; but it will introduce an element of feedback into the system. Over time, this will inevitably force the schools to improve.
If a restaurant has poor food, people will take their business to other restaurants. It doesn't matter what kind of union the cooks have, it doesn't matter what kind of promises politicians might have made, etc. If the customers vote with their feet, the better restaurants will prosper and the worst ones will have to close. The same thing would happen with schools, but it would take longer (people eat several meals per day, but they would probably leave their kids in any particular school for at least a few months before deciding to move the kids somewhere else).
I have debated this issue in the past with some people who claimed that parents must not be trusted to choose schools for their kids. That's lunacy. There will be a few bad parents, but by far most parents really want what is best for their kids. The parents and kids together are the best judges of how well a school is serving them.
Note that middle-class and upper-class parents already have some freedom to pick schools; I know my parents, whenever we moved, would carefully consider what the schools were like, and they would only move someplace where the schools were decent. The poorest people, who are trapped in the bad part of town (no money to move somewhere else), those are the ones who really want school vouchers.
By the way, public school systems spend a lot of money per student. The vouchers are generally for less than the public school system would have spent on a student. If a student takes a $3000 voucher and goes to a private school, that is usually a net profit for the public school. In my state, the average per-student spending is $9,454 per year.
For more on vouchers, click here: http://www.cato.org/research/education/vouchers.h
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Homeschooling!
I'm trying to read this (at +1) from inside the NYC public school firewall, and it's getting cut off with the error "This page will not be displayed because it contains prohibited words or it has exceeded its tolerance of questionable words."
Here's a link to a book with one of his essays. Quite an interesting little book.
The West is also moving on past being able to reproduce itself both biologically and philosophically. Not all change is necessarily progress. The most religious state of the West is the US and of the 1st world states it is also the state that has most retained its christian character in its people. Whether there is any causation involved in this correlation is intensely debated. By no means is christianity interesting for only historical reasons.
I have long believed there was a problem in the educational system in the United States. I was raised up through it, and have experienced it in 4 different states. Each state takes its approach to education differently, which made it hard for me when I moved around from school to school. There was no consistency throughout my education. At one school I would be ahead and at another I would be behind, but all the while I felt I was playing catch up. Yet that being the case, I was still able to do well when I got to High School. I entered the academically challenging IB http://www.ibo.org/ program, and did a full course load for three years and my senior year I tested and got my IB Diploma as well as the regular HS diploma. I also graduated 15th in my class of 345. I'm not tooting my horn here, put using this as a point to show education is possible, but you have to choose a path that means hard work.
The program I was in was the only one in the district of 6 or so High Schools. Other HS's has Honor's programs, but those are a joke. As are the basic requirements for passing. You show up to class and they pass you, for fear if they fail you, they will destroy your self esteem. Did they ever think about how that makes those who actually work for their grades feel? My brother was able to skip 40 days out of a 90 day semester and still graduate. Now if I were to skip out of work without letting anyone know nearly 50% of the time, I would be fired in a heartbeat. What kind of message are we sending the kids in the educational system? Do what you want, and we will let you pass because we don't want to hurt your feelings. That's bullshit, the minute they get out into the 'Real World' they get stuck with the cold hard reality that it sucks, and bosses are tough. But they have been so pampered and babied, that they blame their bosses for being demanding and uncompromising, and the bosses end up being more lax in the work force. Can you begin to see the effects this could have on society.
There are good teachers out there, I know, I had some outstanding teachers. Teachers that challenged me to think, to question. This became even more apparent when I got to college. But it needs to start earlier, and not just in the 'special or gifted' programs. Our society has been moving away from a mass-production intensive society to a services environment. That means people need to think more on their own, problem solve, not just be mindless droids on an assembly line.
I think and know the educational system needs to change, and it isn't so much about money in the schools, its about complacency. We have gotten two comfortable with how things are, loosening the requirements are far easier then failing students that don't perform.
But that's just my 12.5 cents worth on that subject.
Sig? No thanks, I don't smoke.
I see people blasting the system for apathy. OK. I can deal with that. But no one blames the students for apathy. The current student culture not only wants to avoid learning, but holds as a religious mantra that school is a waste of time and completely useless. The students hold just as much blame as everyone else as the government or the teachers or the school administration. How different would school be if the students *valued* their education and then acted on that belief? Personally, unless you are headed for academics, I do not think that high school is useful to most people. For the non-college crowd, school should focus on developing leadership skills, political awareness, and the complex task of running a democracy.
Boy howdy, you're an upset looking for a place to happen. Made my point for me there, eh?
The Christian religion is the philosophical basis upon which law and custom are built in Western society. By which I mean North AND South America, Europe, and their former empires. That's just the facts.
So if you don't know at least the tenets of Christianity, you have no idea what's going on here.
For example, the concept "freedom of religion" is derived from Christianity. Other religious traditions have no such belief. People who come to your country from those traditions will be most offended by your assertion that you are free to practice any religion you want.
Therefore if the tenets (and history!) of Christianity are not taught in school, there will be people in ever growing numbers who do not know about or understand the concept of Freedom of Religion, and who will be completely ignorant of the ass kicking awaiting them should they transgress against it.
Like the Muslim guy in Florida who fired his Latino secretary for eating a bacon sandwich at lunch. He is currently getting his ass kicked up and down and all around in the media and in court by the ACLU, because he doesn't understand that religious tolerance means HE has to tolerate OUR religion and values, not just that we have to tolerate his. In practical terms it means that while he is not required to eat bacon himself, his company does not have the right to declare bacon verboten for all employees.
A Conservative would state it thusly: "Welcome to my country. These are the rules. Play by them and there won't be any trouble. If you don't like the rules, go in peace."
I can't imagine what a Liberal would say, my mind won't bend that far into hyperspace. Probably depend on what day of the lunar calendar it was.
As for Christianity dying, only in New York public schools. But then math is dying there too, so pehaps we should not be shocked.
From Pedro Noguera's (Ph.D., professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley) paper: Preventing Violence in Schools Through the Production of Docile Bodies:
The best quote from this paper is:
It was easy to make my case that metal detectors, and such, are no solution to the problems we face. Seems that only the intelligentsia get this as it's lost on school faculty.
Get your Unix fortune now!
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
Many people know the problems of our industrial society. Some even want to fix them.
Atheism (as opposed to agnosticism) is a belief that God does not exist. If you want to call it a creed or something else, whatever. But it (and things like humanism) are a belief/belief system never-the-less.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
In this newest book Gatto distances himself from the idea that our public school system is part of a deliberate conspiracy by the elite corporate/government leaders to generate a large pool of unthinking laborers and consumers. Indeed, he says (as quoted earlier in the review) that
"With conspiracy so close to the surface of the American imagination and American reality, I can only approach with trepidation the task of discouraging you in advance from thinking my book the chronicle of some vast diabolical conspiracy to seize all our children for the personal ends of a small, elite minority."
This is quite a change of tune for Gatto. In his last book, "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" that was published in 2002, he rather explicitly claims that government officials and business leaders are involved in an active, deliberate conspiracy to make us all stupid, obedient, yet productive workers. It's interesting that he seems to be changing his stance from his last book. I wonder if he has really changed his opinion, or if he's just hoping that people will take him more seriously if his claims are somewhat less outlandish.
"I was frequently on her bad side and grew to loathe school, prefering to be tardy by as much as 2 hours roaming woods and poking around a creek for frogs and snakes."
Tom Sawyer? Is that you?
As I said in my first post in this subthread, it depends on the kid. OBVIOUSLY, some kids do not need this sort of schooling/training. As for myself, I needed it, or something like it, as high school was just not my cup of tea.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
the education system here is based on some industrial-conformity training system
Of course a public education is designed to make you a productive member of society! What else would it be for? To generate a bunch of arrogant pratts that sit arround all day postulating on how to not help others or do anthing else useful? No! That's the job of law school! Public education's goal is not make the most of every student but to make them productive members of a society. In the lower grades, this almost always coincides with making the most of every child which is why education in the lower grades seems the most productive. High school, on the other hand, has a hard time since by then, most people should really start specializing but there are still lots of generic things to learn (english, history, economics) so they keep teaching those and put off the specializing until later.
Just because the school system is non-optimal, doesn't mean it doesn't do a good job. The power of any nation can be directly linked to the quality of it's educational system. Despite the amazing technology that exists today some nations still can't pull themselves out of horrible economic conditions and that's largely due to an uneducated population. The american school system, despite it's faults, has kept us as a dominant world power for nearly a century. As other, much more populous countries catch on to the power of ecucating their population, they will undoubedly follow suit and we will lose our position as the dominant world power but for now, the results speek for themselves. The system works!
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
The West is being draged kicking and screaming into a religious war with the Middle East dude, or have you not been paying attention?
You want to keep practicing your Post Modernist Atheism or whatever, you'd better hope them historically interesting Christians fight hard for your freedom.
Otherwise it won't be looking so good. The Religion of Peace(TM) doesn't take kindly to unbelievers.
It is a pecular world we live in, that such things are indeed possible. We tend to think of others as we do about ourselves. But the fact is that there are others, with the means and time, who think that some small oligarchy (including them, not you) has more intelligency than the masses. And that this is the ideal way, therefore, the masses must be attempted to be kept down.
And this is in their own writings. Not that one master conspiracy is extent, or even desirable for those without our best interests at heart. But to think that every socio-political lunk-head out there exists for the common good, or has ideas of good coincide with reality, is naivity at its apex. (or would that be nadir?)
Of course a public education is designed to make you a productive member of society! What else would it be for? To generate a bunch of arrogant pratts that sit around all day postulating on how to not help others or do anything else useful? No! That's the job of law school! Public education's goal is not make the most of every student but to make them productive members of a society. In the lower grades, this almost always coincides with making the most of every child which is why education in the lower grades seems the most productive. High school, on the other hand, has a hard time since by then, most people should really start specializing but there are still lots of generic things to learn (english, history, economics) so they keep teaching those and put off the specializing until later.
Just because the school system is non-optimal, doesn't mean it doesn't do a good job. The power of any nation can be directly linked to the quality of it's educational system. Despite the amazing technology that exists today some nations still can't pull themselves out of horrible economic conditions and that's largely due to an uneducated population. The American school system, despite it's faults, has kept us as a dominant world power for nearly a century. As other, much more populous countries catch on to the power of educating their population, they will undoubtedly follow suit and we will lose our position as the dominant world power but for now, the results speak for themselves. The system works!
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Just had my first lesson of computer science a-level, in which I learned that MIT helped Apple create Windows, Pascal is a base language of windows, and the 286 was the first processor. Thankfully, after several years of The System, I've become quite adept at giving teachers the metaphorical finger and educating myself instead \o/
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Not that I've noticed.
Are you a coward? Just asking.
"One of the things that makes this work is that (supposedly) training in a tradeskill is not associated with low prestige like it is in the states."
You might want to make a mental note of who are the ones looking down on trade schools. i.e. DeVry, ITT,etc. You'll notice that it's usually those who've taken the "higher education" path. i.e. All the Devry, ITT jokes on "/.".
Then there's the crowd that looks down on both. i.e "I have 15 years experience. I don't need no certification, or college".
but I'll second the sentiment. I have spoken with a lot of people who have been educated since me. And they were taught way less than I. And I'm not really that old.
When reading is taught 'whole word' and teachers are afraid to mark spelling incorrect because it could cripple the child's image of (him|her)self in later life, there is a huge problem. People who learn whole-word reading can't sound out new words or actually use the language. They can pass a very basic competetancy test.
Marking people stopped being an assessment of how well they did, and it has become an exercise in adjusting everyone's expectations to the lowest common denominator. Failing a child will bring lawsuits from the parent.
Things like numeric grades, or Excellent, Very Good, Good, etc have been traded for words which don't say anything other than "Billy tried, that's what we wanted". We no longer have a clue how Billy did, just that he showed up tried.
By the time university comes around, there's a whole lot of people who just don't really know anything and have never been taught the need to be aware of it.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
'Docile Bodies' is a big ole MF hammering point. Discipline and Punish has a whole chapter devoted to it. I hope he cited it....
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
the school system cannot be fixed, Gatto asserts, because it has been designed not to educate.
The school system is designed to provide a Renesance erra education. Most changes since the that period to education have been superficial. Our system was excelent at that time.
Simon's Rock College
>But seriously, large organizations have no single "true" purpose which determines their effect
"The purpose of a system is what it does".
Keep that in mind and you can cut through all obfuscation like a bandsaw through butter.
So just take a look at what the school system does. My late mother was a teacher. She got memo after memo from upstairs and filed tons of paperwork. Her report on the percentage that bore on helping children to learn: 0%.
Oh, and the author didn't say it was "conspiratorial", he said it was a pattern. As he points out, patterns are harder to change.
Diabetes a disability? Explain that to my wife who works 20-30 hours a week AND 40+ taking care of a child and has diabetes. Wow...your right....that's messed up. Does this guy weigh 400+ pounds??
Gorkman
I don't want to spoil the ending, but the point you're making was the subject of an Asimov story, "Profession".
I have a friend who was subjected to various forms of abuse as a child, sexual and otherwise. After about four years of therapy, she copes fairly well and can function in society (has her own job, friends, etc.). She recently stated that of all the sources of injury that confronted her in her childhood, the public school system was by far worse.
Worse, she said, than any of the physical/sexual abuse. Because, while she has conquered all of her fears relating to human interaction in a few years...she still can't force herself to go back to college. After four years of therapy and another four years of earning a living, she still can't stomach the thought of enduring an American education once again, let alone paying money for it.
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
Hate to piss on the parade, but this is exactly what they teach in Education Foundations 101, History of Education. At the University of Alberta, at any rate.
I didn't realize it was some sort of secret.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
"One can be ethical and can have morals without religion."
Yes, but the point is that the particular ethics we are discussing are Christian ones, and the USA is based on them no less than England or France. You don't have to be a Christian to follow them, but if you live in a Christian country you better at least know what they are.
As in, If I go to Saudi Arabia it would behove me to bone up on Muslim tradition and Arab law. Because if I don't, I could find myself getting arrested for any one of a hundred idiot reasons that we would think silly, but they take deadly seriously.
I'll confess I haven't read the book but, from reading the comments posted, I think I have an idea of what was said.
Any educational system can produce nobel laureates or complete duds. The local gene pool might be a factor but there are at least two other equally important factors:
Children learn values, ethics, and practical knowledge from their parents and, to a lesser extent, from their teachers. This can be done passively, in which case you never know what your kids are really picking up, or actively. Of course, one or two bad peers can really mess up an otherwise good kid...
To make a long story short (I gotta run for a train), don't make the educational system just another scapegoat and assume that the perfect system is just around the corner (or across the border). Education of practial matters is best done in school (any school, really) and at home; education of religious matters is best done in church (or synagogue, temple, whatever) and...home.
#include "cunning_plan.h"
At some point in time (during my lifetime), schools became something other than a place where you learned to read, write, and do arithmatic. They became social welfare delivery systems -- they were public-funded compulsory institutions with high standing among the public (up until the latter half of the 20th century, attending school through high school was an honor and a privilege). Persuing social welfare goals was a "natural" fit for the school system when Johnson started the war on poverty.
Since then, we've evolved to a situation where solving a kid's social welfare needs is both more important than the educational effort and a manditory precursor to any expectation of academic success.
This has left the school system overburdened, both in mission and in mandate, and turned calls for improvements to *education* into left/right battles over social policy.
Social policy needs to be divested from the eductional system. If a child goes to school, it should be to learn the "three Rs". All other problems children have need to be solved outside of the educational system. This is why parents love private schools -- not that the teachers are smarter, but by and large more affluent parents expect less social welfare delivery and the schools do less of it and more teaching, plus it's expensive and they demand results.
I'm sorry that the know-nothings here modded you down as flamebait, but most of us know that you're telling the truth.
Public schools == government schools
No wonder kids come out of school thinking that government is the answer to all of their problems.
It's pretty simple really. Get rid of the public education system. The model of 'public' anything is the highway public restarea. The condition of the restroom is directly related to the owner.
If the restroom is just there because some law says it has to be there, then it will be crap, literally and figuratively.
If it's there because the owner feels a need to provide the service and wishes people to be comfortable then it will generally be excellent. Lot's of creature comforts etc.
Technically it's called the tragedy of the commons, but the public restroom model will do.
Even if McDonalds (low level of nutritional quality that they represent) used the same model as public schools then you would litterally starve, worry about selecting the politically correct food and getting beaten up and then punished by Ronald McDonald for defending yourself.
Of course, everyone would be promised a happy meal. No child left behind.
Perhaps a better model would be to simply let parents pay for education straight out of their pocket rather than having it stolen from them in taxes, the body of educational capital fought over like a second hand rag doll, and then reimplemented (poorly) by a bunch of bureaucratic hacks.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach (mostly). Those who can't teach, teach gym. Those who are in too poor of shape to teach gym, become administrators.
All of the people that could have analyzed the system either became something other than a teacher, or left out of frustration.
In any case, it's not the job of a government to teach people. Think of what you are really asking. It is *not* in the interest of government to deliver high quality education. That is the interest of the parents. If the parents don't care and their kids themselves don't care, who else could make a difference and why should we bother.
