Slashdot Mirror
Improving Education?
Shepherd Book asks: "Not long ago there was a spirited discussion, in the usual Slashdot style, about education, touched off by an article about the value of homework. Even more recently, there was a discussion about the value of grammar. This inspires the following Ask Slashdot question: What, in your opinion, would make primary and secondary education as good as possible? I have no experience of education outside the US, but I can say confidently that public education in my country sucks. And it may always suck. However, what can we do to make it suck less?"
"For the purpose of this question, the following are givens:
1. I know that there is a strong libertarian faction in this community, who might like to see public education disappear. Let's assume, though, that that isn't going to happen any time soon, and that there will be a public school system for the foreseeable future.
2. Similarly, many Slashdot readers are brilliant people who have educated themselves to a large extent. Let's further accept that most people are not capable of doing this, or at any rate need help reaching that sort of educational self-sufficiency.
Thanks in advance, folks."
1. I know that there is a strong libertarian faction in this community, who might like to see public education disappear. Let's assume, though, that that isn't going to happen any time soon, and that there will be a public school system for the foreseeable future.
2. Similarly, many Slashdot readers are brilliant people who have educated themselves to a large extent. Let's further accept that most people are not capable of doing this, or at any rate need help reaching that sort of educational self-sufficiency.
Thanks in advance, folks."
for every student.
From the Ask Slashdot post:
There are probably more, but this might be a good start.
Simple. Hand out copies of Elements of Style to every single student. Had that book been given to me in High School I probably wouldn't have hated the class so much.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
This question reminded me of the classic Paul Graham essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular". Despite the title, much of the essay is about how much high school sucks and what could be done to fix it.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
Eliminate American Anti-intellectualism. Geeks and nerds, while sometimes socially inept, don't deserve to be bullied for good grades. Fostering environments where it's okay to tear kids down because they're doing well in school (we've all seen first hand how little teachers and parents actually do to stop this sort of thing).
Yeah. I'd say that's the biggest issue. Putting kids in an environment where success means social punishment.
I realize many parents arent able to do this, but home schooling is probably the best option.
-FL
"2. Similarly, many Slashdot readers are brilliant people who have educated themselves to a large extent. Let's further accept that most people are not capable of doing this, or at any rate need help reaching that sort of educational self-sufficiency."
Yes, the readers are absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately the posters are a different breed so you may not get the types of repsonses you were hoping for.
Yes I realize what group I've just put myself in by making this comment.
Despite the fact that education is basically the most important thing we do (aside from reproducing) it's amazing how rarely it's actually studied in a scientific way. And when it's studied by psychologists, their research is ignored. Crap like "No Child Left Behind" is just a collection of things people made up and thought might help, with no verification whatsoever, yet it's the law of the land.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Education starts at home. Parents need to be more involved in their child's education. We spend alot more than other countries on a per-student basis, but they get more bang for their buck becuase the students work hard and their parents instill on them the value of an education.
Do away with grade levels. No more of this fifth vs sixth grader crap. Students should be placed into classes that challenge their abilities at all times. For what is now grades 1 through 8 I would love to see 8 levels of math, 8 levels of english and so forth. That way students can be failed or promoted based on actual ability. Also schools need to start just failing students in general. I hate it when i hear people say that failing a child is bad for his self esteem and he should always be promoted to the next grade. Passing a child who is not capable is bad for society. Also, there needs to be more focus on sports in school. Not on the winning or losing but on participating, even if it is only a fun extra curricular league that plays a game a week or something. Too many kids don't know how to exercise and gym just isn't cutting it
Revert back to the old days. Hit the damn kids when they get out of line!!
You can't have a class-based society and good public education. An educated lower-class will ask why they are lower-class.
Idiot.
Do away with the "no child left behind" concept. It is a fact of life that some people are not going to "get it" and they need special help. It would be far better to have more children with learning disabilities (LD) in classes catering to LD kids than to have children passing classes just for conformity. If funding is not based on how many children "pass" a given level of classes but instead on standardized test averages the system would work better. There could be a fixed, per-student amount of funding for all public schools with extra funding for the schools that need it the most rather than extra funding for the schools that have the greatest number of high grades and high testing scores.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
First you need to be open minded enough to stop excluding the best solution out of hand. If you have a sucking chest wound you don't say "What is the best thing I can do, except stop the bleeding?"
Public schools don't work, can't work and aren't even compatible with a Republican form of Government.
Step one: board up every public school and college of education.
Seriously. The damage is beyond repairing, it is systemic and inherent in the concept of forced government education as we currently understand it. Therefore any attempts at 'reform' only prolong a real solution and are a bad idea.
Private schools all the way. Even if someone wants to send their kids to an Islamic fundamentalist madrassas. The Right to be Wrong is the #1 basic right because the second thee or me presumes to sit in judgement of a parent's choice we presume to 1) be their master and 2) be wise enough to make their decisions for them. If parents are going to be empowered to truly make educational decisions for their children we must accept decisions we don't approve of.
The only place for the State to intervene is in cases which could rightly be called abuse/neglect.
Once that policy decision is made, everything else follows. The idea that a math major isn't qualified to teach mathamatics is one that only a union operation with a government mandated monopoly could think up so there go the 'colleges of education' to be replaced with majors in their subject matter perhaps supplementing with a couple of courses in pedagogy.
Here is the secret. Teaching isn't particularly hard. All it requires is a knowledgable and reasonably patient master and an apprentice motivated to learn. Note the ancient usages there, that was intentional and intended to remind just how far back learning goes. They didn't need billions of words of academic text telling them how to do it, they just did it.
Democrat delenda est
Parents become responsible.
If parents take interest in their children's education then things change drastically.
My daughter goes to many theatre plays, I expose her to other cultures regularly and encourage learning.
Many parents expect that schools do everything and ignore thier kids.
The fault with the crappy US education system starts and ends with the parents of those children.
IF they do not get in the face of the school by being at PTA meetings, calling teachers on the carpet, or even going to Parent teacher conferences let alone educate their kids themselves outside normal school (learning does not have a schedule people!) then they are causing the dearth of education in their community.
If the parents do not ask for better education and WORK for it, it will never exist.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The fact that you learned a certain way doesn't mean it's the best way to learn. The drilling kids get on how to do long division and multiplication is a horribly inefficient way to learn how to do it, in fact most arithmetic can be done without paper (with a reasonable number of digits). Math (even without a calculator) is easy, but kids are taught the hard way, which causes them to lose interest in it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How to solve the public education problems:
1. Public warehousing of young human animals is fine, don't rock the boat.
2. Pay teachers based on performance.
3. Apply corporal puni^H^Hencouragement to under-performing students.
4. In Soviet Russia, CowboyNeal's Korean grandma gets educated by YOU.
5. Print lessons over graphics of large firm breasts.
6. Scrap the entire system and start over from scratch.
Keep a good a(TT)itude!