Let the free market compete for parent's educational dollars. That way the extreme competitiveness for dollars will yield some sort of bang for the buck.
Those people who don't care, will reap what they sow.
To those who say that very few can afford private education, I would say that economies of scale always make this kind of thing affordable. Hell you are paying for it now. More significantly I'd ask, can we afford the public education system?
For those that truly cannot afford education, if they can justify it (or the student can justify it) we can simply give them vouchers for whatever private school will accept them. No school will be forced to accept anyone.
For those that say that we need a public education system to imbue patriotism, remove religion, or any of a half dozen BS reasons, I'd say that you get to choose your focus --quality, or brainwashing. Education is not indoctrination. Education is teaching people how to refine their thinking processes and show them that they can do a hell of a lot more than they ever dreamed.
Some day, in fact most of the days of their life they will not be in school. If they don't believe in themselves and if they don't have a firm foundation in reasoning without being forced to seek it in an insane system we will have failed as a society.
Solution: Get your kids out of the system. They are not an experiment and shouldn't have to pay the Sissephean price while the social engineers find a fix.
Find a fix yourself. You're an independent human. What are you waiting for?
30 years of socialist vauled pumped into a closed education system with no checks and balances. You expected education in government run daycare services? I was a teacher and I'll never go back, they're (the administration) only concern was enrollment and profit, protecting their own jobs.
Fact: Staffing is based on a student to teacher ratio. In fact democrats and republicans alike try to tell use that the quality of education is directly related to this ratio.
Problem: If this is in fact true then it presents a conflict of interest to the educators as by failing students that should be, they reduce the student population, and thus work themselves out of a job.
Fact: The universities and colleges generate revenue (profit) based on student enrollment.
Problem: This motivates colleges to lower entry standards and retain more failing students in order to retain as much revenue as possible. Special education programs serve as an additional "safety net" to retain students.
Fact: The dollars spent on college and highschool education, and the increases each year, are not porportional to the increase in student grades and drop out rates.
Problem: Teaching, just as many government jobs including law enforcement (including lawyers both civil and criminal), and emergency care (doctors, nurses, emt, fire dept.) have ethically and socially moved from "callings" and "public service" fields into "just another job and\or business." Teachers are no longer motivated by a higher calling of educating people, passing on knowledge, and bettering the intellect of the world. Teaching is now just another job and profession and the quality of the education system as a whole decays relative to that attitude change. If you need an example just look at the legal system's decay including Intellectual Property Law and Tort law. It's not about justice it's about the business of being an attourney.
Fundamental Core Failure in Education
"The fundamental failure of education is the belief that everyone can be saved, that everyone is an A student."
College specifically was to weed out the weakest and graduate the best students. Just because you go to college and do your homework doesn't ENTITLE you to graduate. Look at the graduation rates in history. You were damn smart to get into college (or wealthy, lets be real here) and then to graduate you had to rise to your best. Back then when you graduated college you HAD the skills to work in your field as a professional, now college only offers the entry level requirements. I can't count the number of people that graduate college and I still have to show them how to do their job. They know where to find the information, they know what they need to do once they start, but few know how to apply the shit they learned to REALITY.
Simply put college education was the bell-curve system where only the top students were A students. Students had to compete with themselves and fight to be the best not only in day to day life but in the classroom. That kind of hunger fueled REAL teachers and REAL education. I can quite easily say that I don't trust an A student from Harvard to know his ass from his face. I've worked with hundreds of Ivy league students and countless community college students. They're all equally lazy and foolish in HOW they think. What they "know" means little if they can't apply it.
YOU CAN SUM UP THE PROBLEM AS FOLLOWS:
The current student works with 3+3=?.
Students of oldschool and high quality information work with "Three apples plus 3 oranges equals how many pieces of fruit?" this not only tests wether they know what 3+3 is but also what and apple and orange is as they relate to fruit. Think of current school like isolated weight training versus cross-training.
Make sense? You want to fix education ELIMINATE MULTIPLE CHOICE TESTS AND REPLACE THEM WITH FILL IN THE BLANK TESTS! Force students to think critically and form educated guesses rather then affix them a probability of A-E on a test. Br
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I spent 2 months in Utah as an exchange student and I was really suprised how the American school system is organised.
;-))
I don't consider a school serious where you can pick "making the driver licence", "dancing", "cooking", or any other silly topics as a class.
You should be forced to learn something usefull and the basics of sciences and languages. The university is there for chosing what you want. And you can do the dancing, cooking, and the driver licence in your free time.
Also, how do you want to learn a different language if you change your classes every trimester? That's impossible and I guess that's why most people down there only speak one language. (speak not write...
Some european...
The Sudbury Valley democratic school model, and unschooling.
Or...
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be attributed to a bad compromise.
I beleive from the little information I have seen, that Gatto has correctly identified the historical roots of the current state of affairs, but...
Subrosas has identified why America puts up with what it's got now.
Now, given this, you can twist Gatto's pessimistic conclusion into something more interesting:
To change America's education system, you must change the values of Americans.
As someone who was homeschooled from birth through highschool, I can vouch for the fact that curiousity and learning are a child's natural state. In my experience most of the homeschooled kids I knew didn't think of education as something boring but compulsory, but as a natural and often exciting part of life and play. It takes a concentrated, long-term effort on the part of the school system to to turn something that kids naturally do into something they see as a chore to be avoided. This accounts for the success of families who choose "unschooling" (unstructured, self-directed learning), which according to the conventional wisdom would produce idiots.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
http://bigfiber.net/~the1/incident.txt http://bigfiber.net/~the1/report.jpg
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
The West is being draged kicking and screaming into a religious war with the Middle East dude, or have you not been paying attention?
The fundamentalist nutjobs in America are a large part of who is dragging us into this religious war.
They are not fighting for anybody's freedom. They are fighting to make some predictions from revelation come true so the whole world can go to hell and they can go to heaven beforehand and gloat at all of us heathens who have to suffer through it. Sad how un-Christian an attitude they have. Even sadder they think that'll get them special treatment.
They take as unkindly to unbelievers as the fundamentalist Muslims. We only made it this far because the founding fathers knew how they were and did everything they could to hold them back.
It's sad that so many people want to piss that away now.
I remember growing up and reading Heinlein's books where the US became a religious theocracy and I thought it was ridiculous. Well, it's getting damn close, and that is scary as hell to anybody with any sense.
Name me one time in history where letting the religious zealots rule was anything but horror for the majority of the people.
This is just anecdotal, but the two families I know that homeschool their kids don't have any problems with their kids "interacting" with others or anything like that. One family I know is also a very musical family, their children are not only very well home-educated (just by talking to them you can see they are several "grades" higher in awareness than most other children you meet), they are also accomplished chamber musicians and tour and are actually raking in some dough. With another family I know that homeschools, the oldest boy is big in little league and various sports, seems well spoken and surprisingly politically and socially "aware" of current events, etc, and does plenty of normal kid stuff and has lots of friends, runs his own computer, etc, and the girls help do volunteer work with their church, and the family travels internationally at least once a year to go do missionary work, so they get more "exposure" than most children I know.
I won't say thaese are typical situations, because I obviously don't know all the homeschooled kids out there, but in my circle of friends where only two families homeschool, they appear to have the better educated children and are certainly more "well rounded" than the others who just get a regular local public school education.
I tell all my liberal friends they should read "Beggers and Choosers" by Nancy Kress to get some context on issues like this...
How about we just teach them what is in the Constitution; that all people are endowed with the same rights because they are people. There's nothing inherently Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist about that. It's a humanist philosophy.
In practical terms it means that while he is not required to eat bacon himself, his company does not have the right to declare bacon verboten for all employees.
Unless it interferes with the work the person must do. If a person is a telephone operator, and is eating bacon while trying to talk to customers, they can get fired. If a Muslim policeman wants to go to the mosque five times a day, regardless of what he's doing, he'll get fired for the same reason an armless man would get fired from data entry; it affects job performance.
A Conservative would state it thusly: "Welcome to my country. These are the rules. Play by them and there won't be any trouble. If you don't like the rules, go in peace."
I can't imagine what a Liberal would say, my mind won't bend that far into hyperspace. Probably depend on what day of the lunar calendar it was.
I'm a liberal, and here's what I'd say: "Welcome to this country. It's not mine, but here are the rules we've all decided to live by. If you have a problem with them, you can work to change them peacefully, accept them and abide by them, or go in peace."
You see, unlike a Conservative, I am tolerant of independent thought and realize people should be able to change the rules.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Note that there is no reason why a public school that chooses to comply with the new rules that can get parents to send kids there can not survive.
Here's a draft of a voucher initiative designed to do just that. Needless to say, nobody has tried to turn it into law, the people who want to start voucher schools have NO interest in money with accountability. any more than the public schools want to be held accountable.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Be very wary of those claims that they are not teaching lessons by teaching tests. A couple of coworkers have teachers as S.O. and they will tell you that is how they were "hinted too, told too, etc" to relay this new requirement.
The NCLB program requires schools to PROVE the money the receive is actually producing results and if not it provides a STICK to actually make changes occur. For 30+ years we have been pouring money down the rat hole only to see the separation of test scores stay the same or increase.
No one wanted proof that the schools were failing the students and the last people who wanted that are those that run the education establishment.
Hint: Those running it are not the same ones teaching the kids. (granted you excuse the lifers who can't even pass accreditation tests but keep their jobs because of the union - and you would be surprised at just how many of them are there!)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So instead of looking for a conspiratorial angle, perhaps we should instead examine the context of that long ago period. For example, if that period coincided roughly with the industrial revolution (I didn't pay enough attention in history class, sorry), then it is not hard to see why the early educators chose a curriculum that best enabled its matriculators to participate in that new thing called industry.
Also, I suggest that we all keep in mind that, except for the earliest colonial migrations from Europe, everyone else has been immigrating here to find a job. America is built on the backs of people who came for the sole reason of finding work. Work is ingrained in our bones. So that might be another reason our schools are so job-oriented.
Lack of parental involvement or interest is probably the biggest problem in US public education right now.
Hmmm... I wonder if tax incentives to the parents of children who perform in the top X percentile of their class would motivate parents to become better involved.
Actually, we have a post-industrial economy. In basic terms that means that more of our labor is comprised of skilled labors than the world average. The mindless "mass-production" jobs we outsource to China for a few dollars a day per person.
Open Source Sushi
That is, everyone else is a stupid Walmart drone and yet I and every single one of my fellow slashdotters and slashdottesses are unique and special and bright and have insightful and deeply wonderous thoughts.
So we defund and shut down bad schools in poor neighborhoods. Then what?
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Christopher Lasch wrote about this in 1979 in "The Culture of Narcissism".
I'm sure he wasn't the first.
Nice to see people are finally catching on.
-... ---
how on earth is the idea that schools are not about education but about socialization and control in any way original ? I am sure lots of /.ers could cite the obvious references..
I am a certified teacher as is my spouse; we both have multiple university degrees, and two school age children. I have taught in both public and private schools and found both to have good and bad qualities. I agree fully with Gatto (read his work a while ago) about the purpose of public schools and where they are taking our children, to the factory floor (or lower with off-shoring). In the private school I saw the tuition dollar driving educational and advancement decisions, students advanced because the tuition cheque cleared. If you want to make the most of your student/child's education and give them the opportunity to grow and develop into their full potential remember the following: 1: Parents are the first and most important teachers. Your kids will follow your example; read a book, have a discussion, take a course, learn something new, and do this with them. 2: Know what happens in your student's school (public/private/home); call the principal, visit the teacher, send notes, follow up tests, question policies, etc. Don't let a problem be the first and only reason you talk. 2: When they are in a school you must provide positive support both direct (volunteering) and indirect (reading to kids, having books in the house, shutting off the tv/Nintendo/ps2/computer/etc) participation is paramount. 3: Talk about school with your kids; what did they learn, can they teach it to you? 4: Empower them with their right to a good education, and their responsibilities as a student 5: Take opportunities to expand their worldview; take them out of school for family trips, special events, bonding opportunities. 6: Finally, help them learn to make decisions and then let them make decisions. Yes, they will make mistakes and learn from them and grow... Of course there is much more you can do. If you do some of what I suggest you will be part of the solution. Of course you may drive some teachers and administrators nuts first and your kids will want you to walk way behind them at the mall...
Public or Private its the teachers, community, parents that make the most difference.
School admin, then District probably next.
Money is always an issue but its not a big deal unless there is way too little of it. Money gets mentioned so much because its the only thing that can be controlled.
I went to mostly public schools. Only 1 of them was great. That one is what got me to where I am. The 1 private school I attended was the WORST one. I'm still trying to get those shark-like nuns from my memories...
Private non-religion based schools should be prevented. The article's author fails to realize that private schools could be far worse. The religion ones have their potential problems, but they are fairly safe.
He underestimates the systems ability to change. It can and has undergone many changes. It can be fixed. Most importantly, it needs to be broken from the federal government. My relatives in one of the best public school systems, have been watching it being dismanted over a long period and they would agree on points. But not to go private.
Bush has accelerated the downfall of the public school system; making it more clear what they are up to. Which is why more teachers sound like this guy now. But its been going on ever since forced integration....
Maybe I should put up a rebuttal to this guy? I was considering it weeks ago when I read the article. He is right on many points, but his conclusions are not justified. (what can you expect, he was fired...)
I refuse to send any child to Microsoft's schools, or McDonalds or Disney's schools.
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nt
Why is it that, when *every* other governement monopoly has been replaced by a competitive private equivalent, the quality of the product has gone up and the price of the product has come down but no one is willing to try this with primary education? Where there is competition, costs fall and quality rises.
Also, you assume that the only way to provide education is at the public expense through taxpayer funded schools staffed by so-called "education professionals" and the only alternative is a costly private school. I know of quite a few people who have home-schooled their kids to keep them out of the public school beast and have managed to do so on not a whole lot of money and with extremely good results (i.e., educated, inquisitive kids with independent ideas and without public education scars). Interestingly, this also didn't present a significant time-drain for the parents since a couple of hours of individual, quality instruction each day were more than sufficient to impart the same material that mass classroom instruction required a full day to attempt to communicate. Finally, the kids who have been home schooled also tend to be better disciplined than the public school product since they knew better than to "mouth off" and "goof off" with their parents.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
My wife and I decided to home school after we had moved to the best school system and they damaged my child's love of learning by having her do brain dead worksheets.
There are tons of stories of homeschoolers graduating with advanced degrees before they are 18. I remember one story about a 14 year old girl that graduated with a masters and got a job teaching at a Junior College.
Correct numbers for the amount of homeschoolers is hard to come by. Us homeschoolers don't always register with Uncle Sugar. But it is at lest two percent and could be as high as ten percent. Montana has eight percent registered home schoolers and the true numbers are much higher.
Every family that we know that has pulled their children out of the school system and began homeschool has an improved home life. My two kids love it. My five year old can read Dr. Seuss and my nine year old is doing eighth grade math and she reads a Harry Potter in an afternoon.
But it all boils down to taxation. When we are taxed to the point that both parents have to work to make ends meet, parents have no choice but to enroll their children into the public school system. This is the real reason the Dems are against tax cuts and school vouchers. Both of these put the power of a childs education in the hands of the parents.
I hope that this subject is settled and teachers can start asking the real question.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
Would you people please quit repeating this stupid crap?
Pretty please.
It is absolutely false.
A - without
theism - belief in god(s)
An atheist is somebody without a belief in a god or gods. That's it.
Some people might be more militant about it, but that has nothing to do with what the word means or how it fits into reality.
Everybody is born an atheist. Everybody. The Pope, those people on your college campus yelling at you that you're going to hell, Bush, everybody.
It is the natural state.
At some point everybody who now believes in some particular god was taught about it through some means ( most often their parents tell them it's absolute truth from the time they're born ) and they started believing that that was true.
I personally, have never seen anything to convince me that an all powerful, all knowing creature who is at the same time good is even possible in this universe. If you choose to believe that, then that is your business, but the burden of proof is on you, since you are the one claiming such a thing exists. This isn't to say that you have some burden to try and convince me, just that the fact is that you are the one who is proposing something as true, not me.
In fact you are proposing something as true with zero evidence and a built in requirement that it shall have zero evidence and that it has to be accepted as such.
That is a religion. Not choosing to believe such a thing is in no way, shape, or form religious.
So nobody chooses to be an Atheist (at least initially. Some people have gone back and forth) they just are until and unless they make some other choice.
Do you get it?
Please stop repeating that mindless mantra which has no basis in reality.
27. Education is slavery, it enchains the mind and makes it a resource for class power. When the ruling class preaches the necessity of an education it invariably means an education in necessity. Education is not the same as knowledge. Nor is it the necessary means to acquire knowledge. Education is the organisation of knowledge within the constraints of scarcity. Education 'disciplines' knowledge, segregating it into homogenous 'fields', presided over by suitably 'qualified' guardians charged with policing the representation of the field. One may acquire an education, as if it were a thing, but one becomes knowledgeable, through a process of transformation. Knowledge, as such, is only ever partially captured by education, its practice always eludes and exceeds it. I Guess McKenzie Wark knew something we didn't.......