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
According to Dr. Hans Mark, former NASA Interim Head and Aerospace Engineering professor at the University of Texas, the answer is: Roll back women's lib.
Back in the days before women's lib, and there were few jobs available to intelligent, educated women, the best and brightest women became teachers. As a result, the United States had an astonishingly good public education system, because we had the best teachers anywhere.
The idea of rolling back women's lib is obviously both abhorrent and unworkable, but there is a legitimate point: Good teachers leads to good education. If our best and brightest desire to become teachers, then our schools will become better whether we want them to or not.
Another problem is that in certain American sub-cultures, education is not considered a viable means to open up opportunities. It is, but these sub-cultures don't consider it to be. Consider Charles Schulz, who succeeded despite terrible failures in school; one year, he failed everything. His parents, who had never had any education, had no idea how to guide him; in an interview, when asked how he reacted to Schulz failing an entire year, his father replied: "I thought he did pretty well."(*) If the parents don't value or understand education, the children won't be successful.
And on that second topic, unfortunately the Religious Right's crowing about "Family Values" is right on target. (Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day.) The only way to solve it is to find a way to reinforce the structural and legal support for the family unit. In the past, this existed in the form of legalized punishments for unwed mothers. Nowadays, we have legalized punishments for married people (such as the "marriage tax penalty"). What we need are structural incentives for people to get married, stay married, and take care of children. Now that sounds pathetic -- doing these things is what you're supposed to do, after all -- but the legal climate today is such that you are punished for doing these things and rewarded for irresponsibility. Until that changes, these sub-cultures that formed won't change.
(*)Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, edited by M Thomas Inge
Teachers spend so much time trying to teach the dumb students, that the brighter ones are somewhat forced to stay at their level. Its not politically correct to acknowledge that some students are smarter than others, so we're stuck with a system that treats everybody the same. They've already got some programs for the advanced students, but the dumb ones are grouped in with everybody else.
Allow the bright ones to move on quicker, and keep the not so bright ones held back. Its sick that some people who spend 13 years in school can't read past a 6th grade level. Thats not creating a workforce, thats preparing them for poverty, which the bright kids later have to fund.
The most important thing though would be to get the parents involved. Kids whose parents are involved usually do better in school. Who in their right mind lets their children go off for 6.5 hours a day to be watched over by a stranger? And then they do this for their entire youth?? Parental involvement is key.
As for pay, I think they get paid alright. I might be in the minority here, but starting pay is $35k or so, and you get two and a half months off during the year. If you were to assume they made that same money during those two months, thats more than $42 to start. Not to bad.
Stop hiring Elementary Ed majors as teachers. Raise the standards for teachers and pay and you'll attract better teachers. I'd love to teach but there's no way I'll take a 60% pay cut to do it. I know a lot of bright people that are in the same situation. Well, that and they wouldn't put up with school administrators.
Teach the basics: reading, writing, history and math. Ditch the crap.
I'm sorry but I beg to differ. I say teach the basics ABSOLUTELY, yes, but I'm not sure what you call crap. A child's brain is like a sponge, it learns everything you put in it. If you wait till the child is older to introduce a child to other subjects, it's too late.
I think kids should take up 2 other foreign languages as early as possible. Propose them classical latin or greek too. No, they're not "useless in our modern world" as I sometimes hear, they are what differentiate a well-rounded education from a basic no-frills one. Get them to learn all kinds of sciences in fun ways. Get them to experiment. Teach them hard stuff early, but in fun ways... In short: take full advantage of a kid's ability to learn, the trick being not to bore him so he keeps on wanting to learn more.
The other thing is, for God's sake DITCH MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS! Exams aren't just to get grades, they're a test of a student's reasoning. A math teacher for example should grade a student's reasoning, not the final answer. Similarly, don't rate essays with machines, like it's been proposed recently. All that contributes to de-humanize studies, and only teach students to "work with the system", not to think.
Finally, ditch computers when kids are young. They don't need high tech to learn how to write and count, and school should spend their precious budgets on good teachers and on books.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
As simple as that. Most people are made to remember in class, not to think. The best two teachers I had made do just that. One was extremelly brilliant, and he usually made a quiz BEFORE class. And all he said was "make your best effort." Too bad he was fired. I guess making people think was outside the rules. The other wasn't ignorant, but probably lacked the adecuate knowledge to give the class, so tried to learn TOGETHER with us. He got down to our and said: "Ok, let's try to understand this." Right now I'm in university, I can write a paper in 2 hours and get 8 out of 10. I can get into any exam and get about 8 of 10. Without any studing, just going to class and paying a bit of attention. No need to put any effort into it, no incentive to do it either. So I guess I have two points of view: 1- Force everyone to think, to at least try to solve really complex problems, that are outside of their current capabilities. 2- Keep a mediocre class, and an AP class, those who want to put in extra effort can do so and get a better education. The choice between those two depends on cultural situations. I live in a mediocre country (Costa Rica) but have also studied in the US. And in general terms is depressing. But then I guess I'm just babbling anyhow.
please excuse my apathy
It may not help much with the other school subject, but it'll certainly give us people who are less ignorant about the rest of the world, because they can educate themselves, once they become adults, about other points of view...
then:
I had my primary and secondary education outside of the US, so I can't speak for the "poster's country"... :) My own experience, however, is that much of basic education relies overly on rote learning.
I cannot but echo Feynman's concerns (when he visited Brazil - IANAB, but many cultures have the same problem) that students are not encouraged to be curious, but rather to accept whatever the book or the teacher tells them as fact. At the schools I attended our textbooks were treated almost as gospels and scientific findings were considered immutable facts discovered by others far more brilliant than ourselves.
The reason education sucks is because, we as a society, don't fucking care.
That is an overly optimistic viewpoint. The truth is that America is openly anti-intellectual. Students that do acheive some degree of excellence are openly attacked and persecuted in schools. The cult of the celebrity runs wild. Teachers are considered as the lowest rung of the professional hierarchy.
The best they the could do for education today is to fail the students that don't learn or can't do the material. Give them the chance to try again if they wish or give them an alternative path (different discipline, trades, whatever) but the basic truth is not everybody can do everything equally well. Allow students to figure out what they can do well and what they have trouble with. Then they can either choose to work harder on their problem subjects or focus on what they do well.
Passing a poor student just to spare his feelings really just robs him of getting the education he deserves while reducing the quality of education for everyone else (keeping things simple so everyone can pass).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This will probably be anathema to most Slashdotters, but I'd suggest that we strongly limit the user of computers in primary education (K-6). Have a lab, sure, and let kids use it if they want. But computers should not be an integral part of early education, because they do not encourage the kind of thinking patterns that children should develop.