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
I didn't RTFA, yet, but based on the review inclusiveness isn't mentioned. It's easy to educate the elite very well, but getting a minimal level of education for all Americans has been the battle for the last 150 years, especially for the last thirty years. It's only natural now that we have most people attending school that we can focus on making the quality of the education better. Perhaps no education is better than a mediocre one, but that is a moot discussion at this point. The question is how we go from mediocre to good and then great.
I was homeschooled as well - your misconception about social interaction is the same argument used against homeschooling twenty years ago, and still just as wrong.
Homeschooled kids actually have a healthier level of interaction than kids in public school. We had groups that did things with other kids (such as sports or group classes), but were doing a lot of things that involved more adults as well, like family trips to the musuem and talking to people there. Homeschooled kids actually have more interaction with REAL people than the screwed-up fantasyland that is public school. Would you rather have your kids practice interacting with real adults, or learning to figure out where they belong in the crazy caste system public schools foster? Why waste your kids time and mental energy learning to fit into a system that does not exist from college onward?
Homeschooled kids are the MOST well adjusted people I have ever seen. Just about all of them are more social and outgoing than a lot of public school kids - in part because talking to adults is not an alien concept.
Homeschooling is a great educational option for a child (in no small part because it engages the parent completely in the childs education, which you get in more limited amunts with public schooling), but it requires a lot of time and commitment from the parents. Not everyone can afford to give that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
is the excessive amount of general education American students have to suffer in the later stages of their schooling.
As a Brit, now living in America, I graduated from a British university at the age of 21 having spent 3 years studying almost nothing but computing (my chosen subject).
Having spent a lot of time around American students and "software engineers" just out of school. I find they spend a lot of time on English, History, Philosophy, etc..., and come out of a computer course without a basic understand of how processors work at a low level.
They should, IMHO, have learned enough general education at the high school level to get them through life. The higher levels should be about studying for your chosen career.
You sound like the perfect candidate to read this book. I'm quite fascinated by the direction the discussion threads are going under this review. Some interesting reflections, but what can we really say until we've read the book? If Gatto lives up to the reviewer's opinion, then you'll have quite a treat on your hands!
As a side note, I spent about 5 years working for 2 government agencies, and I've seen first-hand how a system can be designed to prevent anything from being accomplished - even when the participants have a shared goal and the commitment to it.
This is what I don't get:
Being a Christian, I can't bring to mind any passages of Scripture that argue this. It's certainly not one of the extra-biblical elements of Christian tradition. Freedom of religion is a product of post-Renaissance Western philosophy, as far as I can tell; it may be compatible with Christianity, but it didn't originate there.
You
Actually what those people should do is decide if they are going to be Americans or not. If yes, then they should strive to ensure that the American government stays the hell out of the religion business, and the churches stay out of the business of governance. We need leaders committed to the Constitution. What we do not need is a few more centuries of people killing eachother off because their Holy Men got a memo from their imaginary friend.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
Not everyone knows what they want to do for the rest of their life when they are 20 +/- 2 years old and many people won't have the world experience to know their own talents until much later in life. I find the German system particularly absurd since it assumes that such a determination can be made even younger and then you are trapped as either a "professional" or a "tradesman/laborer".
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
So you're saying that those who believe in Christianity (or perhaps Judaism, Muslim faith, Buddhism, etc.?) should be told to "get with the program" and have their freedom of religion stripped from them?
While Gatto doesn't get into religious discussion per se, his criticism of religion is distinctly like that of Nietzsche in many instances. Its been about two years since I have read this book, so I don't have it handy at the moment, but his primary criticism of the new state religion we call "education" was that it was, at its heart, a slave morality just as Nietzsche famously condemned Christianity.
To varying degrees, Nietzsche was also saying the same thing about all the religions you mention.
What Nietzsche and Gatto both have argued is that any moral system which defines one ideal always exists as a tool of enslavement. Whether it is one Jesus Christ or the happy and content student who spends all his time performing ridiculous mental and physical exercises, the end result is the same.
Or should the state declare the official religion as atheism? "You must believe that there is no higher power, and that you are worthless and have no purpose other than a product of the Universe's machinations."
Value is created by human imagination and hard work. The Christian concept of innate value is just as dangerous as the Educational concept of complete compliance. A person is not valuable simply because they exist, nor does following orders mean you are a good person.
Further, there should be different ideals of morality and existence. The artist shouldn't live by the same morality as the warrior or the politician or the farmer. This is why polytheism is so much better than monotheism.
What we need is an educational religion which accepts the many different paths of human existence, and prepares each person for their respective life. The one size fits all approach found in monotheistic religions and our current educational system has been a failure.
2. I submit that if you think religion is dying (especially Christianity), you aren't paying enough attention. Many of those around you are quite possibly of a faith, but choose to keep it to themselves instead of beating it over your head in an inappropriate forum.
It really doesn't matter what people believe in their heads. We are assessing our civilization by their deeds. By any measure, the west has become so thoroughly decadent it is almost comical the vast majority of people belong to an established religion. Religion is dying because it offers nothing of value to people living in our current world. It is a religion that provided a sense of purpose to the masses of slaves and allowed them to feel powerful (since they were BETTER than their masters, due to their suffering in life and inferior status "the meek shall inherit the earth").
I don't read or respond to AC posts
"Welcome to our country. I'm not going to be a wad about your habits and traditions if you promise not to be a wad about mine. In the event one or both of us is an asshat, lets let a majority or some enlightened third party decide which of us is at fault, assign some recompense and get on with our lives."
Of course, as with anything, ymmv and this comes from the moon being at last quarter.
I think this is a pretty strong reflection of why not discussing religion is a problem, and promoting "politically correct" unawareness isn't really a working solution and only seems to aggrivate issues.
Firing someone for eating bacon qualifies one as an asshat. OTOH, having someone flaunt a disrespect for one's religion in one's face is frankly, the act of an asshat classified as insult, and I think the law, media nad general public should stand at about the same place as where an employer is required to take verbal abuse from an employee. Did the emloyer bring this (over)sensitivity to the attention of the employee? Did the employee do anything to acknoledge they understood the employer's issue(s)?
Disclaimer: I know nothing about this case, or the details therein--but it seems to me, that everything in the media is one-sided and accurate about one time in two (my own experiences comparing the journalistic merits revolving a handful of first-hand events) anyhow, so I'm not going to waste my time researching it.
I just can't help but wonder why it is my muslim friends don't care a lick when I eat bacon in front of them or some of my athiest friends don't care when I say "bless you" after they sneeze, and I personally, don't care when my jewish friends wish me a happy chanukah.
Some liberal Food for thought :)
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
but it is in no way a generalization.
Do you know the difference between a hasty generalization and jumping to conclusions?
Hmm
Polititans do not know JACK about education!
We spend more on a prisoner than we do on a child in this country. (its a LARGE difference like 10k)
America is very f---ed up; we have more people in jail than Russia ever did, or anyone else. (I thought they were the police state?) We are building jails at a record pace. I bet we have more prison guards per inmate than we have teachers per student!
Schools are falling apart. Districts are top heavy with administrators.
Reality is we need smaller classes, because there are not enough great teachers who can do well with so many students. Aside from the fact all teachers tend to do better with certain types of kids. More teachers means better chance your kid can find a teacher they click with.
School Districts must be reorganized; if not destroyed. I can not tell you how many times I saw perfectly good hardware being dumped when I TOLD THEM the inner city schools needed it. They can't legally share; so districts trash probably millions if not billions of dollars nationwide!
Private schools are even worse about sharing.
And funding should all be pooled and evenly spread out.
Its not fair that one city gets more money than another one..
Then we can start talking about the complete waste of time high school is...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
she gave her children the freedom to learn and explore their world
Provide the children a solid base to explore from on thier own, where they can make thier own decisions about what is right and wrong, as opposed to...
unfiltered acceptance of life-styles of which she disapproves.
Which can include the concept of "drugs are cool", "drinking is cool", "you have to be pretty or you are nothing", etc - in short, having "proper" lifestyles dictated and forced upon you upon pain of ridicule.
Even the most religious homeschooling familes turn out very strong free-thinkers, not all of them religious or even conservative themselves.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I went to a really good, Canadian, public high school with a lot of really good teachers and a pretty good "advanced" track for gifted students - honours Math, and honours English.
;)
And as your typical Slashdot gifted geek-type, kicked ass even at the higher levels from the advanced track.
(I also took a lot of shop electives, which really paid off in a BIG way later in life... but that's a digression)
Because school was so easy, I got to having a pretty high opinion of myself - which is a nice way of saying I was an arrogant, know it all shithead.
I applied for, and was accepted to, a Canadian Military College (le College Militaire Royale de St Jean), which was unique in Canada in accepting students in advance of their high school graduation - that's right, I joined the Army and went to MilCol at 17, when all my peers were still in Grade 12.
I did this for a couple of reasons. It got me "free" post-secondary education. It made me special. It filled a recruiting officer's quota. A couple of others I'll gloss over.
None of these are good reasons for going, and I was completely and utterly ignorant of both the reasons why these institutions exist and of the ethos of the professional military officer. I could not have possibly been more unprepared for what I was getting into.
Did I mention that CMR was a bilingual institution, and that the operating language of everything outside of classes switched from French to English and vice versa every week? Or that I didn't speak French at all?
So anyway, I dropped into this for all the wrong reasons, and I got the mother of all wake-up kicks to the head. Not only did my private life totally change around, but I was now surrounded by people every bit as smart as me - and more than a few a damn sight smarter. No more special me. All of a sudden, I gotta STUDY. I gotta WORK.
I spent a large portion of the next 4 years in and out of a good bit of disciplinary and academic trouble.
And it was the best goddamned thing that ever happened to me, and I'm thouroughly glad of it.
Suprised?
What that place did - although it took a while - was cure me of of being an asshole. It taught me humility, leadership, and established a personal ethos that I still live by today. (Verite, Devoir, Valliance)
I am a much *much* better person than I was before I went there. The pre-CMR me was a total shithead. Post CMR... less so,
And along the way, I got a decent education and learned to speak French, plus a military career, and the best friends I've ever made.
The media, and especially Hollywood, makes military institutions look like brainwashing hellholes. Nothing could be further from the truth. If I had my life to do over again, I'd go back in a heartbeat - except this time I'd skip all the subversive rebel bullshit and learn what they were trying to teach me.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
IMHO, I think you're missing the authors point.
"The fact is that millions of irreproachably competent graduates, and quite a few phenomenal ones, are coming out of the US educational system. And the Japanese and the German and the Australian and the British and the South Korean and the Swedish and the..."This is exactly the authors point - we get millions of "competent" graduates out of how many millions that are being educated? What's the final percentage? Are we really producing the throngs of Einstiens that they would have you believe? According to the US Census - only 83% of people 18 and over have graduated high school. That number drops to 24.7% for college or higher. Now looking at the numbers for educational achievement marked 29 June, 2004 : we come up with the following percentages:
This means that if we take the cenus estimates for people 20 and over (there is no segmentation for 18 and over) that approximately 12,800,428 masters and doctoral degrees are in the hands of the American people. This is a pretty small number compared to the over all population of 200,948,641 for people over 20. Also consider that this number doesn't tell us the number awarded every year. Indeed, according to the government (ca. 1993) there is a "real crisis in higher education in America." Now if we start to factor in the number of masters and PHD degrees that are awarded to non US citizens we start to see that number shrink yet again.
I think that what the numbers, and this book are trying to tell us is that the educational system is one that perpetuates the myth that intellect is a scarce resource because that perceived "rarity of intellect" is one of the major drivers of the economic system which Gatto is criticizing. We believe that less than one percent of the population has the mental capacity to obtain a doctorate, therefore we make sure that less than one percent of the population gets a doctorate. Our hypothesis is confirmed and we proceed to act as if the experiment was valid and the prophecy non-self fulfilling.
Anecdotaly, I think there is some proof with this. I'm sure everyone has run into the PhD who can't solve a simple problem, or the Masters degreed T/A that doesn't understand the basics, but managed to persevere long enough to slip into a teaching berth at some university.
Granted, this is a "Back of the envelope" sort of analysis, but I think it does point towards that something isn't on the up and up with the educational system in the US.
You didn't say anything different than he, just a little more subdued.
"accept them and abide by them, or go in peace"
Perhaps you didn't think deeply enough to consider he might have been hypothetically speaking to someone at the border seeking entry. In that case, "abide by them" and "if you don't like them" are just instances of tact, not intent.
Or, did you mean, the individual could come in anyway and not abide by them? Hmmm?
Most (but certainly not all) private schools have a per pupil cost much lower than their neighboring public systems, and at least SEEM to produce better results, even comparing apples to apples in terms of student body.
I really don't understand how the same people who decry k12 educational vouchers in one breath are happily choosing to attend whatever college they want, knowing that Federal loans and grants etc. are available regardless of the school you choose, public or private. Why can k12 education operate this way?
Each k12 school ought to be controlled by a board that is elected by the parents of the attending students. They would set tuition, hire the principal(s)/administration, and make school policy. Parents would be free to use the stipend from the state to pay for fees/tuition at any school. Least that's my idea.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
I guess you aren't doing much for the US mathematical ratings, you are comparing apples to oranges. If you compare just percentages, the CIA factbook lists the US literacy rate at 97% of aduts, vs. the 98% figure you gave for Cuba - is that really so different?
In short, if you could fit the whole US population inside Cube the literacy rate would be the same.
Kudos to Cuba for keeping such a good literacy rate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No. To put it simply atheism is lacking belief in God or a deity, and is as much a religion as your dis-belief in the invisible dragon in my garage.
Name me one time in history where letting the religious zealots rule was anything but horror for the majority of the people.
Are you saying that the US is currently being ruled by religious zealots? If so, I don't think you have a very good grasp of what a zealot is. I know, I'm not from the US.
Better in what way? Your other comments would seem to suggest that you see the purpose of religion to be to serve the civilization.
But isn't this the question to be asked of religion: Is it true? Service of civilization should be secondary to truth; besides, building a culture on lies seems counterproductive in the long run.
You assume that religions exist to serve people. But you must see that if a religion, any religion is true, then it must dictate the goals of humanity. Only if religion is false can one say that its purpose should be to serve humanity, and then to observe a religion would be silly.
The central question is one of truth, not of function.
If you're looking for a good example of the right way to teach religion, you should check out the UCSD MMW (Making of the Modern World) program. http://provost.ucsd.edu/roosevelt/mmw/
...Okay, so I lied, I liked it. But it was a ton of work.
;)
;)
Undergraduate general education requirement for Roosevelt college at UCSD. We study fscking EVERYTHING under the sun, and being an engineering student I absolutely hated every minute of it. I value it now though. Perhaps it was more of a guilty pleasure.
It's 28 units of anthropology, a complete history of the world crammed into two years of study. It's very aggressive, but it's also taught very well and could easily be repackaged for high school consumption. Professors come from all sorts of different departments - history, English, theology, philosophy, etc. Oh, and anthropology.
When I say everything, I mean everything. From pre-history to the modern day. IIRC the breakdown is:
MMW 1: pre-history to neolithic
MMW 2: neolithic to classical antiquity
MMW 3: classical antiquity to medieval era (or as Eddie Izzard calls it, the "stupid fucker" period)
MMW 4: medieval era to ~1600
MMW 5: 1600 to 1800
MMW 6: 1800 to modernity
A favorite theory of mine posited by my MMW 1 professor is that agriculture came out of the discovery of grain fermenting on river banks, in other words, proto beer
Another interesting theory is that the "virgin" birth was a mistranslation into Greek - the Greeks didn't have a word for "young girl," the closest thing was "virgin," and that's what got used.
One element of our study of the bible was that of who wrote it - the author of the book "Who Wrote The Bible" is a professor here at UCSD. Very interesting. Turns out there were four authors or so over a period of time, and that the whole thing is very political. Go figure.
The idea here is that this is all crap I absolutely never would have known without taking MMW.
Every major religion throughout time is studied, including the oddball ones - we don't stop at Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. We read parts of the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, all sorts of stuff. We're taught the beliefs and values, and investigate how these have effected history and decision making, why people might be fundamentally at odds, that sort of thing. But there's never any suggestion that something is right or wrong - that much is left to the student, and essays are graded on the strength rather than the slant of one's argument. Professors aren't looking to make students think a certain way, but instead simply to make students think. Far more valuable if you ask me, and what the author of the book in the OP is fighting for.
What makes it even more interesting is that it isn't particularly Euro-centric, and actually, one of the main themes of MMW 4 is the question "why Europe?" After all, China had gunpowder first. We read all sorts of crazy stuff too - Xenophon, Confucius, the salt and iron debate, the code of Bushido, the tale of Maruf the cobbler, Ibn Batuta, Newton, Treitschke, Ike, Hitler, Bob Dylan, and on and on and on. Contemporary accounts of every event we study, as well as op-ed type stuff. Very interesting.
Just don't ask me to remember any of it
I've suggested that the lectures be made available on DVD to alumni of the program...I really hope something comes out of that.
Hey, just because you're statistically more likely to be a freak (as a home-schooled kid) doesn't mean that you as an individual actually are... ;-)
It's about time someone tackled this problem head-on.
I've believed for a very long time now, that America doesn't attempt to educate the way they should. "A" students and students of higher intelligence/intellect aren't weeded out at an early age and cultivated.
Slower students are misdiagnosed as average.