Example: at the school where my mother works (as the school librarian) they routinely teach second graders to create PowerPoint presentations. This is completely ridiculous. PowerPoint, by its very nature, encourages summary rather than analysis. It forces you to reduce your topic to three or four bullet points per slide, which makes it all too easy to summarize a few high points while remaining completely unfamiliar with the bulk of the topic at hand.
Similarly, PowerPoint (and word processors, and basically every document-oriented program) makes it easy to worry almost exclusively about formatting instead of content. A report that takes 12 hours to prepare can easily wind up including four hours of research and eight hours of tweaking the layout and putting together fancy graphics.
Lastly, computers are purely visual and auditory experiences that make hard stuff easy. Kids need to have lots of experiences that engage ALL of their sense. That includes touch, taste, and smell as well, folks. I'm thinking of things like math manipulatives, finger paints, food projects (home made root beer, maybe). In the process, they need to learn to do stuff the hard way so that they're not completely dependant on the machine. It's easy to use computers as a substitute for learning basic math skills, for example. And hey, who needs to know how to spell when you've got a word processor that puts a squiggly red line under the incorrect words, and will even fix it for you if you just click a button or two?
For these reasons, I believe we should remove computers from elementary school curricula. They're doing more harm than good at that point. Computers will play an important role in later education -- say, starting in seventh grade -- but for the very early years, they're neither necessary nor helpful.
My school required a 2.5 GPA for anyone wanting to participate in sports, clubs, etc. Raise this to 3.0, actually enforce it, and you'll see grades increase. Obviously grades aren't necessarily reflective of what the student is learning, but it's a good start.
An alternative school in Milwaukee started paying students to attend class. Their attendance went up significantly. Many people will oppose this, saying you're bribing kids, but at least kids will be in class. I'd rather have my tax dollars go toward this type of program than raising teacher salaries (which doesn't lead to better students).
This includes creative spelling, among other things. Phonics is a proven method... stick with it. If kids can read and spell, they'll have a much better chance of being able to learn on their own outside of school. They'll also be more likely to take up positive hobbies like creative writing.
Also, stop trying to get rid of sports and music programs. I was in many sports in high school, and it was definitely something that helped my studies and social skills.
Finally, grow a pair and take on the teacher unions. I have seriously considered switching to teaching as a profession and still think the teacher unions are complete BS. They always talk about taking care of the kids when state budgets are being planned, but they have yet to say "Ok... we'll pay $20/month toward our insurance like most people do... use the money that's saved toward actually EDUCATING the kids." The teacher union is a greedy organization that really needs a big dose of reality.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Whatever it is that makes for a better education, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the time you spend in school. My wife is from Uzbekistan (former Soviet republic) and the quality of her education seems much higher than the one I received. Yet, she only went to school from 8am to noon 5 days a week from the age of 7 til age 17. That's quite a difference from the typical age 5 to 18, 7:30am to 3pm we go through in the U.S.
And yes (to those who were going to ask), the length of the school year is about the same.
I've got a real issue with people who make statements like this.
My public education was great. I worked hard, learned everything I wanted to, went into college placement classes, finished a year early and then finished college in the major I wanted on scholarships and got the job I wanted.
If our system "sucks" so much, why are there SO many successful people who went through the system?
There's a simple answer. The system is only as good as the people using it. If parents want to throw their kids in daycare, both work full time, and don't take an interest in a childs education, it WILL suck.
Education in the US doesn't suck. Our culture sucks. Geeks and intelligent kids get mocked. Kids who skip grades and push ahead are ostracized not just by their peers but by their peers parents as well.
Parents at home don't push their kids to do their share of work. Parents don't take an active role in their kids education! Why aren't you trying to learn a langauge at home, for fun, with your children? Why aren't you meeting the teachers and getting their year long lesson plan? Why aren't you teaching them on the side?
Why can Indian, Mexican, Chinese, and other cultures come to our country and go through OUR schools, and come out on top?
It isn't the government's job to educate your children. It's yours. I'd wager you've checked your 401k on a more regular basis than you sit down and help your kid with their homework, or even thought about the pace of their learning.
I won't even go into divorce and dual custody, daycare, and parents both working after a kid turns 3 months old. Likewise I won't talk about IQ and breastfeeding, or any of the other issues that plague this country.
Stop being a victim and realize YOU are to blame. Not your kids, or your government.
What, in your opinion, would make primary and secondary education as good as possible?
Clearly there are excellent schools, just as there are crappy schools. Since at least one excellent school exists, the solution to the problem is trivial, copy that school.
I choose to interpret the question thusly:
What, in your opinion, would make primary and secondary education as good as possible for everyone?
Society cannot make great schools for everyone if the elite/policy makers can opt out of the system and send their children to private schools.
By abolishing private schools, parents who can make a difference in the public schools would make a difference in the public schools because that's where there kids would be.
They need to read books, litereature, histroy, etc.
What...the....hell? I could have sworn we were just having a conversation on literacy..
--- What
Think about some of the dumbest people you remember. The ones that partied all of the time, and could barely handle college. You'll remember the girls the got trashed and danced on tables at parties. The guys that couldn't remember what the captial of the US is.
What major are a lot of them?
Education
Fixing education starts with getting teachers that actually know how to teach, and didn't pick Education because it was the easiest way to get above a 2.0. Not many intelligent people are going to work towards a job with a starting salary of 20k. Most of us here are programmers, and we would laugh at any offer that low. I know that we can't afford to pay all teachers $50,000 out of college, but unless we can find an incentive to get smart people to teach, education is screwed.
The number 1 reason for idiots isn't actually the education system, as bad as it is. It is the amount of quality time the kids get at home and the investment the parents make into their child's education. There is a reason that class issues are extremely prevalent in education. If a low income mother is working 3 jobs, she doesn't have time to teach her kid to read or make sure he is studying instead of surfing porn. Add in that many of those households have single parents. Then add in that the population is too dense to provide enough teachers and the schools are horrible and you have real problems. Individual kids get passed through the system and the parents can't or won't pick up the slack.
Private schools are far from the answer. Most private schools are worse than public ones around me. Some are better, but those are the ones that cost more than your average college. Throwing money at education won't fix it. Unfunded mandates basically derailed it. No Child Left Behind sounds nice, until you see that children are being left behind on purpose to keep them out of the statistics that cause the school to lose funding.
/. ++
I can anticipate an argument here. "But different countries have different cultures and emphasize different things!" Answer: public education's purpose, at least partially, is to brainwash children to follow a culture. So it doesn't matter what US culture is. Insourcing (ba-ding! +1 buzzword) the best practices will just result in our children getting the best education along with the culture that supports the best education.
At least, that's my nonprofessional opinion.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
I could go on and on replying to your message but I'll try to make it short. In summary, I agree with almost everything you wrote but I want to comment on one thing in particular:
We need to focus on fundamentlas, reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. They need to read more and write more, and be able to construct cogent arguments and analyses in both written and oral form. They need classes in rhetoric and philosophy.