While above-average, but bored, students are misdiagnosed as below average or "slow".
We don't showcase and cultivate A students.
We don't quickly isolate F students.
We breed as many C students as possible, and do what we can to make that "C", that "average", that "normalcy" status, easily achievable for everyone.
We do what we can to make every child...and every parent...feel "equal."
think about it -
How many of you, spent 3 weeks in 4th grade, learning where to place the nouns, the verbs, and the conjunctions?
How many of you then spent 3 weeks, in 5th grade, learning where to place the nouns, the verbs, and the conjunctions.
How many of you spent 3 weeks in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade......re-learning the same thing?
How many of you were bored?
How many of you realized you needed to "brush up" on these skills?
How many of you, who had to "brush up" would be willing to diagnose yourselves as "below average intelligence"?
Its just like dude said in the Hacker's Manifesto - "Yes, Mrs. Teacher, I've done 32 consecutive fractional division problems now for my homework, every night, for the past seven nights......I friggin *GET IT*!"
My K-12 education was a complete and utter waste of time, I could have easily learned in 7 years what I picked up in 12.
And when I graduated and started kickin' it in college dorm rooms with Asian and European foreign exchange students.......I realized just how much education I'd missed out on. I realized how much American History I still *didn't* know, and how much world history I *REALLY* didn't know.
And believe me, it was damn embarrassing.
Kudos to this man, for exposing the red tape mess created by so many school officials scared to tell a handful of soccer moms, "Your child is slow."
What is this post? Like what are you trying to say? I got the earlier ones, but like this one just plain baffles me.
Okay, we're going into a religious war, and i guess we'd know that if we pay attention? To what? The news/government? Yeah, they've been saying that since 1948. So why do you we even have to pay attention anymore? We can pretty much count on a few things: war/terrorism imminent!, environment in danger!/environment in danger?, republican!, democrats!, FTAA meeting--violent protesting from hardline "anarchists putting their beliefs into action" suppressed by courageous action from police, gay rights something/gay marriage?, animal rights something, women rights something, immigration. Personally, I don't think it's worth the attention.
But the last two comments are the ones that I really do not get.
Post Modernist Atheism. I understand that you're just making a term up to give a name to what you attack, but why? Wouldn't just plain "atheism", do? I mean, why do you have to throw that "post "modernist" bit in there? But then you get on with "historically interesting Christians" and how one who practices(???) the aforementioned brand of atheism will need them to fight hard in order for them to continue their practices. So, like, soldiers are equatable with Christians now? And not just any Christians! Historically interesting ones. As opposed to...atheists? who are not interesting historically...why?
I mean, I'm not wholly knowledgable on the subject of global military strategies, but I can also assume you aren't either. And your knowledge that like there's an army of Middle Easterners coming to take over the US unless we can stop them with our interesting Christian soldiers, I find very dubious. Maybe you run in circles with Brzezinski, but, actually, I guess you don't, because even he will say that there's no real Middle Eastern threat, apart from losing it to the Far East.
Anyway, my questions were not rhetorical. So, if you want to supply answers, I'll want to read them.
... is having to carefully budget how many copies she makes over the year. In other words, teachers barely have enough money for paper.
Books used by kids daily don't last long. Many do require revision. Buildings need to be maintained. Supplies need to be purchased. Staff needs to be paid. The ever-increasing population demands more and bigger schools. Classes are too large and there aren't enough teachers or space to allow for smaller ones, or enough money to afford them or teachers to teach them anyway. Never mind the fact that teachers have terrible wages and so-so benefits, much less than other jobs with an equivalent degree of education command.
So genius, did you consider the fact that the reason schools are always asking for money might be because they are already starving for funds? Never enough money for education my ass. I've yet to see a public school that even comes close to having enough money, and I've lived in some pretty rich cities.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
>1) Driving students home to bad neighborhoods after dark.
You are well-intentioned, but insane to do this. You are leaving yourself open to claims of molestation by the students. It is absolutely nuts for any teacher to be alone in a car with a student. This is not a Welcome Back Kotter world. If one of those kids ever gets pissed off at you, you're screwed. It'll cost you six figures to beat the rap, and you will be on unpaid leave with no benefits while you try to do it. Also, any accident is on your own insurance first, then the school's.>2) Creating an extra-curricular dance program that "interfered" with the students curriculum.
Ummm... You did talk this over with your principal before you did it, yes? After all, the principal and the superintendent and the school board are the ones responsible for the curriculum. Were you doing it outside of school hours, or was it taking time away from the approved curriculum. Dance is physical fitness. Did you have releases from the parents for this extra-curricular activity? You could be risking millions in school district money, since LA Unified is self-insured for the first five million of any claim.>3) Attempting to engage students with "dangerous" science demonstrations (i.e. using a bunsen burner constitutes dangerous, using 1 Tesla Magnets constitutes dangerous.)
I'm really sure there is a well planned science curriculum in LA Unified. Lab science claims are some of the costliest I see. I've seen two fifteen million dollar claims in the last three years. That's big money, and worst of all, it's two kids with really screwed up lives (bad burns from a combination of bunsen burner and methanol, both of them.) I have a degree in biology with a minor in chemistry, so I love lab science, but first year teachers doing ad lib Kewl Science scare the shit out of me.>4) Breaking up a fight with my bare hands (I was chastised for "laying my hands" upon the students.)
What kind of training in breaking up fights did you have. There is a lot more to it than just grabbing a kid by the scruff of the neck. I guarantee that LA Unified has a week long training course in dealing with this. Do it wrong, kids get hurt, you get sued, the school gets sued, and worst case, you just dissed some bangers little brother, and your house gets a lot of new 9mm windows. I've got the claims to illustrate all of those.Yes,there are rules. Most of these rules came about because of bitter experience and finding out the hard way what works and what doesn't work. you were a newbie and seemingly lacked the experience to understand why some of those rules were there.
How about:
Let them fail, crumble, whatever. I'm serious. You can't make them learn if they don't want to and their parents dont care either. All they are doing is wasting the resources that should be spent on those families and kids that value learning. The kids that are "left behind" in a voucher system are those that are wrecking the system in the first place, and there is nothing society can do for them, because they themselves don't care.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
i love banans
Thank you for your insightful contribution to the discussion, Ralph Wiggum. You demonstrate the failings of the American education system far more effectively than any book can.
Plus, for some reason I cannot fathom...it's kinda funny...
What astonishes me is that they do not teach LOGIC in public school. This is why the overwhelming majority of people feel right at home with informal logical fallacies. I would estimate that about 80 percent of all arguments I hear (friends, print, tv, etc.) contain at least a one informal logical fallacy. It drives me insane. Call me cynical, but if given a choice between a judge or jury trial, I would choose the judge every time. People always whine about how messed up our legal system is, but it is not the system, rather it is the jury's lack of basic reasoning skills.
So, this book somewhat makes sense. It is easy to control people who cannot reason themselves out of a cardbord box.
"For example, the concept "freedom of religion" is derived from Christianity. Other religious traditions have no such belief."
Sorry to bust your bubble, but MOST religious traditions (Buddism, Shinto, Wiccan, Naturalists, Fillial, etc..) not only have practiced a live and let live standing with other religions for thousands of years, but are also even compatible and intermixed. While I will grant that there are isolated instances in history where particularly imposing regimes have perverted religious devotion as a drive to support their wars, none of them will ever come close to the centuries of hate and intollerance driven by the "Thou shalt have no other God before me" drive of Christianity. It was one of the primary desires for people to move to America in the 16th and 17th century to escape religious persecution because they held slightly different beliefs about "God's message". Even today, the Catholics and Protestants are still bickering on a violent level.
The parent of this whole misguided rant was trying to point out that education should not promote OR DISCOURAGE any religion except to where it would actively impinge on the beliefs of others. There is nothing wrong with praying in school. There is, however, something basically discriminating when a teacher makes the act of prayer part of the class when it is not a belief shared by all the students.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
I had the pleasure of taking my human physiology class from a lady named Marjorie Billeter. She'd just finished up her masters in reproductive endocrinology, and she loved physiology. Really. She'd show up for class wide-eyed and excited about it. It was almost comical! And as she taught the class, she'd get more and more excited about physiology, until by the end, she was talking so fast that it was like trying to decipher a movie on fast-forward. She was honestly like a little kid on Christmas afternoon telling you about all the cool toys she just got. And with her masters, boy, you should have seen what she was like teaching about the phiology of reproduction.
Even better, if you had a question, she took a great personal interest in helping you understand the subject matter. She really, really, loved to teach.
Our university, each year, gave out one award for teaching excellence from the faculty, and one from the student popular vote. The one year that she taught, she won both awards - and it was the first time that had ever happened. This lady taught, and she taught well.
So, what happened to her? The tenured professor that she had been inteded to replace decided not to retire after all, so she got the boot. So long, good riddence. One of the best, if not THE best teacher the biology department had ever seen, and she was just dumped along the way. I can think of at least five of the tenured professers that weren't one-quarter of the teacher she was.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I can say I have been to the far end of the school spectrum and back. But I can say my school district does one hell of a job of educating kids with information and teaching them how to learn. Mabey it's rare, but still, I've had amazing teachers who not only made the material fun and easy to learn (not easy stuff being easy to learn, but hard stuff easy to learn). Do some teach to the standarized test, yes, but many teach around it, instead by laying the foundation of the classes then building up with the test material. Facts and formulas arn't just spitted out for memorization, but explinations why and how and the relation to other material happens all the time.
Ex-Basketball Player
by John Updike
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth's Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps---
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low,
One's nostrils are two S's, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all--- more of a football type.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In '46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points.
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.
Off work, he hangs around Mae's Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Sips lemon cokes, and smokes those thin cigars;
Flick seldom speaks to Mae, just sits and nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I taught in public school for four years fulltime and a year of subbing and such.
Dewey or another one of the founders of our modern education said back in the 19th century something along the lines of "our current goal in education is to homogenize this culture so we do not have a bunch of disparate subcultures that will ultimately break up the Union."
I'm sure that creating a good work force is a part of education's job. I'm not convinced it's being purposefully dumbed down due to some evil mastermind. But I think it's safe to say that education has taken all the various subcultures created by the many immigrants coming to America and has homogonized them into some semblence of a single culture. ie. a common language, etc. Imagine if each little geographic region would've chosen their own language. The part of the country I come from would've probably ended up speaking German or Norwegian! But now, only the old timers have any memory of their mother country. So in that sense, modern education has done it's job well. The union is still together. But obviously we need to make improvements. SATs have steadily gone down since 1970. And now NASA couldn't put a man on the moon if it wanted to as they've lost the knowledge. So we definitely need to make improvements.
I taught math, and what surprised me the most was how little the high school students knew. I was to teach them Algreba and Geometry and such and at least half of them didn't know their basic multiplication tables or know how to do the division algorithim. It's no wonder so many programming jobs get farmed out overseas now. It's cheaper for the corporations for us to be stupid.
To extend an old adage:
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. But those that can neither do, nor teach, cop-out and claim the system is sabotaged, allways has been and is unfixable....
I'd like to thank the author for quitting. The last thing I want my children exposed to is that kind of example from their teachers.
I agree, it is a sad thing that parent's must put their children into public schools, particularly in view of what I've read today. Not because of the author's poorly cited references, or shoddy logic. No because I fear that the author is not the only defeatist teacher out there seeking excuses for his/her failures rather than motivation to succeed. That will damage my children more than any statement made by a coal miner in 1871.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Sorry folks. I've read that thing. That book make a fedw good observations on weak point of the US school system. But aside from that, this guy is a complete utter bullshitter.
His historical excurs is laughably xenophobe and tries to appeal to the ultra right-wing America-Über-Alles crowd that hangs out in places like the FreeRepublic. His comprehension of European history and school systems - on which he bases much of his argument - is cursory at best and full of embarrassing misunderstandings.
But his worst sin is that he does not event attempt present a credible counter concept for universal education. Given that, his counter concept seems to be "abolish mandatory schooling". Since we all fully well know what that means for large parts of the population (substantially worse education than it gets now) this is utterly cynical elitism - "let thet great unwhashed masses go to hell".
Not to mention that quite a number of industrialized nations (not the least of them his despised Germany) have school systems that work quite well and lack most of the weaknesses he lambasts so loudly on the US system.
Any book which makes an assertation about "the American school system" is off the mark from the start. School systems are run locally.
In my area, if I cross the line between Baltimore City and Baltimore County, I see one system where most public schools are failing and one where things are generally ok.
(My bias: I spent K-12 in Baltimore County schools, which gave me a sound enough education to make me a National Merit Scholar and send me off to college with almost a full semister's worth of AP credits. Of couse, this was in the late 80's, and things have probably changed since then, but the impression I get from the kids I work with now is still of generally adequate schools.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I have a few points and a fairly decent position to do so from. In college, we had some good teachers, some bad ones, and some average ones. One of the best, a former IT Admin from a large company with a passion for both teaching and computing (but much less teaching credentials than computing, I believe). One of the worst, a prof who majored in English and non-IT courses and couldn't understand the course well enough to teach it. The guy actually was sitting in on our C++ courses in order to learn for teaching it in following semesters.
Not all people in a given profession can teach it, but not everyone with a teaching degree can teach all courses.
Now, I work (and incidentally am posting from) in schools. I'm a tech not a teacher, but obviously interact a fair bit with the staff and see how things go.
We actually have a lot of good teachers here, but one of the problems I see is that they are overworked and misplaced. You get a guy who is great at teaching subject X also having to teach subject Y (which he isn't great at teaching), because budget limitations don't allow another teacher for Y.
The other thing that astounds me is teachers with poor grammatical and/or spelling skills. Yes, they're not teaching english, but doesn't it set a poor example for students when the teachers can't spell? Support requests have some abominable spelling errors, many which are common (and I believe should be well known to teachers) and others which are just.. well... kinda dumb.
I'm hoping that when I have children ready for school... the teachers will be able to spell, and the "system" will exist to teach rather than sell books and promote cola brands...
This is Slashdot, after all. Many readers are avid supporters of chemical behavioral regulation; prescription or otherwise.
Are you saying that the US is currently being ruled by religious zealots?
No. What I am saying is that there are a growing number of them in positions of power, most notably the Attorney General, and they are actively seeking greater control so they can shove their world view down our throats.
This is a cause for great concern because fundamentalists of any persuasion are extremely dangerous people.
I couldn't agree more. Let's face it, not every kid is going to college. They might not care about high school education and may drag everyone down with their unhappiness about being forced to go to school. I'm not looking down or passing judgement on them. That's just the way it is.
For these kids, there should be an option for vocational schools. They'll learn some useful skills to prepare them to earn a decent wage and maybe they'll be happier not having to be in a place they don't feel they belong. Additionally, they can be taught the basic math and literary skills needed to function in society at their own pace.
Umm, no, Freedom of Religion is not derived from Christianity. Christianity is a triumphalist religion, like Islam. This means that, according to Christianity, unless you're a Christian, you're going to hell. Or according to Catholicism, if you're not a Catholic, or according to Presbyterians, if you're not a Presbyterian... you get the picture.
Christianity now plays nice mainly because it gets beaten up if it doesn't. It wasn't long ago Christians were as bad or worse as political Islam is now. Consider the Crusades, the slaughter of the Cathars, the wars that were sparked by the Reformation, Cromwell, the witch hunts, Northern Ireland, and the list goes on and on. And of course, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...
Ahem... sorry...
What I'm driving at here is that the First Amendment is the separation of church and state, because it means that the state is never to take any religion's side against another religion. A lot of the people who had emigrated to America had already had quite enough of that. I think every child should probably be taught the Bible in school, and the Koran, and the Tao Te Ching, be acquainted with the ancient Greek philosophers, as well as being taught critical thinking, the ideas of the enlightenment, and humanism. But none of the religions would permit their own faith to be treated as just one more color in the rainbow. Triumphalist religions think the have the TRUTH (caps necessary), while everything else is just the opinions of those who don't know any better--or work for Satan.
As soon as you teach religion in school, you have to choose one. The alliance of the faithful will only last until they win. That's when the real holy war starts, between the faiths, and the various forms of each faith. What the Falwells and Robertsons of the world have to understand is that the secular humanists are their best friends. They're the ones preventing the faithful from strangling each other.
And if anyone pipes up and says that science and evolution are religions too, I will have to hurt them.
Badly.
Here in Toronto, and spreading abroad, there is a volunteer based tutoring organization named JUMP Tutoring. (JUMP is an acronym for "Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies".) However, JUMP is not a tutoring organization for the brightest or gifted students, JUMP focuses primarily on those schools, students and communities most in need.
JUMP was founded by mathematician and playwright John Mighton. They have received quite a bit of publicity in local newspapers and, as a result of their highly effective program, are growing quickly through word of mouth.
If you're reading this thread and have an interest in directly tackling the types of problems that Gatto is discussing, visit JUMP's website and read about the program and their results.
For example, a student in a remedial grade 6 class who couldn't count by twos is now in a grade 10 academic program a year ahead of her grade level; an entire grade three class, including several so-called slow learners, scores over 90% on a grade 6-7 math test after less than two months of instruction, and a boy who was failing grade 8 math is offered an academic scholarship and is now completing a PhD in mathematics.
JUMP is a registered charity, and their program is free. Due to the rapid growth they're undergoing and a lack of funding to support the level of interest they've sparked, they do sell a $4.00 workbook for the students. Just about everything JUMP has acheived so far has been done by volunteers.
For the cynics amoung you, yes there are many tutoring organizations and JUMP could be just another. However, as worthless as the opinion of an unknown person on slashdot might be, I think there's much more to their program than most tutoring efforts. The website speaks for itself, and in addition, Mighton has written short book titled The Myth of Ability which is an excellent read.
There is a big difference between believing that religion is losing/will soon lose its dominant role in sociology and believing that religious people should be deprived of freedom or that religion is dead.
I believe, for instance, that Internet Explorer is losing its stranglehold on internet browsing. Does this mean that nobody uses IE now? Nope. Does it mean that nobody should be permitted to use IE? Hell no. It does mean, however, that the current trend points to IE being less important a year from now than it was a year ago.
I recently read The Da Vinci Code. The book is entertaining, but it also gave me one great big A-HA! experience: Namely, that school's main purpose was to destroy me. I might have thought so back when i was 13, but i was one of those teenagers who thought themselves so much better than the system as to be immune. Which was not entirely correct.
But when i think about school - and i didn't have any particular problems which as i know now is a BAD THING - i can only come to one logical conclusion about its purpose: This is, to make curious, creative, lively little children into the mindless worker drones that they will become. By mindless i mean accepting and never questioning society and its order, and as a side, they also deeply ingrain cultural beliefs and a belief system in you that is insanely difficult to get rid of. Mainly, i learned in school how to arrange myself with the system. How to cut a deal with "the Man". Get a house/job/ aspire to make 100k per year, then 200k, have a good insurance, be a good corporate citizen.
Have a family because, honestly, its the only thing that can keep you sane, and besides, the financial responsibility will make you more cautious and therefore more malleable.
School is about making sure you are neither wild nor free.
But who is to say that one parent or another in every family is necessarily a good teacher (or even merely adequate)?
And what of single-parent families -- do you propose a subsidy whereby the single parent can collect a public subsidy to homeschool until their youngest child is old enough for university or the workforce?
One-size-fits-all solutions rarely work.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Stop teaching history?
Creative Demolition
"Anyone can look around the room and see who is not participating."
You mean like when your in the bathroom and everyone is getting high but you? Why is it that religion or patriotism is looked down upon and stopped right away for our own safety but I can't go anywhere on campus without seeing people on hard illegal drugs? It's not just the students either, because our football coach regularly buys his coke from one of the players(also a dealer). It just seems to me people get way to upset about the wrong things...Creative Demolition
Of course it has: Economics is the study of value, a subset of praxeology, the study of human action. No matter what we do, we act based on our values and the relative value we place on the choices available. Prices are really just ways to assign numbers to these values.
To claim otherwise is to hide or obscure the most basic tool we use to make all of our decisions.
... I slung it at my homies at ampfea.org before I even digest it, fully.
...
If that isn't a lesson in the positive side of what we've been able t achieve, un-educated like, in the meantime, I don't know what it is
[note to moderators: take your time, i couldn't give a fuck...]
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I went to public school, and I was bored long before I got to high school. The American education system is definitely designed *not* to do one thing: teach kids how to think.
Too much effort is spent on who, what, when, and where, leaving why and how by the wayside, all the while aiming at the imaginary median child. The below median kids are labeled as ADD or ADHD and pumped full of lithium and/or other drugs (treating the symptoms, not the disease), while those above the median are ignored because no one knows how (or has funding) to keep up with them.
You assume that religions exist to serve people. But you must see that if a religion, any religion is true, then it must dictate the goals of humanity.
But since it's impossible to prove the truth of any religion to the satisfaction of all (or even most) people, religion has no place dictating the behavior of any person who doesn't wish to abide by it.
And therefore, religion has absolutely no business interfering with government, in any form. People have insisted on the contrary in the past, and death has always followed their foolishness.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
People like this, are reasons why i don't have faith in society. I live in a pretty rich neibourhood, but i lerned somthing very important recently : you want somthing, you have to figure out how to get it, and then take it. and if it dosen't seem worth it, you don't want it bad enough.
i really question how these people live with-themeselves, unless your on alot of drugs, any one that can think for themselves will eventualy relize that you have to walk that path, so why not go uphill?
i guess these people don't know any better, or never got a chance too.
some times i hate people so much.
Me fail English? That unpossible.
Maybe noone can eat philosophy, but Socrates was once forced to drink it.
> A Conservative would state it thusly: "Welcome to my country. These are the rules. Play by them and there won't be any trouble. If you don't like the rules, go in peace."
Only old-time Conservatives like you (and like myself).
Sadly the Republican right-wing dictatorial types have hijacked the label to cover these big-government, big police state policies and programs, so that nowadays I'm afraid to self-identify as a Conservative, because ppl misidentify as one of the right-wing fascist crowd (which is far from Conservatism).
If I missed out on offending you here, please reply to this post explaining your position and I'll see if I can write you in somewhere.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Paul Graham wrote an article on the subject, titled Why Nerds Are Unpopular. I find his essay a lot more believable and relevant than this conspiracy-theory-laden underground history mumbo-jumbo (disclaimer: I've read only about 50% of the book, skimmed the rest).
>|<*:=
He seems quite wrong, seeing as the Bible is littered with examples of the "true" religion fighting off false gods (both the Old Testament and the Apocalypse) Add the whole Middle Ages tradition of witch burning and the Inquisition that dealt with non-Christian heretics and the later "saving" of the barbarians in the colonies by converting them to serve "the true God" (more precisely His European representatives)
Heck, even Christianity itself is not one religion - with the first split (eastern/Roman) being so brutal that the two sides outright excomunicated each other, which lasted until very recently.
If you want to see religious freedom, I guess a better place to look would be east Asia, seeing as they actually allowed various religious "flavors" to coexist for a long time. In Europe, religion was an instrument of control, thus incompatible with "freedom" until quite late - we were the cultural barbarians from this perspective, until a larger exposure to non-Christianity (no, Judaism doesn't really count) started to occur in the 19th century.
Another person made a post to the parent of this thread that supports my observation:
wcrowe's comment
(I hope cross posts aren't in poor taste!)
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
As usual, most of you gits aren't even bothering to read the article, much less the book the article speaks of. Here you are, yammering on about methods of teaching, which system of schooling works 'better', and what minor tweaks are needed to the current system to 'fix things'.
Blithering idiots. The entire premise of the book is that the current system doesn't need to be fixed - in fact, it CAN'T be fixed in any meaningful sense. That compulsory education, especially in it's current form, is *in and of itself* the problem. The only way it can be 'fixed' is to dispose of it entirely and replace it with a non-compulsory educational experience, and a varied experience at that. Instead of one choice, dozens, and perhaps different ones for different goals.
All you're doing here is rehashing the same damned arguments that people have been having for the last forty years. But you aren't addressing the real problem in any way: that the system itself is so fundamentally flawed it can only be scrapped, and that compulsory education will inevitably result in this flawed system.
So, try reading the article, then at least a few chapters of the book (if your educational system has prepared you for something more than the print version of a sound bite), and THEN come back for some reasoned commmentary. Until then you aren't discussing the book, just the same old bullshit that's been bandied about for decades.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
"You can take a look around my area and notice that virtually every prominent civic, business, and social leader followed the same track as I did. Bank presidents, mayors, city politicans, state senators, our Congressperson, etc."
I wonder if this has anything to do with the massive pedophile scandal. A prominate feature of the scandal is that for years district attornies, police and politicians would look the other way and cover it up.
The Roman Catholic church has advocated that pedophile priests be tried in secret court trials, an official pronouncement of the pope, and that evidence in America be turned over to the embasy in DC, "because they have diplomatic immunity to protect against that". Lawyers throughout the United States have discovered to their dismay that the Roman Catholic church is using its political power to continue raping little boys. In Boston, the DA asked the Cardinal Law be held because he had two passports, a United States on and a vatican one, and they were afraid he might flee the country with the vatican passport before he could be questioned as has many other priests who have raped little boys. In Oregan, a lawer recently stated that the vatican was trying to subvert the laws of the United States to be under the laws of Rome. 15 states have sued the Roman Catholic church for insurance fraud, and are running into the legal fiction that the vatican, all one mile of it or so, is its own legal country - so much for seperation of church and state - But the Italian authorities have been running into the same thing for years, with investigations into murder, art fraud, bank fraud and money laundering being blocked.
With thousands of pedophile priests known, and the Roman Catholic church known to be engaged in a criminal conspiracy to cover it up, and with nothing yet being done about those crimes, I found the original post a little self serving. Yes, if you want to be part of an elite, but evil, network to promote your own selfish interests, I guess you might go to a catholic school. Of course, you might also get raped. Its in the news every night, just search an online archive if your local news isn't printing it.
God forbid that the religious schools of the antichrist even exist, let alone promoted. Amen.
www.rev14.info
I'm stretching here, but wasn't there some guy shot back in the 1960's? Something about a civil rights movement, has a holiday named after him. Martin Luther Something day?
First bacon, then no Christians at all, then we get down to excluding skin colors.
Try not to be an idiot, won't you?
Its a Western Christian invention, post Bible.
Try reading some Protestant philosophy. Martin Luther maybe. Freedom of Religion in the old days meant freedom to disagree with Rome on small details and not be burnt at the stake for it.
Currently the idea was expanded from that Christian Protestant begining to include the Post Modern freedom from any religion at all its all bad get it off me! type thing.
Basic premise can be found in the story of the Good Samaratin. Men of other faiths can be Godly.
Well, I've never seen a platypus but they exist. I don't know who the hell Charlotte Thompson is, and I'm not going to google her for this.
A friend's wife had a learning disability, and after they discovered it, they had to teach her phonetically (which she'd never learned) instead she'd been taught to recognize the word. I have nephews who have never been taught phonetically.
I don't care if I've misused something that leaks through your tinfoil hat. But if you aren't teaching people to read phonetically, then I assume that to be whole word since how else do you teach it.
Neither does being a self-righteous ass. But, this is slashdot, and we all do it. =)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Stuff like this really burns me...because while they didn't like what you did, it wasn't wrong...not by a long shot... for a matter of fact what the school did by calling the sheriff WAS a criminal act...if the teacher or principle did it knowingly!!! This is the problem with our govt authority of late...you were publicly humiliated, even if you could find out that somebody outright lied it would be swept under the rug as "water under the bridge" but if you got lucky you could get some tenured teachers fired and jailed!!!
Having high level degrees is no guarantee of anything. High intelligence is no guarantee of anything either.
... for long periods of time without working at a "real" job. One guy was doing this for more than 10 years already! A few cases were of guys who were once assistant professors of mathematics at a university, but who were eventually denied tenure and couldn't find another job for many years. For some of these guys, they eventually gave up looking for another job and just sat around all day reading advanced math books while collecting government welfare checks.
I knew of several guys with PhDs in math, who just sit around all day reading books and research papers with titles like: "algebraic geometry", "differential topology", "advanced number theory", etc
The poster boy case of this would be that Unabomber guy, Ted Kaczynski, who eventually became a Montana hermit after quitting his math professor job at UC Berkeley after two years. Another case would be the Fields Medalist (the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize) Alexander Grothendieck, who disappeared one day in 1991 without a trace and became a hermit somewhere in the French countryside.
Perhaps some of these guys have underlying mental problems like schizophrenia, such as Ted Kaczynski?
... but would probably do very poorly as a teacher themselves. My mother was a public school teacher. She got her degree from the same college as I did. I got what is considered by the public as a better degree than she did (her: Education, me: Computer Science) yet what she can do in a classroom is incredible. I taught a couple classes that were targetted to people who wanted to learn computers, Excel, Word, etc. That was difficult with just 2 to 5 people who wanted to learn, try it with 20 to 30. Over her career she taught kindergarten through second grade. I would have no problem sending my kids to a public school in the State of Washington (not DC). The money that is spent per student is a fair amount and the teachers eventally have to get their Masters degree (or equivalent). Washington State is #1 in SAT scores, with Oregon right behind. And teachers do get paid next to nothing. Starting salary is about $25K per year. Yes they only work 9 months, but does your job make you take 3 months off unpaid? Hard to get a summer job teaching when no one is hiring for learning. Yes they only work ~6 hours a day, but there is extra time that they have to put in grading papers and coming up with tomorrow's lesson plan. If you think you can do better, please homeschool, I hope it works out for you. There will be one less parent annoying the teacher that their student is more important than the others. The best thing that parents can do is teach their kids that they aren't special, that they have to earn, scape, and work their tails off to get something in this world. While I don't agree with the Fight Club "you are not a beautiful or unique snowflake", I do think that the world doesn't owe anyone anything; an education is included in that.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Unfortunately, as education is a contentious issue, most of the discussion here seems to be about peoples' experiences with schooling, rather than about the merits of Gatto's book. I have read the majority of the book, and while I believe that many of his first-hand observations about the damaging effects of education gone wrong, or the unreasoning faith in schooling and the expansion of the school system as intrinsic goods, are valid, the argument of the book as a whole (inasmuch as it may be said to have a unified argument) is unconvincing, to say the least.
As has been noted before, Gatto does not cite his sources very often, let alone very well, nor does he contextualize them well enough to convince me that all his damning quotes really are so. He denigrates the failures of modern schooling by holding up such representative examples of unschooled successes as Benjamin Franklin. But worse than sins of omission or proofs by anecdote, the book has two major flaws: its arguments are often self-contradicting, and its attribution of the flaws of the American educational system to the schemes of a cabal of Fabians, Unitarians, industrialists, &c., &c., is ridiculous when viewed in its ungainly totality.
For a representative example of the latter flaw, see the footnote to The Cult of Forced Schooling, at: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16c.htm. It contains the following about Alexander Inglis, author of the 1918 work Principles of Secondary Education:
Is the Inglis bloodline germane to his work as a school pioneer? You'll have to decide that for yourself.
Unfortunately, the book is thick with such allegations. And in making them, it resorts to arguing in the alternative (as I understand the phrase). For example, Gatto describes how the shadowy cabal that shaped American education was horrified by the 19th-century influx of immigrants that would overwhelm America's Anglo-Saxon bloodlines, which were supposedly held to be vital by innumerable organizations devoted to their preservation; yet their solution to the problem, according to Gatto, was to transform these foreigners into docile, worthwhile Americans through the newly forged school system, and to adopt them into their families. If these Anglo-Saxon bloodlines were supposedly so important to the shadowy cabal, and were so vital to the character of their possessors, then why was their solution to try to reform immigrants in their own image (when that was, by the assertions Gatto attributes to them, impossible due to the immigrants' purportedly inferior lineages) or adopt their children into their families (which would presumably 'taint' their bloodlines)? I hope that the evil secret masters of the world really are that confused; if they are, we may have hope after all.
I don't have the time or patience to give a thorough rebuttal to Gatto's lengthy book, nor, unfortunately, have I seen one elsewhere; but I encourage people who are considering adding this book to their stack of evidence (largely anecdotal, I fear, at least from what I have seen [if you'll pardon the pun]) that 'school is evil' to read at least a healthy percentage of it--not just its introduction--and see what they make of its argument(s). In short, the book as a whole is full of tripe; were this to be rendered out, we would have a much slimmer, quite possibly coherent volume, which might be widely read and whose theses might be profitably debated by people interested in ensuring that children learn what they should, in school or outside it. Instead, we have a mass of ramblings that I fear is destined to be cited by the faithful rather than read.
Why is it that no-one can ever discuss education without an huge number of the posts being about how due to the wonders of { "a rigorous Jesuitical education", "a fascinating yet socially integrated homeschooling setup", "a high-school from the wrong side of the tracks with teachers who Really Cared", "nothing but caning, rugby, rowing and Latin", ...} they are now admirable people whose intellect, creativity, success and social grace towers above ordinary mortals.
Something about discussions of education seems to trigger wild excesses of self-congratulation that no other topic does. I suppose it's a pretty easy way to covertly praise oneself, but really....
I presume it's because most of you, unlike me, didn't go to an selective Australian public high school, where the best of the best receive absolutely first-rate educations, while maintaining an astonishing level of intellectual self-discipline, humility and public dignity.
That's right. Gatto has it right. The number one solution is to remove the public schools. They should go. Do you want the government (i.e. Big Brother) teaching you, your kids, and your neighbors? No--It's propoganda they will teach. You will get people who like to think they "think different" but really are clones of the policies of the buerucrats and the powerful socialistic teachers unions.
There is a group that is working for this. Check them out http://www.honested.com/misc/7.php
That the author of the book gives far too much credance/respect to the values and wishes of parents. State controlled education is not bad because it ignores the hopes/beliefs/and desires of the childs family rather it is good precisely *because* it ignores these. Government education is good precisely because it provides a partial antidote to parents inflicting their views, religion or beliefs onto their children. The institution of public educations roll in developing children's independence should not be underestimated.