This needs to be emphasized. I think having kids confront all the stuff they hold dear by having them learn Philosophy would be wonderful. I think a Senior-level course would do great things. Just before they go out the door into the so-called "real world", they get a glimpse of the fact that they are about to enter a period of their life where the answers aren't so easy. Where they really will have to think for themselves rather than review what was in Section 3.4 of their textbook. I would couple this with the need for critical thinking and analysis. If kids are so obsessed with how they are "going to use this", then present them with articles from the daily newspaper and have them examine the issues and think about what the story didn't mention or glossed over.
The problem is that parents wouldn't stand for any of this. Can you imagine trying to have a debate in a high school philosophy class about abortion? It might be a much-needed chance for kids to see the side of the issue that their parents haven't crammed down their throat but the parents certainly would never stand for such a thing. Alas, the critical thinking and analysis skills that kids need to develop would never be allowed in public schools.
GMD
watch this
> Much as I despise the way public education is run in my country right
> now I'm loathe to give too much power to the parents...
Some must be sacrificed is all are to be saved. You can't have it both ways. Authority MUST follow responsibility. If parents are going to be responsible for their children they must have the authority to actually carry out the responsibility. Or you believe children are the property of the State and we should just do like Cuba and yank all the kids into barracks as soon as they can walk and be done with it.
I agree that there are people with children who shouldn't be honored with the word 'parent' but short of removing them from the corrosive environment there probably isn't much to be done. If the parents are defective products of the modern welfare state & education system it is going to be very hard to get useful citizens. Must admit I don't have a good answer to the problem. Wish I did. But the answer isn't to make EVERYONE a ward of the state and breed yet another generation of helpless dependents.
Democrat delenda est
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I spent a lot of time this past school year tutoring 11th-grade New York City public school students on the SAT. These were bright kids who were genuinely interested in learning and very much wanted to attend college, and they attend the school system with the highest per-student expense in the entire USA, but their vocabulary was terrible, their writing was at about the level I'd expect to find from a middle-schooler, and they didn't even know how to use fractions. You can try to attribute this to low teacher salaries, bungled administration, or lack of funding, but when a smart kid can take a decade's worth of math classes and still not know how to work with fractions, I think the problem goes well beyond any of that.
The fundamental problem as I see it is free riders. Compulsory public education means that a sizable percentage of students in any public school will be uninterested in learning, with parents who are equally uninterested in their children's educations. These kids will contribute to a culture of disinterest and a lack of respect for education which can pervade the entire school. I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters can remember sitting through math classes where most of the time was wasted trying to get a few disagreeable kids to sit down, shut up and try to learn something.
Private schools work better because they cater to a self-selecting group: most of the parents who send their children to private schools are at least a little bit interested in making sure that their children get a good education and go to college, and will provide the reinforcement at home to make sure that they actually do study hard. Well-funded suburban private schools work similarly, because families move to areas with higher property taxes in large part because of their superior schools, and because (unfortunate but true) people with the money to live in those rich suburbs tend to have college degrees themselves and are more likely to appreciate the importance of getting their children well educated.
So in spite of being a Democrat, I think school vouchers are a good idea, not because private schools are intrinsically "better" (they're not) but because the extra effort and expense of sending children to a (voucher-subsidized) private school will weed out a lot of the less-devoted students and parents, while keeping private education within the means of moderate-income families. And even for bright but lower-income students, vouchers can help bridge the gap between merit scholarships and tuition fees.
At the same time, by shunting off a lot of the college-bound students to private schools, vouchers allow public schools to focus more on the needs of the remaining students. It may seem a bit radical in the face of American schools' constant focus on college prep, but there are some strong arguments to be made for adding more of a trade-school focus to public high schools; there are certain professions, nursing for example, that are badly in need of workers, and providing some of the training for those jobs in high school can fill the gaps and provide a much better career alternative than Wal-Mart.
This isn't about "giving up" on public education, it's about appreciating the reality that not everybody is going to college, and doing the best we can for them based on that.
Why schools should use exclusively free software
e s/health/tobaccotrial/usa.htm.
by Richard Stallman
There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers--with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what you want it to do. Free software also gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life. These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone.
But there are special reasons that apply to schools. They are the subject of this article.
First, free software can save the schools money. Even in the richest countries, schools are short of money. Free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software, so the school system can make copies for all the computers they have. In poor countries, this can help close the digital divide.
This obvious reason, while important, is rather shallow. And proprietary software developers can eliminate this disadvantage by donating copies to the schools. (Watch out!--a school that accepts this offer may have to pay for future upgrades.) So let's look at the deeper reasons.
School should teach students ways of life that will benefit society as a whole. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will use free software after they graduate. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated (and gouged) by megacorporations. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes: to get children addicted (1). They will not give discounts to these students once they grow up and graduate.
Free software permits students to learn how software works. When students reach their teens, some of them want to learn everything there is to know about their computer system and its software. That is the age when people who will be good programmers should learn it. To learn to write software well, students need to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. They will be intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.
Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, "The knowledge you want is a secret--learning is forbidden!" Free software encourages everyone to learn. The free software community rejects the "priesthood of technology", which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know. Schools that use free software will enable gifted programming students to advance.
The next reason for using free software in schools is on an even deeper level. We expect schools to teach students basic facts, and useful skills, but that is not their whole job. The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors--to cooperate with others who need their help. In the area of computers, this means teaching them to share software. Elementary schools, above all, should tell their pupils, "If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other children." Of course, the school must practice what it preaches: all the software installed by the school should be available for students to copy, take home, and redistribute further.
Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson. It also teaches students the role model of public service rather than that of tycoons. All levels of school should use free software.
(1). RJ Reynolds tobacco company was fined $15m in 2002 for handing out free samples of cigarettes at events attended by children. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/featur
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Your other ideas were OK. But honestly, no homeschooling?
No parent can be an expert on everything. But neither can teachers - that's where good textbooks and other educational materials are impoortant. But far more important than a textbook is interaction with the teacher. It's a given that with homeschooling, you are going to get a lot more interaction with the teacher.
Furthermore because homeschoolers have the freedom to tailor education on a per-student basis, you can get a lot more depth in subjects of interest than in public schools (where they simply cannot tailer education to a per-student basis).
I was homeschooled from the end of gradeschool until college. Where there were subjects my teachers were not as familiar with, ew leaned more heavily on the textbooks. But also we had study groups with other homeschoolers that would help, like chemistry labs. We also had team sports that played with other school leagues.
There simply is no basis to think that a parent can not do as good a job overall as the average teacher can do, and improved family relations are a pretty big benefit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
2) Make it easier to be a teach, but weed out the bad teachers. We have a overwelming lack of good teachers and a overwelming number of bad ones, why? Cause right now it takes more work to become a teacher than to make good money in a related field of work, so that only the diehards who REALLY want to teach (who are few and far between), or the people who have nothing else to fall back on do it. Pay better money, make it easier but at the same time make sure you get rid of the bad ones before they get tenure.
3) End standardized testing. Its a joke, shows absolutely nothing but the person is a good test taker, and truthful give a false readout of if the students are doing well or not. I know great testakers who are total morons, and I know people who did horrable on the SATs yet could mentaly do the calculations for perfect satalite trajectories.
4) Stop comparing the US to other countries. Im sorry the fact that other contries are smarter or not is bullshit and anyone who actually reads the numbers will see that unlike other contries, the US is the only large country that requires attendance to high school. Most countries dont even send their children TO high school, they take tests and then are forcfully placed into what their job will be based on those tests.
5) Stop treating college as the end of school. High school should be where most of your life skills are learned, NOT college. Right now High schools teach as if kids are going to college, and not as if these students will be entering the workforce. In this buisnesses who refuse to higher qualified high school grads over a unqualified college grad based soley on a peice of paper are directly responsible and should be made to blame. College is ment to further your enducation, not complete it.
Kick out the bad seeds. Make them do labor and send them to special schools. 90% of most school problems can be directly atributed to less than 5% of the schools population. In the future if people start listening to suggestion one and actually parent their kids, this might be able to be removed. But at the moment there is just to many wasted humans who need to sadly be forced to stop being asshats thanks to their parents that schools just cant cope unless you have a special program for it.
START FUNDING EDUCATION! You want people to be smart start actually put money into the schools instead of saying it and then screwing the books so that schools actually get .5% of what you promised. No Child Left Behind was great at this as they promised money to support the program and have yet in 5 years to hand a cent out to anyone but the government buddys.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Most of the problems come from the useless state and federal standards. Get rid of them; all they do is take up space that SHOULD be used to teach stuff that will actually help us one day.
Secondly, schools should not be saying 'our way is the only way'. If a student wants to take advanced courses, and is able, let them for christ's sake.
By shoving the ideal that everyone is intellectually equal down our throats, we lose a lot : the lazy bastards are still lazy bastards, but the ones who could have truly excelled have been brought down to the same level.
Schools really shouldn't be spending thousands of dollars on crappy technology, either. My school district just bought a bunch of HP Thin clients at around 460-480 dollars each. And I could build a similar computer for about 250. Instead of funneling my tax dollars to a computer company as crappy as HP, I think that the money should be put towards teacher's salaries, which, in my district, are supposedly the lowest in the state, but are at least well below the state average Have the a student organization to do the computer work; hell, half the time, me and my friends know more than the people who are getting paid, which is truly pitiful. But, you know, that's the price we pay for 'catching up with the rest of the state'.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
I had a theory that NCLB is really designed to take money out of the public school system. I'm just a teacher though and have little knowledge/decision making authority about education policy so I didn't put much weight in my theory. Last summer, though, I took a class in research methods and was surprised to hear the professor (a man of 40 years' standing in many levels of public education) advance the same theory as though it was pretty much common knowledge.
Do you know, for example, that students with severe special needs take the same tests as everyone else? How many specialists does that take, and how does that affect teacher-student ratios in the rest of the building? Staffing funds are not unlimited. Do you understand how much emphasis is placed on testing and Adequate Yearly Progress on high stakes tests? I've been reading some of the other posts about how to improve education and they all seem to rely on abandoning high stakes tests. There are many ways to evaluate progress and tell if someone should pass or fail a class, and if they fail I'm all for them having to repeat. It can be done without reliance on tests that determine (sometimes all by themselves) whether you pass or fail, and were created by people who haven't taught in years.
Many of the changes proposed are more like what happens in private schools which have less detailed oversight than public schools. Increase the federal and state government's role in schools to the point where education is impossible (we're not there yet) and people will get fed up and look to private schools (hello vouchers) as the answer. Maybe rightly so kids don't get 2 tries at their formative years.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Why is it that at a university, where you're supposedly learning things significantly more advanced and in-depth than in K-12, it's perfectly reasonable to spend less than four hours on campus a day as a "full time" student? For 30 weeks of the year?
This "maximize time in the classroom" mantra that's going around is sickening. I remember darn well what I was doing 80% of the time in K-12. Reading a book. Playing with my calculator. Daydreaming. Doodling. With a 3.9 GPA.
If the school day were to end at noon, it would not only keep the kids sane, but also provide time for them to pursue more meaningful activities. Music. Art. Athletics. Science clubs. Playing tag. Interacting with other people in a non-structured environment (such scandalous madness!).
As an added bonus, they would be significantly less brain-fried due to less hours sitting still, and therefore more attentive. They might also be more active with this reduced mental exhaustion and increased time, helping to stem the "obesity epidemic."
My mom is from Argentina, where school was just like that. 8 to noon, five days a week, with electives available in the afternoon. When she moved here, speaking very little English, she was bumped up a grade. It can work.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
If you understand addition, doing 100 problems is as easy as doing 10.
The same goes for subtraction, multiplication and division.
The PROBLEM is our attitude towards the classroom and students.
If the teacher assigns 100 addition problems to 100 students, and 80 students have no problems with them, what happens next?
Well, the next day another 100 problems are given to see if the 20 students who didn't get it right last time have managed to catch up.
And so on until you have kids who are bored because they spend a month repeating something they understood the first day and kids who still can't grasp it but cannot be left behind, re-assigned and their parents won't put in the effort to educate their darling angels.
You will not find a kid who is failing any subect who has parents who are interested and involved in his school work.
-Get rid of grade inflation: Bring back the bell curve. I've seen people get A's in high-school level American History who can't tell you who can't name 5 presidents...including recent ones. How can you tell if kids are learning if ALL of them get A's? This is worse than social promotion...at least if you pass the kid with a D he knows he's not performing...if you pass him through with a B he thinks he's "above average" (according to most schools' grade scales).
-Scale back athletics and (somewhat) the arts. Sports are great, but gyms are for athletics, schools are for learning. When every teacher is a coach, that's just that much less time being spent making sure kids are learning. Personally, I'd like to see organized sports out of public schools entirely, but I realize that's probably extreme to most people...and that it would never, ever, happen. As for theatre and band, they aren't nearly as bad as athletics, because they have some educational quality...but they still take away a little too much focus from academics, which is bad for the kids who aren't going to go into acting or music.
-Teach the darn teachers: First off, my wife is a teacher, and I respect almost anybody who chooses to go into the profession. That said, the teaching program at her university (and I've heard this is not the exception, but rather the rule) is a -joke-. I've seen the classes she had to take for a primary education degree, and seen some of her fellow students. It frightens me. How can you teach what you don't know? Now I realize why I sometimes felt smarter than my teachers (especially in late elementary/junior high)...I think in some cases I WAS. And high-school teachers should be required to have a major in their field of focus, and a minor in education, not the other way around.