Moreover, speaking as someone who does and teaches math for a living, many very important skills for modern life simply *are* boring for most people. I'm entierly behind any plan that stops school from crushing the spirit, especially of those who would otherwise turly want to learn but I simply don't see how these things can be taught without a similarly regimented system. Some kids will pay attention if you explain in a creative, interactive way but what do you do with the majority who aren't interested?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Last week I was reading C.S.Lewis' The Screwtape Letters (1942(?)). For those of you unfamiliar with it it's a wonderful series of letters written by a demon to his nephew concerning how to best lure a soul away from "The Enemy" (God) towards "Our Father" (The devil). The ideas C.S.Lewis lays down in this book are very thought provoking and mature, but it's not written to be difficult to understand; i.e. the "letters" are not dry and erudite theological essays but very brief, very entertaining, and simple essays. I found one letter particularly insightful and copied it for a few of my friends. They are all college graduates. They are all middle aged. They are all professionals (DBA's, SysProgs, MBAs). They all failed to get past the second sentence. One yelled at me for giving him something incomprehensible. One wadded the paper up and (playfully) threw it at me. My wife called me an elitist. Not one of them was able to comprehend the one page passage.
I am not an elitist.
But I have come to realise that not a one of my friends, my peers, (indeed no one I personally know) are able to read Dickens, Twain, Scott, or Hardy; much less Shakespeare, Marlowe, Goethe, or even Conrad.
I don't want to be an elitist - but this is very frightening.
For decades parents were actively discouraged from participating in their children's education, and were told that their only welcome contribution was to join the PTA and send money. The modern secular homeschooling movement, which was essentially founded in the early 1970s, was at least in part a reaction to how incredibly disenfranchised parents were then.
Please remember that was the day and age in which people we're only beginning to ask for "second opinions" in doctors' offices, and that was controversial, because doctors were "professionals" so you were expected to passively receive their commands. It was the same with teachers. Patient activists used to accuse doctors of "playing god" when they treated patients like that, making decisions for them, not letting them make their own decision. Well, back then, the teachers were "playing god", too.
I'm talking about parents being told that reading to your kids will delay their learning to read. I'm talking about parents being told not to help their child academically in any way, or otherwise "interfering" in their kid's education. I'm talking about parents not being allowed to observe the classes their kids are in, even discretely. And most certainly you didn't get any say in what education your kids got. Your kid with a four digit IQ got assigned to the "red chairs"? To bad, try another lifetime.
So excuse me if I'm a little exasperated at modern complaints about how parents -- who, in their own childhoods, their parents were not permitted to participate in their own education -- are so little involved in their kids' lives and education.
The school system is just reaping what it sowed.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I agree, in some sense the education system crushes the life out of students, especially the brightest and most curious ones. However, this isn't the right question to ask, rather it is can another system do better? In particular I am open to the possibility of reforming the method of teaching in government but parents or parentally choosen agents are bound to be even worse.
Nothing threatens to stamp out the interest in learning in a child to be forcefed the same beliefs and superstitions as their parents. At least school as it stands now allows students contact with the wider world. Any attempt to disassemble government schooling would likely degenerate into specialty religious schools.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Note that "competition" is between producers, not between a producer and a consumer. The producers vie to better provide what the consumer desires. Meanwhile, consumers compete (bid) for the limited capacity of the available producers. "Cooperation" is between the producer and consumer. A "price" occurs when all these forces are in balance. And the many actors may each agree on a different price for each transaction.
As business pushes ever harder to own all IP, the availability, even the existence of an intellectual commons come under greater and greater threat. This is just one of many places that a our current social trends indicate grave consequences for the future of liberty, and human self dertermination.
True, but this is an independent issue. The property rights historically defined around IP are in conflict with current information techology and create a host of unnatural stresses.
John Taylor Gatto makes some good points but lacks an understanding of the real hidden influence on Education and the technology that can be used to combat it. This is much more evil than it looks at first glance despite the best efforts of educators.
The problem:
http://www.cchr.org/topics/educators/index.htm
The answer:
http://www.appliedscholastics.org/
An example:
Taken from http://www.appliedscholastics.org/teach.php
TEACHING
If one wishes a subject to be taught with maximal effectiveness, he should:
1. Present it in its most interesting form.
a. Demonstrate its general use in life.
b. Demonstrate its specific use to the student in life.
2. Present it in its simplest form (but not necessarily its most elementary).
a. Gauge its terms to the understanding of the student.
b. Use terms of greater complexity only as understanding progresses.
3. Teach it with minimal altitude (prestige).
a. Do not assume importance merely because of a knowledge of the subject.
b. Do not diminish the stature of the student or his own prestige because he does not know the subject.
c. Stress that importance resides only in individual skill in using the subject and, as to the instructor, assume prestige only by the ability to use it and by no artificial caste system.
4. Present each step of the subject in its most fundamental form with minimal material derived therefrom by the instructor.
a. Insist only upon definite knowledge of axioms and theories.
b. Coax into action the student's mind to derive and establish all data which can be derived or established from the axioms or theories.
c. Apply the derivations as action insofar as the class facilities permit, coordinating data with reality.
5. Stress the values of data.
a. Inculcate the individual necessity to evaluate axioms and theories in relative importance to each other and to question the validity of every axiom or theory.
b. Stress the necessity of individual evaluation of every datum in its relationship to other data.
6. Form patterns of computation in the individual with regard only to their usefulness.
7. Teach where data can be found or how it can be derived, not the recording of data.
8. Be prepared, as an instructor, to learn from the students.
9. Treat subjects as variables of expanding use which may be altered at individual will. Teach the stability of knowledge as resident only in the student's ability to apply knowledge or alter what he knows for new application.
10. Stress the right of the individual to select only what he desires to know, to use any knowledge as he wishes, that he himself owns what he has learned.
-- L. Ron Hubbard
As an atheist, I deeply resent being called a Post-Modernist - the two belief systems (although calling Post-Modernism a system is probably a stretch) have nothing to do with each other.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
History doesn't change, its sort of written in stone
Whoever told you that wasn't a historian. The facts remain more or less set in stone as you said, but the interpretations change about once every ten years, as little details come to light. Overall I agree, however. For the most part primers shouldn't have to be changed out that often. Fundraising and all of the other monetary concerns were rampant, and yet the school spent 80,000 dollars of mysterious money to but a press box for the football team. (Oddly enough, a similar amount of the special education budget never got used for anything and kind of seemed to never exist. Hmmm...)
Textbooks aren't the real concern, anyway. The grandparent poster seemed to kind of go on a rant about how people equate education with money. While this is a primary concern of schools, they are still trying to provide some result. They haven't gotten *that* transparently greedy yet. The problem is exactly how they should go about educating the populace when the original design of our school system wasn't really to educate. The money thing is a side note to the whole affair, and really reflects a growing problem in American culture today - money has become more important. Than anything.
-1, "1337" speak
I graduated from High School with a career 59% grade average. For those of you who didn't go to school in New York, that's basically an F average. I was awarded a diploma because I passed all of the required classes, barely. The conclusion you might come to is that I hate learning. But you'd be wrong.
For someone who loves to learn, school is the absolute worst enemy in this regard. In my case, I would cut school simply to hang out in the library and study with notebook in hand. School is not about learning, it's about control, purely and simply. Some teachers could recognize your interests and help you along, but these teachers were so rare and could only do so much.
I never did go on to college. I never even took the SATs. I regret nothing.
One thing I said to myself then, which I say to myself now, is that the beaten path is the easy way out. Down that road is what everyone else has. A 9-5 job with unpaid overtime, living for the weekends, and genuinely being told what to do throughout life hoping that someone will someday appreciate your obedience and throw you some scraps. Public schools train you to fit in this kind of life. In my opinion, that's not life. I don't know what it is, but I can't imagine calling it life.
You can take away my car, house, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, heaven forbid even my high school diploma, but as long as you haven't taken away my ability to think, I can still survive and I can still be happy.
Like they said in trainspotting (but missing the point entirely): Choose life.
Exactly. He believes in what he's writing enough to make it available in any number of ways. I admire his dedication. I would have admired it even more had he put his writings up under a Creative Commons license, but that's picking nits.
However, as far as his pedagogical views go, I think he needs to take a closer look at what John Dewey was saying and what Progressive Education was all about before spouting off on it. True, he's not as bad as the guy who wrote "Why Johnny Can't Read" but he needs to examine it closer. The trouble is that more people know Dewey from "Why Johnny Can't Read" than any other source.
I've seen Progressive Education in action. There is a great little school in Van Nuys, CA called "Children's Community School" that follows concepts of Progressive Education, and after observing there I can see that they get closer to what really needs to be done in both public and private schools than anything I have observed at LA Unified School District. When "No Child Left Behind" ends up leaving an entire generation of students behind, maybe the untried solution of trusting teachers to teach and trusting students to learn might be finally taken seriously.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
In most places this is illegal, thanks to the power of featherbedding labor unions. They are responsible for the minimum-wage laws, and hence for high unemployment among young and poorly educated people. They DEFINITELY don't like competing against volunteers or unpaid apprentices.
The Democrats are so in hock to the unions for manpower and money, they ignore the fact that unions regularly shit all over the most marginalized workers in our society, and destroy the impulse for volunteer civic betterment.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Those 6 points were interesting, but point I got from it for public schools was something like - You should try to make a system to work that isn't inherently working anyhow!
No, anybody tries that in the public school system is going to find that the harder they try and the more they care about kids, the more they will be punished. This is exactly the kind of accountability we don't want.
When I was a kid, I always wondered why it cost less per student to send me to a prestigious private prep boarding school ranked near top every year then it did the state to send all those public school kids to gettho high in LA. This guy hit it right on the head - the public school system is inherently anti education and the only real solution is to shutdown the whold goddam thing so something real can take it's place.
This would be a great fact to toss out when trying to convince someone that schooling is unnecessary.
Sounds somewhat flippant.
But where does this statistic come from?
This is a time-honored and illogical method of asking someone to provide their own straw man. The "statistic" comes from the book being reviewed.
Citing a source is one thing. Requiring every statement to be accompanied by a corresponding statistical justification or published study is invalid, illogical and unsound argument.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Perhaps some of these guys have underlying mental problems like schizophrenia, such as Ted Kaczynski?
Maybe, just maybe, they're not crazy. What if they figured out something that the majority of the rest of the monkeys didn't? I know plenty of times I want to just dissappear. Though I would rather pick something ala Thoreau, but I still want fiber to my cabin.
No, I think he's right. You don't understand what a zealot is.
A zealot is a guy who will fly an airplane into a building for his faith, or blow up a school gym full of little kids. We don't see that much around here.
Ashcroft is a guy who has beliefs you don't agree with, and is not concerened that you disagree. That's not a zealot, that's a guy with some steel in his spine.
"Or, did you mean, the individual could come in anyway and not abide by them? Hmmm?"
Yeah, he meant that. Not his country, remember?
And he will keep meaning it until some imported bad guy decides not to follow the rules and blows up people in HIS town. Then it will be different.
The US educational system has its problems = primarily in that it tries to dumb down education a lot - this is particularly evident if you compare the standards of education against those available in parts of Asia like Japan, India etc..where the syllabus, on the average, has a much higher degree of difficulty.
However, the US educational system has one killer advantage over many of the Asian systems in that it allows high achievers to advance very quickly..for instance, a particulary bright student can skip grades and finish school much quicker than the rest of the class.
As far as I know, this doesn't happen in places like India where no matter how good you are, you advance at the same rate as the rest of the class.. skipping grades is very rare... and also schools and colleges strictly enforce age restrictions.. For instance, you cannot join the undergraduate programme in the Indian Institute of Technology if you are older than 18/19 (I forget the exact age) or less than 17.
Also, in Asia, scholarships are much harder to get.. unlike in the US where the bright kids will get these scholarships and advance into highly rated colleges... and the US colleges are definitely some of the world's best.
So yes, the US educational system has its problems but the situation is not as bleak as people would have us believe.. a bit more emphasis on increasing the depth of each course of study will definitely help cure some of its ills. Also, there must be a greater emphasis on teaching about the rest of the world as well - my experience has taught me that many Americans have very little knowledge of anything outside their own state or nation.
Probaby a bit off-topic, but Ivan Illich has some interesting thoughts on the educational system.
h ooling.html/
http://homepage.mac.com/tinapple/illich/1970_desc
Atheism is defined as no belief in god.
It has NOTHING to do with religion.
It is a single belief; and therefore can not be a religion.
There are many religions that do not have a god; or at least view the existance of god as irrelivant to their religion and therefore do not even take a position on an issue not relivant to their system.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
End the Government School Monopoly
The public school system was created to insure that no child goes uneducated due to lack of financial means. That admirable objective does not require all publicly funded schools to be owned and operated by the government, however, just as food stamps can prevent starvation even though the government does not own and operate a huge chain of grocery stores (at least not in the USA). Food stamps are given directly to the beneficiary, who then decides where to spend them, whereas public funding of elementary education is currently permitted only at government schools. Why the difference? The answer is painfully obvious: as long as most parents are unwilling or unable to "pay twice" for a private school, the government schools can be used to indoctrinate their children against their will. After all, many "liberals" believe that traditional religious morality constitutes dangerous bigotry that children need to be inoculated against.
Public funding of elementary education has the effect of transferring funds from wealthier families to less affluent families, but average families will break even, more or less, paying about as much in taxes toward education as is spent in their behalf for educational services. For those average families, the net effect of the government school monopoly is that the government takes money away from them in taxes, then gives it back in the form of benefits -- but with a huge string attached. The government takes away money that could have been used at any school, public or private, then it gives the money back, but on the condition that it can only be used at a government school. It all boils down to a perverse money-laundering scheme in which parental choice is washed down the drain.
The transfer of funds to lower-income families could be accomplished, without sacrificing parental choice, by simply giving parents vouchers and letting them choose for themselves where to send their children to school. The vast majority of underclass families prefer this approach, yet liberal Democratic politicians vociferously oppose it, and the teachers unions characterize it as "radical." They think they know better than parents what is best for their children. Of course, the fact that the Democrats receive huge contributions from the teachers unions is a major factor. After all, neither Bill Clinton nor Al Gore would dream of sending their own children to government schools, yet they arrogantly insist that those schools are good enough for the rest of us. (The excuses about security beg the question: why are private schools more secure than public schools?)
Opponents of school vouchers contend that they violate the First Amendment by allowing parents to spend public money at private religious schools. The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing an official state religion, but it also guarantees religious freedom. The notion that letting parents choose religious schools somehow constitutes the establishment, or even endorsement, of a particular religion is patently absurd, as the Supreme Court has recognized. A much stronger case can be made, in fact, that it is the current system that violates religious freedom by stripping parents of their religious educational options unless they are willing and able to "pay twice." It is the current government school monopoly, not a voucher system, that violates the First Amendment.
Another phony argument used against school vouchers is that they would divert funds from the government schools and cause them to deteriorate. It is true that vouchers would divert money from government schools, but they would obviously also divert the responsibility to educate children. Vouchers are virtually always worth less than what is spent per student at the government schools, so the net effect is to increase the spending per student at the government schools. A typical elementary school might spend $7000 per student annually, for example, and vouchers might be available for up to $4000. That leave
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
That's about what I expected. Let's up the ante then, and ask if you are prepared to countenance honor killings?
Many cultures (not just Muslim, kids)hold that it is acceptable for the parents of a female child to kill her if she brings dishonor on her family. It is in fact codified in the laws of many countries.
Does your multiculturalism stretch that far? If not, why not?
Parent to my comment was:
"The West is moving on past Christianity. It's interesting for historical reasons, nothing more."
Which is patently false and frankly silly. Hence my post.
More sense now?
"no religion in the schools" being touted by people for the separation of church/state is constantly being taken out of context and used to bash the position these people defend.
Straw Man falicy. heavily used to get people emotional and irrational on this topic.
They are not fighting to kill religion. They do not support prohibiting religion; they take their position on the principle that people should be free.
Funny to watch two sides that basically have the same principle in common disagree over it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Anyone get a hint of anarchism from the article?
Don't think it constitutes a religion. I think he chooses the wrong words; most of them being charged words; as the posts here prove---especially with the word religion.
Its a belief. not a religion. conformity and blind adhearance to law and authority. Viewing authority figures with an idealistc parent-like respect is something they do put out. (but some of that stuff is also in private schools)
As our government gets closer to despotism, schools of any kind will turn out more drones.
How many people who suck EVER realize its their own fault they were fired? How many are surprised when they are fired?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I first heard about it on /. and it led me to read Gatto's books.
Any public school building could become a sudbury education environment, and all you need to do is retrain the staff and win the blessing of the community.
No class, no requirements - just free time, resources, and a knowledgeable staff. Trusting the students to make mistakes. Sudbury.
Sudbury Network
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
An even better refference is the Treaty of Tripoli, drafted under the first US President George Washington and ratified under the second President John Adams. The Treaty of Tripoli reads in part:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion
This Treaty text was not merely approved by the senate, it was passed by unanimous senate vote. The full treaty is about 2 pages long and was published in several newspapers for public consumption. As far as I know there is absolutely no record of public complaint anywhere in the country.
Try passing such a text today and all hell would break loose. Sigh.
Most of the Founding Fathers were religious, but hardly Christian. They believed the best way to protect personal religious freedom was to deny the government any "religious freedom" itself.
Over a hundred and fifty years later, during McCarthyism paranoia, the US Pledge of Allegiance was changed to add the God refference, as well as to US money.