-Tracking: I'm a believer in it...simply having AP classes and normal classes isn't good enough. I went to two high schools, one that did it and one that didn't. Face it, some kids are smarter than others, and when the whole class has to go at the pace of the slowest student, everybody loses. The only requirement, in my mind, is that parents should be able to move their kids to a higher track on request, but perhaps have to sign a waiver saying the school is not responsible if their child fails...since nowadays failing a student can actually bring legal action, or so I hear.
The school I attended that used tracking had 3 different groups for each core class. One for honors, one for general college prep, and one regular (though really it was usually remedial) class. The idea being that not everybody is college material...and this district had a pretty decent vo-tech program to go with it. So you had 3 different American History classes, 3 different algebra classes, etc. Granted, this is only feasible in larger schools.
Bring back the basics: Okay, I love multicultural education. I love finger painting. But the first several years our kids spend in school have one (academic) purpose...teach them to read and do basic math. There's a reason it used to be called grammar school. Most of the problem isn't at the high-school level...you can't build on a crappy foundation. Kids are getting there without basic reading and math skills, partly due to social promotion and partly because they aren't a focus anymore. How can you read your history textbook if you can hardly read? So now you're failing English AND history. Great. By 8th/9th grade it's far too late...might as well just let them drop out.
Focus on Vo-Tech: Not everybody is college material. Especially university material. As soon as we realize this, and as soon as universities stop accepting damn near everybody (ever look at the freshman dropout rate for state universities?), we will be better off. We can start focusing on giving those that aren't going to get a bachelor's some usable job skills, or prepare them for some form of trade school. There is nothing wrong with being a mechanic...we need them, and
If our system "sucks" so much, why are there SO many successful people who went through the system?
Sometimes people come are successful in spite of things, or because it was so bad that it motivated them to educate themselves.
Also, it very much depends on your definition of successful. Sometimes, people can makes lots of money and be "successful" yet be illiterate.
Most important should be the ability to think. Too many schools teach students how to take a test. That is readily observable under NCLB rules.
Critical reasoning skills generally don't get taught until college and by then it is usually far too late.
I feel fortunate that the Catholic schools I attended from grades one through twelve taught me thinking skills that would carry me far in life. Not only did it teach me to think, it also gave me a healthy dose of scepticism about organized religion.
Read his acceptance speech for the Teacher of the Year award in 1991 here. Really, he hits the issue square-on.
harmonious design
I also had a great public school education. My teachers taught me the basics and then taught me to think for myself. I can't believe that the only good public schools in the country are in my hometown, which leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily the schools themselves (except in the case of extremely poor areas that have trouble attracting qualified teachers).
... a good public education can be had, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. It does, however, require parental involvement, high expectations, and hard work.
What makes the schools I went to successful? It's not the amount of money spent per student (on the high end of average, and property taxes remain relatively low). It also isn't any sort of technology being used as a stand-in for good teaching. The important things are that the schools: 1) pay a fair salary and attract bright and interested teachers, and 2) are populated by children from highly intellectual families (probably one of the things that initially attracted the qualified teachers). My hometown is about 25 min outside Boston, and is largely composed of Boston professionals and university professors--groups that place a very high premium on scholastic success. Parents take a real interest in how their kids do in school and, in my experience, expect learning and schoolwork to happen inside *and* outside the classroom.
Don't be so damn quick to blame American schools and schoolteachers
I am 1. A successful product of public schools 2. A public school teacher
The educational system we have in place was designed to create a "classed" society: We need owners, we need management and we need factory workers. Most of the country was rural, so folks not working factories got basics to help them through life.
The system worked well: we had graduates ready to go on to college or report to work. (think about it bells told you when to start and stop, lunch was a defined timeframe - no flexing) Society has changed rapidly and schools today are on the verge of being antiquated.
The emphasis on standardized testing has not helped students. Teachers often focus on getting the child to pass the test without getting them to understand and manipulate the knowledge they gain. I have seen many students who can pass a test but ask them to do something different with the material like apply it in a new way, and they look like deer in headlights. The tests also have created "achievement gaps" between races and even the sexes.
I struggle with the idea of standardized testing: I know it has become a necessary evil, but there are students who miss incredible amount of class time because they have to take this test or that test to enable them to graduate.
I do not have the solution to save everything. If I did, I sure as hell would be sharing it with the country.
With that said, there is one over-riding factor that would help: PARENT INVOLVEMENT. If parents made an effort to stress the importance of education, grammar, math, spelling, DISCIPLINE etc. you would have a new generation of literate and educated students. They would also have the skills to adapt and learn.
Too often parents expect the schools to do their job. If they don't get directives at home, they sure as hell won't get them from people they see a couple hours a day.
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
The level of generalization I'm reading here about US schools being awful is a tad extreme. The whole question of education is complex and contrary to what many may believe, there is no ONE way that would satisfy and work for everyone.
I attended public school in NYC until 7th grade. I then moved to New Jersey and attended public school until graduating from high school. I can honestly say I think I received an excellent education. I went on to college and got a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
I think several people have already mentioned the following:
Self awareness - try it!
I think the problem in the United States is cultural. We are brought up to believe that we deserve the best of everything and we shouldn't have to work to get it. Our free enterprise system bombards us with "how can you possibly live without our product?" and "why wait? You deserve this". This leads to a generation of children thinking that they deserve good grades because we're all "winners". When I taught (physics) at a private University many of the students were agast that I would give out C's and D's. Even worse, parents would call and compain to me that junior received a failing grade!!
I've moved more than once a year in the first 20 years of my life and visited 5 different school systems alltogether. I've seen many education systems as a first hand experience. Top-Level ultra expensive private schools, reformistic primary school, integrated high school (with school uniform, corporal punishment and the whole sheebang), etc. ... errrm ... was considered one of the better ones.
The last school I attended was a waldorf school (wikipedia info not very detailed but feasable). I was there for the last few years of my school time.
In my first hand experience the anthroposophical waldorf education system beats any other hands down. It had concepts one hundred years ago that are considered "brand new stuff" (such as early second language education) by others today.
The Epochal system makes learning fun and the results just stick. I rember our classes with tremendous detail. And, rumors to the contrary, their scientific education is top notch, often due to the pratical and experimental orientation of classes. Art is a core component (not just a nice extra) training social skills from the first day. Teachers usually are hard working idealists doing their best to aknowledge each individual pupil and supporting their talents. I mentioned their math classes in another comment the other day, which gives a clear picture of the general compentence of the waldorf system.
My daugther attends waldorf school and the extra money it costs is more than worth it. And I live in germany where the education system is
The truth is:
Every improvement regular western school education has gone through within the last century allways was a step towards the waldorf way of doing things.
It is my first hand experience that they are the bar for everything else.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I totally agree.
The bit I quoted above reminded me of a Poli/Sci professor I had in junior college. One day, as he's going over the finer points of Constitutional law, one of the slackers at the back of the class raised his hand and asked, dead seriously, "Yeah, but do I really need to know any of this stuff?"