As the Christian Bible says: "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Interestingly Jesus was specifically reffering to government coinage being "Caesar's", and obviously pledging allegiance to a government is "Caesar's" as well.
It is not a restriction of people's religious freedom to say that the government has no place to establish religious declarations. The Founding Fathers knew this, Jesus knew this. National allegiance and national coinage, these things are Caesar's, render them unto Caesar. Return to our Traditional Pledge, return to secular coinage.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The primary definition of "mythology" is "a body or collection of myths belonging to a people and addressing their origin, history, deities, ancestors, and heroes." (ref).
The primary definition of myth is "A traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals of society".
By those definitions, almost any religion, dead or alive, is mythology, since almost any religion refers to myths.
Since mythology can also be "the field of scholarship dealing with the systematic collection and study of myths", then, in a real sense, Biblical scholars are mythologists.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I suggested that God was added to the Pledge and to money during McCarthyism, actually God first appeared on money in the late 1800's. It crept in not through congressional action, but through a back-door administrative manuver. However the Pledge part was indeed correct. Our Traditional Pledge was altered in the 1950's.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The only thing that they required was that people also worship the Roman Gods, as well (and, sometimes, the Emperor).
This was no problem with most religions of the time (as most of them were pantheistic), but it came up square against followers of the Jewish and Christian religions, whose beliefs forbade them from worshiping any god other than Yahweh.
Even taking the Jewish/Christian problem into account, though, Rome was more tolerant of religious freedom than Christianity was and is through most of its (Christianity's) history.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Heh. First time I read any of the Bible in depth was at University, in Literature Class.
My end of year essay was on the use of humour in "Genesis".
It didn't seem to piss anybody off, or even strike anyone as paticualarly controversial, but then I'm living in Britain, possibly the most secular society in the world, for which I thank the Lord.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
Not very bright, are you?
Happened several times in my small hometown, also in nearby ones. The reason that it hasn't happened in say, LA or NYC, because there never were small little functional school buildings to tear down and waste. You still haven't read the book though, have you?
Seems your biggest problem is "haven't RTFA". Who's trolling?
Read the book. Gatto makes the case, that yes, the waste of usable buildings has ocurred nationwide. Should I repeat the effort? Should I paste a chapter long excerpt? Did you even bother to check if there were such a chapter (which would be the least you could do... obvious you're another retard who likes to comment without RTFA, as it were) ? I'm not a statistical methodologist, I couldn't prove his numbers in a way most would accept, if I wanted to. But I can confirm anecdotally, that at least where I'm from, it happened not once, but twice.
As for your other "minor" points, I never said that 1% is the perfect ratio. I said it wouldn't be a bad goal to work towards though, considering that there are more non-teachers than teachers. You seem to believe though, that layers of non-productive bureaucratic fat are good, or at least necessary. You know what, if possible, I'd settle for a reduction from 51% to 25%. No reason to stop there, though.
My bet was "how much do you want to bet that schools use 75% of their copier paper for memos and internal office use, as opposed to assignments and handouts for students?". I've now made it as clear as I believe possible, if you still don't understand it, too fucking bad. The number is an exaggeration (I'd be shocked myself if it literally hit 75), but what if it's just 60, or 52%? What if it's only 41%? Aren't those a little high, just so that some bureaucrat can "manage" his little flock of teachers?
I don't take everything Gatto has said as gospel. Rather, he said things that were obvious, that in part I knew before, only confirming what was hard to deny. Before, it was possible to believe that maybe I just had incredibly shitty luck, Gatto says it's happening everywhere.
I do have problems with some of the stuff he says. I don't like the tinfoil hat guys myself, and I don't believe that the trilateral commission assassinated JFK on orders from templar knights against the wishes of a Roswell gray in a tank of fluid who's been secretly been giving advice to Alan Greenspan (for example). However, Gatto, throughout his entire book, is *constantly* saying "this isn't necessarily the work of a conspiracy" and "don't think of this as a conspiracy" and other stuff... as if he is deadly afraid of being one of the tinfoilhat guys I've attempted to describe.
It is both a little eery and little discouraging that he continues like that, through much of the book. But then, you have no clue what I'm talking about, since you haven't RTFA.
Research has shown that if there is more than a marginal gap in ability or achievement students do not benefit from being mixed.
First, they don't view the more advanced students as role models, but rather someone in a different league.
Second the advanced students often end up doing a greater share of the work, sometimes their classmates work too. And they often wind up pigeonholed as tutors. A job which doesn't challenge them, and for which they have little pedagogical experience.
Mixed ability classrooms can be considered harmful to all parties when the difference in ability is significant.
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari
Sorry, but freedom of religion has nothing to do with Christian beliefs.
It has everything to do with the persecution of the Protestant/Puritan breakaway groups in
England & France. The predominantly Roman Catholic guys in charge (Kings, Popes etc)
were very busy locking these guys up & worse
This is why many of them left for the new world.
That is why your constitution makes very specific statements about religious freedom. The wanted to make sure that they never had to go through that again!
It's also worthwhile remembering that this was basically an argument between Christian sects!
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
Or bomb two whole countries back into the stone age?
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
No Social Skills!
------"Shut up before I intubate you!"
Ashcroft is a guy who has beliefs you don't agree with, and is not concerened that you disagree. That's not a zealot, that's a guy with some steel in his spine.
Wow, your delusions are showing through.
Ashcroft is a guy who is so concerned about naughty words and pornography that he will pull justice department resources off of terrorism investigations to harass people for smut and swearing, thus helping to allow the 9/11 attacks.
That is blind ignorant zealotry to put any resources into dirty words when everyone and their mother was telling us the attacks were coming.
Steel in his spine my ass. He's a coward who has a very hard time dealing with the fact that there are people who are allowed to believe differently than him.
A zealot is a guy who will fly an airplane into a building for his faith, or blow up a school gym full of little kids. We don't see that much around here.
Not so much recently, but don't kid yourself that Christians are any better than that. They have used similar tactics for thousands of years.
Kuro5hin: Here
And the book text is Here
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
One more thing to think about...
The school didn't bus. We had no bus. Kids came from all over town, from all over this area of the state. We weren't the only show in town, we were had sister schools that had the same policies.
What exactly does "came from all over town" mean? Did they fly in? Did they ride their bike 20 miles? Probably not. This indicates that they were driven. I hate to break the news to you, but many of the kids in head start's parents couldn't afford to send their kid across town, because they didn't have cars. You are bragging that you didn't have a bus. Don't you understand? A bus is how poor people get around. Most of them don't have cars. Second of all, any parent who drives their kid halfway across town cares quite a bit, and is willing to go to considerable expense to get their kid to school. There are poor people with this much motivation, but unfortunatly many of them don't have the means(i.e. a car). And, even less fortunate, many poor people don't have the motivation to send their kid halfway across town. That was my original point, was that the kid in head start actually had it pretty good compared to some kids, whose parents may not see any value in education. When people are that poor they tend not to have a lot of hope, and often times will blow what little money they have left on vices. Finally, I would be surprised if a completely destitue area like East St. Louis, MO, could support a school like yours. So, that would end up creating a large geographical area that extremely poor people would have to traverse in order to get to your school. While it might be possible for a working class guy to drive his run-down pickup truck to the school every day, it's a different story when a family can't even pay rent, much less afford a car.
Maybe they should have had you guys do service projects, then you could have seen first hand what I'm talking about.
A post like this is almost worthy of Mark Twain.
I got a laugh thinking of this one. I'm just trying to imagine what would happen to my Catholic grade school if it were transported to East St. Louis. Now, you would keep the surrounding community exactly the same, spend exactly the same amount on security, etc. Force them to let everybody in, just like the public school. I'm just wondering how long it would have taken for the school to get covered in grafitti, and burned down. How long would it take for the nuns to flee the area back to the nice suburbs. How long would it take for the budget to be broken in an attempt to educate problem children.
I think that what private school advocates would learn from such an experiment is, "Holy Shit! Educating poor people is expensive." Communities that are poor tend to have a lot of anger over the way their lives turned out, and that anger tends to get taken out on things that are seen as being too clean, too perfect, too elitist. Many of the worst students cost ten times as much to educate as the best ones. You can sit me in a room with a book, I'm cheap. A kid that's suffering from malnutrition and from child abuse is going to require a lot more resources. That's why I get so annoyed when people mention that their test scores were higher, and they did it at a fraction of the cost. This is what you SHOULD expect. Better students are cheaper to teach. One mentally retarded student can set your budget back by an astronomical amount, and pull your test scores down quite a bit also. Not mention violent kids, who might destroy property, or need psychiatric intervention. Even the most subtle forms of discrimination, even geographical, can have a huge impact on a school's bottom line.
The other problem with violent kids is that they frustrate many teachers, so that you have less teachers that you can pick and choose from. This also gives private schools an edge. There is a reason that they are willing to work for less at private schools. The important thing to keep in mind is that many of the behavior disorders are not the kid's fault. A lot of them come from broken homes, suffer severe neglect, aren't fed a proper diet, etc. Again, dealing with this is EXPENSIVE. I saw this at the head start that I worked at. And remember, these are the ones that come from relatively good homes.
Treating a school like a business is a great way of ignoring many social ills, shirking our minimal responsibility of at least attempting to provide equal opportunity, if not equal outcomes for equal effort.
In my humble opinion this is an important book. Please read it. Mr Gatto states that the purpose of American education (and perhaps much of the education that happens on this old planet) is designed to "dampen" the intellect, spirit and humanity of people. It is in fact, an assembly line approach to humanity. Mr Gatto writes about the "empty child" and the stuff that s/he is filled up with. (I know I ended this sentence with a preposition...sorry.) This stuff is supposed to snuff out the dreams and replace them with "reality". He notes that the educational system (not the teachers, not the schools...but the SYSTEM) is set up to destroy not enhance intellect (I mean thinking and problem solving skills). The statistics he cites on the decline of literacy are frightening. Literacy has dropped so much in less than a hundred years. Education has replaced learning. Learning is a natural part of life. Learning is how we survive. But I disagree with him on one point. I believe that this has been done deliberately. I ask again, please read this book...the text is online. We're all individuals here. (quoting Life of Brian) Thanks for your attention. LadyMary
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Conservatives generally don't believe that government should interfere with a company's hiring and firing. Even if you think, as conservatives do not, that government should force an "equal opportunity" policy on private employers, that does not imply that employers can't regulate their employees' actions while at work.
There's a difference between firing someone for who he is and for what he did at work.
Their argument? "Well, he came to school, so you can't fail him."
Judge: Bailiff, after hearing the plaintiff's argument, please go over there and kick him right in the ass.
{boot!}
{ouch!}
Judge: Next case!
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
As long as we have a government that puts their pocketbook before the people NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE!!!.
Back on-topic, I think what we will see in the future is groups of people getting together to hire teachers for their kids. Schools will look more like the one room school houses of the past. Obviously our politicians will never take care of us, so as time goes on we will have to start taking care of ourselves more and more, you will see a situation like we had during the revolutionary war, we will have fight to regain our freedom.
And this has what to do with teaching the tenets of Christianty in Western schools? All I said was if you want to live in a Western country, it makes your life easier if you know the basics. That includes France, I hasten to add.
Besides, you've taken me out of context. I did not say that NO other religion has freedom of worship as a concept, just that some don't. Our current version has ROOTS in Christianity. Obviously it has been elaborated upon since it was posited.
Sorry guy, I guess I must be just an ignorant Nazi/baby killer. I'll go shoot myself now, ok?
...and a good thing too, it was getting pretty heavy." -Groucho Marx, Karl's" smarter brother.
Hence my origional comment in this thread, since marked troll -1, that there's no tolerance at all for non-left opinions on Slashdot. Mere reason and evidence are meaningless here.
I rest my case.
Again, I can only direct you to the Civil Rights Act.
Because the Civil Rights Act in this particular case is what was transgressed against. Companies cannot make any rule they like. Making a rule that bans a religious practice is illegal, making a rule which enforces a religious practice is also illegal.
It is illegal for a Christian company to ban Jews, or to make rules which transgress against the Jewish religion such as baning the wearing of the yarmaluke.
Therefore it is also illegal for a Muslim company to ban Christians, or to enforce halal customs on their employees. Bacon cannot be banned from a Muslim owned workplace, nor indeed can the company punish even their Muslim employees for eating bacon, much less non-Muslim ones.
Why Liberals continue to abhore the former case while arguing the "legitimacy" of the latter is a mystery to me. Justice is supposed to be blind.
Thems is The Rules. Obey the rules, or go in peace. Or go to jail, I suppose.
Nice try, tho.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
It was 3/5ths a person. And actually blacks would have been better off they were counted as 1/4th or less in that particular case, because it had nothing to do with anything other than voting rights.
It was slavery that supressed blacks, but the ironic thing was that it was the southern owners that wanted blacks to be counted as a full person for voting purposes. If the south succeeded in getting them counted as a full person, would blacks have been better off? Probably worse actually, because Abraham Lincoln probably would not have gotten elected.
This reminds me of an old Foxtrot strip:
Mom:"Peter, what are you reading?"
16-yr old Peter:"The newspaper. The history teacher wants us to know more about current events. He wants us to read what happened today."
Mom: "That's great! So what did you read about?"
Peter: "Garfield ate Jon's lunch."
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
The problem with this is we're not talking about average (mean) students. We're talking about typical (mode) students. A typical student costs a fraction of that. Locally the average cost per student is about $6,000, but the typical student cost is $2,000. The reason for the difference? A small number of students who are very expensive to teach. Kids with learning disabilities, mental problems, whatever. The state is committed to teaching them. These student can't take the voucher and go to a private school, the private schools available for $3,000 won't be able to handle a problem student. Thus, the typical kids ends up going to private schools. The school loses $3,000 in income, but only $2,000 in expenses. End result: the school loses $1,000 for each student that leaves.
I'm open to the idea of vouchers, but you need to price them based on the cost of a typical student, not the average.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
There are no ethical or moral values to be found int the Bible that cannot be found elsewhere. This does not mean that Christianity is a completely derivative religion, but rather that it follows the needs and spiritual desires of the human beings it is meant for, just as other faiths do.
If you doubt what I've said, I recommend that you read George Frazer's The Golden Bough, which is an extensive (and tremendously boring, due to its completeness) cataloging of human belief. All the elements of Christianity, including the moral framework that informs ethical behaviour, all existed prior to the birth of Jesus, and this is well documented by Frazer.
Anyway, I'm sure you're sick of my posts, but, I'm a bit bored today. The thing to remember about private schools, is that as long as they have a release valve, they can't really make any claims about efficiency. The release valve for private schools is the public school system. Did your school really allow everyone to attend? How did they do that? I'm serious, how did they teach mentally challenged children? Remember, that those costs are lumped in with public school budgets. Would the parents of such a child choose to send them to your school or a public school? I'm asking because, if those parents preferred to send that kid to a public school, then that would mean the public school would foot the bill. These are important things to consider. It's really not fair to talk about this stuff until we get an accurate picture of what is happening.
If a student is too precocious, too gifted (I almost got sent to public school because they didn't feel like they had the resources for me, seriously), a behavior problem, learning disabled, etc., then the school sends that student off to public school. The reason why is because keeping that student would drive their costs through the roof. That is one of, if not THE primary reason that they have stricter policy than public schools. Sure, they would love to help everyone, but they know their limits. I'm not saying that these schools aren't successful, of course they are, and part of the reason why is because they get a nice subsidy from the public school system, that generously tackles the problems that private schools are unwilling, or unable to handle.
Ok, I'm done rambling. Feel free to respond with a much shorter comment if you want. I know, others, including me usually have more of a life than I've had today.
Sorry guy, I guess I must be just an ignorant Nazi/baby killer. I'll go shoot myself now, ok?
Hmmm. I raised real issues about the dangers of religious zealotry in any form and you proceeded to claim that zealotry does not exist unless planes are flown into buildings (or similar).
I pointed out the very real consequences this country has faced due to allowing blind zealotry into high positions of government.
From that you take away that I called you a nazi baby killer?
That you then use as proof that there is no tolerance for "non-left" opinions?
I'm afraid I can't even see the connection. Sounds like a persecution complex to me.
let's see.
Hence my origional comment in this thread, since marked troll -1,
Hmmm... No, it's still at +2 and wasn't even modded at all. Sure sounds like it.
I didn't even discuss Ashcroft's politics, just his negligent actions in zealous pursuit of one particular aspect of one interpretation of one religion. There was nothing on the left/right spectrum in my post.
Unless, that is, you believe that anything critical of a member of a Republican administration is "left wing", in which case I'd have to say that your political zealotry has blinded you to your duty to be an informed citizen.
I'm open to the idea of vouchers, but you need to price them based on the cost of a typical student, not the average.
This is a fine point I haven't seen elsewhere. Thank you for pointing it out.
I think vouchers should be set at a level where they are adequate for a middle-of-the-road school, even if that means the voucher is priced above the "typical" level. But even if the vouchers were set for the "typical" level ($2000, say) they are still an improvement over the current system. Poor folks actually will pay money over the cost of the voucher, if they can possibly afford it and they think the quality of school is worth it. (In other words, if Very Good Private School costs $3,500 and the voucher is only $2,500, some poor folks who can manage the $1,000 will pay it to send their children there. And maybe they can't afford the full $3,500.)