Without missing a beat, the prof responded, "Maybe, maybe not. The world will always need fry cooks."
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
This is what happens in the UK with the old Grammar/Secondary Modern division. Those of us who went to grammar school leave education unused to dealing with 90% of the supposedly less intelligent population, while the other kids are effectively told that they don't amount to much intelligence wise.
Streaming is a better system as kids do not have uniform ability across all subjects. It is quite possible to be great at maths but only average or worse at English and vice versa.
What absolute rubbish. The US system is pretty much the same as the system in nearly every other western nation and most asian nations. I challenge you to name one western country that doesn't have compulsory education (to around age 15), or a single country where people are forced into jobs based on testing.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I'm living in Denmark,
where the vast majority of the education system is public (even the universities are free of charge). That means that a very high percentage of the population gets an education. While many of the schools aren't as fancy as their US counterparts (the money is divided between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy areas), everybody is given the same opportunities. Where you live and who your parents are doesn't matter.
I think the biggest problem with the US system is that education has become an expense for the citizens. Not only do they have less or no time to work, they actually have to pay for being educated (bare in mind that the education of citizens makes a great, positive impact on a country in more ways than one). Here in Denmark (and Norway and Sweden too, I think) we actually *pay* people to study (SU).
Until June 11th, I was a high school math teacher at a public charter school in North Carolina. When I decided to not renew by contact for next year, it had nothing to do with money. It had everything to do with culture.
As a whole, our culture (or at least North Cakalaki's) does not value education. I don't need books, I don't need computers, I don't even need chairs. Give me some kids who come from families that value learning and education, and I'll help build an educated student. Give me a kid who won't even put in the effort to cheat on a a test or homework assignment, and there's jack shit I can do.
While culture may not be easy to change, it is the root of all our school's problems. Our schools are stupid enough, however, that, generally speaking, they don't attempt to either fix nor solve the problem. An essential clue that our systems are lacking is the shortage of math and science teachers. These people are, ideally, logical and rational people. Personally, the irrationality and lack of logic at the NC Department of Public Instruction was more than enough to cause me to leave the system. My only other alternative, would have been to sacrifice my standards and the quality of education.
What most of you missed is the parents. It is the parents responsibility to make sure their children are learning in school. It is the parents responsibilty to fill in the gaps they feel their children are missing at school. If your children are failing you need to look no further than yourself for the problem. We expect the schools to be doing our job. I feel the school system will give my children a base to learn on and I will expand on that base.
;-) )
Also, I think kids today are getting WAY TOO MUCH HOMEWORK. Just because my son learned algebra in 5th grade does not mean he will be a success in life. They also need to have fun, make friends, and most of all know how to play.
FYI I know my spelling and grammer suck, live with it, I do. (I code good
That's just nonsense.
I volunteer as a math tutor in a sixth-grade classroom, one hour a week. One kid has parents who are right there with him every evening, but he doesn't learn the material. I have spent many hours teaching him a particular algorithm (e.g., dividing two fractions), drilling him over and over, and then asking him to apply it. He can't do it.
This kid will go through life using a calculator to add two-digit numbers, just as another kid I know will always ride a wheelchair. Thank heavens that we have calculators and wheelchairs.
I can't be certain about yourself, but personally, I succeed in school despite their best efforts, not because of them. I was constantly bored, I learned the contents of the lesson in a matter of minutes instead of a matter of days, and so on. I was often caught unawares when it was my turn to read from the text or story because I was usually several pages ahead. In high school I finished the book (To Kill a Mockingbird, not a hard read) when everyone else was on chapter two. In grade four, I was lending novels to my teacher, and was surprised at how long it took her to bring them back.
That being said, I feel that the school system has failed me. I always burned through the knowledge that was given, then had to wait around for more. As the years dragged on, this gap because that much more pronounced, and eventually, I just stopped paying attention entirely. My grades plummeted from an A+ average to a C, I started failing courses because I didn't even bother to learn the material anymore, and my choice of university was based on prerequisites (the university I went to let just about anyone in).
If I were allowed to learn at my own pace, I could have finished the vast majority of my schooling by the age of 12. I could have been in university at 16, and graduated at 20. As it is, I didn't even graduate high school until I was 19, because of the hoops they made me jump through (had to get x hours in 'work experience' in my chosen field), with the result that I had moved across the country, worked for months, and travelled around the world, all on my own dime, before I'd even graduated high school.
Compare this with the experiences of my stepsiblings. When my stepbrother, probably about 14 or 15 at the time, came to stay with us for a summer (as he often did), we discovered, one day, that he was incapable of reading in any practical sense. He gave it a good try, but he just wasn't any good at reading, punctuation, grammar, spelling, or comprehension. I first noticed this, in fact, when he was unable to properly read aloud the title of a song. He was reading at what I would approximate as a second- or third-grade level, and he was about to enter high school! How is it possible that he has succeeded six grades beyond his capability? More amazingly, how is it possible that in the two months he was staying with us, he made more strides in his reading ability than in the previous six years of 'school'?
Another example is my stepsister. You and I probably don't even think about libraries. They're just libraries, right? Well when she was about the same age, 14 or 15 (and I was younger than her) she was staying with us for the summer, and my mother and I discovered that she didn't know what a library was, or rather, how it worked. She knew they kept books there, but that was it, and it was a great surprise to her to learn the mechanics. You don't have to pay for the books! You can keep them for two weeks, and then renew them if you're not done! Your card is free (your district may vary)! This was all a complete shock to her. How is it possible to get to your teen years without learning the mechanics of a library?
A lot of these examples, it's true, can be chalked up to parents. Her parents never took her to the library, his parents never got him into reading, and my mother routinely had a stack of six or eight novels books before we even thought about leaving the library. Regardless, isn't this something that schools are supposed to pick up on? Shouldn't a school notice that kids can't read? Or that kids can read faster and more avidly than any other student in their grade? Yet somehow, they don't. There's nothing in place for situations like this, and those rare teachers that do take the time and effort to help kids are never rewarded by the school system, and rarely rewarded by the parents.
Parents are fucked up, society is fucked up, those are both true, but the school system is no less fucked up, and it needs fixing just as well.
I'm told that, hundreds of years ago, people were highly literate. Even kids could read Shakespeare, apparently; at least Sam Johnson seemed fine with it at the age of 9. I understand that twelve-year-old Abraham Cowley was reading Spenser. And I've been told repeatedly that colonial American farmers were able to digest the Federalist Papers without much trouble at all. How is it that America's founders were able to defy the world's foremost superpower, and fashion a remarkable democracy that lasted almost until mid-twentieth century? Those were young men then. Have you seen todays' college rabble? Those people ought to be out doing great things, not spending drunk time in some dormitory. What happened?