You're directing me to the Civil Rights Act to learn how a conservative would put it? This thread started with someone writing "A Conservative would state it thusly...".
I didn't voice an opinion on what laws the US has, or should have. Rather I voiced an opinion on how conservatives generally see the issue of government intervening between employer and employee.
It is hard for me to take you seriously for two reasons. First, you don't know how Slashdot works.
(#10180121) is the ultimate parent of this thread, and the origional of my comment, which was that there's no tolerance on Slashdot, and which is now marked -1 Troll more than confirming my point. Thank you Lefty moderators, you are absolutely predictable.
Second, you make the outrageous claim that John Ashcroft is a religious zealot hell bent on destroying everything his hate filled zealot heart wants to.
Now, finally, you take my disagreement with your outrageous and unsupported assertions as evidence that I am a zealot too.
This is important shit, not some intellectual game, so let me realign your brain cells a little bit.
The fucks who killed all those little kids in Russia? They are religeous zealots, or were before the Russian cops executed them on the spot. That's what the word "zealot" in English refers to. Its taken from the lunatics who threw their living children down on the heads of the Roman soldiers from the walls of Masada when they ran out of ammunition. Look it up.
The Russian government then spent three days covering up the situation by lying to the Russian people, lying to the parents of dead children, lying to the intenational press and lying to each other about how many terrorists there were, how many casualties, and how many were taken hostage, and why it took so long for the regular troops to get there, and etc. THAT is corruption.
John Ashcroft is not a zealot, and the Bush administration is not corrupt.
You want to be taken seriously, don't make claims that are self evidently not true.
To be sure, immigration is a factor in Sweden. The birth rate has been going down for some decades. Yet the population is growing through steady, heavy immigration. This leads to areas where Swedes have become ethinic minorities in their country. Malmö is the largest of these areas.
Someone could lie and enter the country without abiding, but then they would not be accepting the rules and would suffer the consequences. Either way, it's their choice.
So, really, someone entering the country has four options, that I will display as pseudocode:
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Killing children is something I personally believe I would choose not to do at any point (barring extreme circumstances, which I beleve makes anyone capable of anything) and no one I know (including my muslim friends) does it either--if one of them did, I'd really want to get inside their brains to know at what point they stopped being rational.
My hope is that all 3 bodies of law are smart enough to transcend their religious confictions and enact laws capable of outlawing things that make a society disfunctional. The Bible has no problem with rape--I however do. I can also see where laws governing monopolies, and driving under the influence have their place as well, but aside from modern cults, you won't see much of this in any religious doctrine.
That's all I'm saying. The moon is a bit past third quarter now. :D
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
True.
I'd consider myself more to be a Lockean Liberal if one can use the term without bringing a freight of Statism with it.
Say, wouldn't it be nice if Locke and Jeffersonian democracy and all that stuff was actually taught in schools? That's be a good thing eh?
Of course you can't really understand Locke and Jefferson et al without at least a nodding familiarity with Christianity and its practices at the time...
Wait, didn't I say that already? ~:D
It is hard for me to take you seriously for two reasons.
OK, let's look at them.
(#10180121) is the ultimate parent of this thread, and the origional of my comment, which was that there's no tolerance on Slashdot, and which is now marked -1 Troll more than confirming my point.
You know what? So it is. I thought you were referring to the first comment you made to me which wasn't modded down, and I didn't follow the chain to the top. Mea Culpa.
Now given the nature of the comment:
Tolerance? Come on dude, this is Slashdot. If it ain't Lefty liberal, flame on!
By the way, excellent point you make. Big "E" Education certainly is a religion to its practitioners, may they all come down with boils.
Besides, who says there's something wrong with teaching Christianity? If you don't know the rules of Western Civilization your life will suck, and all the rules come right out of the Bible like it or not.
Lets' see first paragraph has some slight merit, but largely trollish in character.
Second paragraph, flame.
Third paragraph... hmmm.... troll, I suppose maybe a bit of flamebait. If you don't buy into my book, your life will suck. Real nice.
Anyhow, the point was that I was referring to the wrong post. Fair enough.
Actually your point was that I don't know how this site works, which I'm not really sure you demonstrated. I did make a mistake though, so whatever.
Second, you make the outrageous claim that John Ashcroft is a religious zealot hell bent on destroying everything his hate filled zealot heart wants to.
Well, in the first place this isn't what I said. I did say he was a religious zealot, which is hardly an outrageous claim. I don't recall calling him hell bent on destroying everything or anything like that.
Now, let's make sure we both know what we're talking about:
From dictionary.com
zealot n.
1. One who is zealous, especially excessively so.
2. A fanatically committed person.
Now, your whole premise seems to hinge upon some other definition of this word. Where you got it, I don't know but this is the one I was using.
Now, finally, you take my disagreement with your outrageous and unsupported assertions as evidence that I am a zealot too.
No, I took the fact that you attacked my very relevant critique of the priorities of a person who works for me as a citizen as some crazed "left wing" thing. There was nothing inherently political about my point, it just happens that the Republicans are currently in power and it was particular actions of a particular office holder that I criticized for their specific effect on our country. The fact that you took this to be somehow political and specifically "left wing" is what I took to be evidence of political zealotry on your part. Why do I think that had it been a "Lefty" who had lowered the priority on terrorism to pursue largely trivial things like terminally ill pot smokers with more zeal than terrorism that you would be up in arms? If so, then I was correct in my assessment.
If not, well.. I really don't know what to think about that. You seem to think terrorism is a big deal, but you don't want anybody to take responsibility? Anyhow, like I said, It's beyond me to understand that sort of thinking. I pay their salaries, I expect them to do their freaking jobs, not push their religious agenda.
I'm certainly willing to listen to some other explanation though.
So let's continue.
John Ashcroft is not a zealot, and the Bush administration is not corrupt.
OK, I see your point now.
Be redefining zealot to mean "murders large groups of children" or something similar you are indeed correct (as far as I know) that Ashcroft does not meet that definition.
I also didn't mention anything about corruption, but lets look at this one too.
corrupt
adj.
1. Marked by immorality and perversion; depraved.
2. Venal; dishone
Yep, that's what a Liberal would say.
You've even contradicted yourself in the same small post.
On the one hand you say "Who am I to judge? Who are you?" with respect to honor killings, stretching even to the killing of children.
On the other hand, you have a problem with rape.
But dude, who are you to judge?!
This is 100% representative of what passes for liberal "thinking", and its reflected in liberal generated social policy like the hopeless farce that is public education in New York City, or another hopeless farce, the Assault Weapon Ban.
So you'll forgive me if I vote for the most non-liberal people I can.
It is hard for me to take you seriously for two reasons. First, you don't know how Slashdot works.
And it's impossible to take you seriously.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
No, you're not making any sense. You're almost sounding like Dr. Gene Ray.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Here's a link:
= 19 04441&wtit=Education%20and%20Ecstasy&matches=103&q sort=r"
"http://www.alibris.com/search/search.cfm?qwork
George Leonard is a 5th degree black belt in aikido. He lives and breaths the ecstatic aspect of education, at age 81.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
But that illustrates MY problem with rape. I stand by the statement of who am I to judge?
If you or some psycho out there can find an ethical treatment of rape, I'm all ears for it, and I'll reassess my position if it holds any water.
The point is, I can understand where honour killings have an ethical treatment--I don't just label it evil, and go of on some senseless and pointless tirade because that would make me a hypocrite, and reflect some incapacity to learn and/or understand the world beyond my own experiences.
I don't care to dwell on my issue because you've ignored the rest of my post--you just look for the flaws and tout how right you are. I don't wish to argue, I wish to think.
My guess here is you're well over 50, and too set in your ways to accept a shiney new free thought of your own, so I wish you and your tightly-closed mind whatever peace and happiness it can bring you.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
Ahh, you wish to THINK. Ok, think about this.
You say honor killings have an "ethical treatment", and to denounce (or pointlessly tirade against) them would be "hypocritical".
Given your decision to consider the cultural/ethical validity of honor killings, if that decision is widespread, what's going to be the inevitable, logical result?
Maybe... honour killings?
So if some demented perve somewhere figures out an "ethical treatment" for rape, like, oh maybe chattel slavery, you'll just "understand the world beyond my own experiences"?
What's going to be the result? Rape? Possibly?,
Final case, if you drop a pencil, are you willing to be open to the possibility that it will be on the ceiling? You can argue about it, but when you drop your pencil in an exam, where do you look?
My guess is that you're under 25, possibly under 20, enroled in some frightfully progresive school and doing quite well at absorbing all the wonderful progressive thoughts they are feeding you.
My condolences. You'll get over it eventually.
You just are not reading what I'm writing here.
Check it: "Besides, who says there's something wrong with teaching Christianity? If you don't know the rules of Western Civilization your life will suck, and all the rules come right out of the Bible like it or not."
This does not say: "If you don't buy into my book, your life will suck. Real nice."
It says something completely different than you state. There's nothing about buying in implied there. The simple communication you seem to be deliberately avoiding is, if you live in a Western country, and you don't know the rules of how people in Western countries live, your life is going to suck. Why? Because everybody you meet is going to think you are a JERK, and behave accordingly.
The fact that the rules for moral behaviour -in the West- come from the Christian religion and Christian philosphers is inescapable, but it does not mean that one must become a Christian to merely know what they are. Nor do I say anywhere that making people convert would be a good idea, or even faintly desirable.
I can know about Bhuddism without being a Bhuddist. As a matter of individual sovereignty, anybody who says I have to convert will feel the toe of my boot. BUT, if I'm going to live in Tibet for a while I better know about Bhuddism. Right? And probably Tibetan schools would be smart to teach Bhuddism. Right?
Did you get that? Is that clear?
There's no attempt being made here to convert all and sundry by fire and the sword, and your insistence that there is indicates, to me at least, that you have no intellectual flexibility. Somebody says the word "Christianity" and you go off down your programmed path.
As for Ashcroft and the rest of it, about all you've stated here is that you disagree with some of the laws that Ashcroft has been upholding lately. He has to apply the law, that's his job. Even the laws you don't like, and even the ones he doesn't like. He doesn't let things slide like Lurch Reno used to under Clinton, but I notice his department hasn't burned down any buildings with little kids in them like Lurch did. Waco, remember? Ashcroft pulls something like that, then maybe you'll have a point.
The "Bush Lied" thing has been just about beaten to death thanks. He didn't lie, everybody knows it. 9/11 Committee report, remember? George didn't lie? Ring a bell?
The only people still saying he did are the Democratic Party, their various water carriers, and you Slashdot intellectuals.
Your raving on being entirely representative of the Slashdot Experience (TM) was the reason I posted that little witticism in the first place. Try turning down the Bush Hatred knob to a slow boil.
http://www.steynonline.com/pageprint.cfm?edit_id=2 9
Here's a rather nice article that may explain some of the consequences of your current thought process better than I've been able to.
Pay particular attention to the guy blaming rapes in Norway on Norwegian women, and his justification for it.
s/millitant/militant/
"I'm on a mission from grammar".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Amen to that! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Um, "imported bad guys" have made, let me see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...
Yup about 5 tries to blow up me and my family in the various towns where we've lived.
And guess what - I still believe in open immigration.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
> I can understand where honour killings have an ethical treatment
Murder is never honorable, regardless of religion or lack thereof. I say nothing of the (im)morality, "evilness/"goodness," right/wrong of it, but there is no honor in it.
Just because some religion says it is honorable, it does not mean it should be accepted by anyone. Otherwise, someone could just come up with a religion off-the-cuff to rationalize mass-murder of anyone he doesn't like. If "honour killings" are legal on religious grounds, he would be perfectly justified in his actions. (Just because a religion is new or small, it doesn't fall outside freedom of religion... theoretically.)
Or to illustrate your slight disjoint in thinking, his 1-person religion changes doctrine to do away with the barbarity of "honour killing." So he just rapes them instead.
> too set in your ways to accept a shiney new free thought
If you've ever had an idea, chances are pretty darn good that someone else thought of (something like) it about 50 years ago. Age doesn't enter into it anyway, IMO. That, of course, could be my age bias at age 27 talking.
> here's no tolerance at all for non-left opinions on Slashdot.
/. and get modded up (or at least stay at +1). When you act like an ass in presenting them, or make it sound like only you can be right, it is rightfully modded down.
/. censors them too.
That is true when those opinions are not based on actual fact. I am very often posting what could be considered right-wing opinions on
I have heard many left-wingers claim
I believe in open immigration to the USA too. That's because I'm a Canadian, and I'd like somewhere nice to live that my income isn't taxed at a rate of 50+%. Like Arizona. I loooove Arizona!
However, you don't have "open" immigration. What you have is a system that turns away doctors, nurses and other skilled people (but first they torture you with bureaucratic nightmares and threats of forced deportation if your papers are not in order) while Somali goat herders with AIDS get the fast track Green Card.
You also have zero border control. You should work on that.
The antidote to this is Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States".
I'm currently reading this book...I've just dipped into it a bit and it's mind blowing. What really made me take this book out of the library, besides the fact I've heard about it mention so many times, was the fact that this was a recent edition...3rd or 4th I believe...so it's updates up to 2001. Anyways, before the 25 Chapter: "The War on Terrorism" or something very similar, someone had...and I shit you not, honest to monkey Christ.....placed this 9/11 dollar bill (side a,side b).
I ask you, how intense it that? Someone had taken the time to find this book at my local library (Barrie, ON - Canada) and place this replicated US left-leaning dollar bill slaming the Bush administration. I find it amazing that little underground activists are hard at work doing these sort of things. Made me even wonder if there were more undiscovered books at my library that had these dollar bills placed in them.
No doubt I'll be returning this book with the bill right where I found it.
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
My point here is the same one I'll make to the kid below, which is where I ask some questions of my own and see where that takes us.
You really seem to be of the opinion that everyone is going to mass murder, pilliage and rape and cross every ethical boundry in as little time as they can, and then try and justify it or pass the blame of it to religion or society or their parents or some other crap. But lets step back for a second and ask if there were no laws about it, would you would cross these lines more freely than you would otherwise? Is your only sense of ethics dictated to you by church and state? Is this the flaw in my logic? If this is the case, should anyone be voting when we can't decide what's right and wrong for themself? I realize its rhetoric, but what about philosophy isnt?
My own limited perception doesn't see it that way. I hold myself to a higher standard than you think, and I would expect the same is true of most people. I don't see it in athiests, muslims, jews, hindus, buddhists or christians, nor do I see it in intellegent or stupid people. Where I see it falling apart in in psychopaths, I see it in the criminally depraived, I see it in gangs and mobs which are psychologically outside the realm of personal accountability and I see it in anyone pushed to their limits of tolerance which frankly, are a universal problem outside the influence of any law, religion or culture.
And no, I doubt its a new idea, but I came to these questions and answers on my own, and I've tweaked them slightly with every new person with their own set of convictions that I've met. I've taken a long hard look at what I believe thanks to you, but I don't see a really convincing argument against it, just some unconstructive criticism which frustrates me, especially when mixed with the emotional crutch called condescention.
But the great thing here is you and I are free to believe what we like, and if we disagree, we disagree. My own observation is society on the whole is better for it.
Thank you.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
Short of seeing into the future and stopping it, people are going to kill people, deliberatly and accidentally no matter what religion, law or punishment you enact about it. Blaming it on religion or society is a moot point, but understanding that someone else has had a few hundred or even thousand years of functioning society without our passing (Western) judement on them will take us alot farther about how to integrate them them into a collective, functioning society.
My point in reference to age wasn't that he was unitellegent, I'll give anyone the benefit of the doubt until they do something to prove otherwise--it was more an expression of frustration at being patronized by someone too cowardly to put his own thoughts out there for criticism, or at the very least offering some form of rebuttal rather than simply finding the best flaw in his understanding of what I've said.
As I've asked him, is your expectation that in a good anarchy, everyone is going to mass murder, pilliage and rape and then try and justify it. Is this because if there was no laws about it you would cross these lines? Is your own sense of ethics is dictated to you by the state? Is this univeral motivation to do wrong the flaw in my logic? Should you be voting if you can't decide what's right and wrong for yourself?
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
"But lets step back for a second and ask if there were no laws about it, would you would cross these lines more freely than you would otherwise?"
Would I? No. But then I'm already aculturated and steeped in Western tradition.
It is indisputable that there are countries in which honor killings are both common and accepted. There are countries in which honor suicides are common and accepted.
If people move here from these cultures and no one tells them we don't do that stuff here, is it unreasonable to assume they will carry on as before? Probably not, right?
If we shrink from teaching our own cultural values in public school to our own kids, is it unreasonable to assume that there will be growing numbers of young people who don't know what those values are? Again, probably not.
Its my opinion of human beings that they generally rise to the occasion, and respond with increased effort to meet increased expectations. If society, meaning the majority, demands a certain minimum level of civilised behaviour, that's what we will get.
Conversely if we are going to declare ourselves open for anything and everything, we are going to get anything and everything.
Which is not what we want as a society. What we want is personal freedom, prosperity and peace to enjoy it in. You don't get peace when anything goes, you get peace when the citizenry willingly observes accepted limits. As in no killing, stealing, raping, slavery etc.