I have a novel idea: Why don't we do what they did in colonial times? You know, schools of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Liberal education. The Classics. Mentors. How about that? Teach people how to think as soveriegn individuals. Let's shut down the state factory schools, with the state curricula and the private interests that shape them. Why not consider the things that Brownson once said: "[A]ccording to our theory the people are wiser than the government. Here the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give law to the government [...] to entrust government with the power of determining education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power of the master."
Why don't we do this? Because it would spell the end of our managed utopias, with their closely regulated, mass-production economies. Henry Ford, for one, needed people who were satisfied with stuff that came off of an assembly line; stuff that looked strikingly similar to what everyone else had. He needed people who would be satisfied with simple, repetitive jobs. It's more efficient to build things by robot than to rely on a specialist. We don't need more smart people, we have plenty already. We need robots, that's what Utopia is all about. And that's what public schools are good at. They are just fine for what they do; they don't need to be fixed. Kids go to school so that they can "get a good job" (even if it's a sinecure), not to enrich their mind or soul.
I tried actually learning at school a few times. I soon realized that, in school, learning has a deadline. It's managed by bells and by psychology. It only really matters that you learn to answer the right way on the final exam - then you are educated. Then you will be successful. Private and state quotas are met whether we learn to read or not.
If we want better students than anyone else in the global competition, all we have to do is tweak the machine a bit. Fiddle with it. But if our goal is truly educated people, then we need to scrap the current system and start over. My guess is that it won't happen.
Hold on right there. Most teachers suck. Don't take this as an insult, I've had enough great teachers to know that they are out there and you may well be one of them. They are, however, not in the majority.
Most teachers fall into one of three categories.
students that want to learn, DO learn
Whenever people say that to defend a teacher's work it just boggles my mind. Demonstrating that some students in your class have learned the material doesn't say anything about you as a teacher. Of course those who want to learn will learn. They don't need a teacher for that, they need a book. If they're motivated, they'll search out the information and do whatever they have to in order to learn it. It isn't the teacher's job to recite information: the challenge is in finding out why the students who don't get it aren't getting it and rephrase the information or provide examples in such a way that they do get it. If you're teaching children, it's also your job to present the information in such a way that will stimulate their curiosity so that they will want to learn.
I'm not saying every child will become interested and learn with a good teacher, but with good teachers most of them do. If you have more than 2 or 3 problem students in a class of 30, you need to find someone else to blame other than the children.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Not at all.
Getting rid of public education isn't accountability; it pretty much ensures that, in fact, the status quo will continue -- that rich kids who now go to well funded schools and have parents that can provide them with time, attention, books, and tutoring will do better than poor kids whose schools tend to be poorly funded and whose parents are often too busy working, and lack education themselves, to provide a nurturing educational environment at home. Only without public education, the poor won't stand a chance. With the possible exception of a few charities here and there, the only kind of school I can see filling in for public school for the poor would be religious schools, which is fine for families who want that kind of environment, but no so hot for those who don't. And don't forget that kids taught in a religious school just might not be as informed about evolution.
So, yeah, arguing that the way to improve education is by eliminating public education is out.
And self education really has nothing to do with accountability. Each person absorbs information differently. Some people are excellent at teaching themselves things; other people need to be guided in it. And it often tends to be different for different people. I need little to no handholding when facing something new and unfamiliar on a computer, but heaven help me (and anyone within my immediate vicinity) if I tried to do much more than add a quart of oil to my car.
Once I learned how to read, I read up a storm and could read probably at high school level in elementary school (and perhaps the college level in middle school). But I had to be taught how to read. I didn't learn it on my own. There are some geniuses who somehow manage to teach themselves to read. If I'd been left in a room with a bunch of books but never taught to read, I'd probably still be playing with fingerpaint.
I think that there are a lot of useful answers beyond getting rid of public education or forcing people to teach themselves.
Here are some ideas:
1) Value teachers, and give them support. From what I understand, teaching is not an easy job, and many teachers get hell from students, and hell from the student's parents. Although people keep saying that teachers are heroes, they sure aren't treated like them. This may be why teacher burnout is so common.
In my opinion, the number one way to improve education is to prevent teacher burnout.
As long as there's teacher burnout, a lot of teachers who are great at teaching, but not great at dealing with administrative politics, angry parents and unruly students will leave. In their wake will be people who either love teaching so much that they're willing to stay in their position (although they tend to be consistently haggard), or people who are great at all the other stuff -- politics, sucking up to the administration/parents, discipline. Now, in high school I was lucky enough to be mostly in AP/Honors level classes, which meant that the students were more likely to behave, tended to care about learning, and the teacher was generally a better teacher than most. But my teacher for PE was another story -- agressive, disciplinarian, and about as mentally flexible as a cinderblock. I'm not an idiot and I tend to do well in most of my classes, but I got a C in health because the focus was exclusively on rote memorization (I remember that I got three questions on a quick marked as incorrect because we were supposed to list three items in order of relevance or something -- like I remember anything from health class -- and all three were marked wrong because I had one out of order).
Okay, I'm getting a little off track here, but my main point is that teachers aren't really valued or respected, kids aren't taught to value or respect their teacher, and in many cases teachers are seen as the obstacle that's keeping Timmy from getting in Harvard, rather than as someone trying desperately to give him the intellectual tools that would be needed
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
"The best situation for that kid would be for his parents to get interested and involved in his school work and get him evaluated to see if there is some reason that he cannot grasp basic concepts."
Maybe you should reevaluate the reading comprehension portions of your own education. He specifically cited a child that he is tutoring, noting their *involvement* on a nightly basis, actively working with their child to improve the situation. They were taking actions that included private tutoring. I find it highly unlikely that they've engaged private tutoring and haven't considered any sort of learning disability testing.
Further, you may want to review your own post. You are focusing entirely on everything but your last sentence. However, that single statement is what the parent poster was responding to. See, you made an absolute statement:
"You will not find a kid who is failing any subect who has parents who are interested and involved in his school work."
The respondant invalidated your absolute statement with all he needed to: a verifiable anecdote. Had you made a more reasonable assertion, along the lines of "most of the kids failing their schoolwork don't have parents who are involved". That would have set the required level of refutation a bit higher.
In the future, if you want people to focus on the rest of your statement, you probably want to drop the absolute judgements that are clearly invalidated by the experience of thousands.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
- 50% based on classroom performance improvement over the year. The second test of the kids should take place months before summer break, to prevent the pure teach-the-test problem.
- 30% based on school performance improvement over the year (to encourage sharing of lesson plans and cooperation). May be further subdivided into improvement relative to other schools in district, state, or nationwide. Lack of cooperation is one of the whining complaints always given as a reason for not having merit pay, and this is an easy solution.
- 20% based on parent and student feedback. This needs to be on a curve, probably within the district, since there will always be that percentage of crazy parents that dislike any teacher their kids have or who are upset when their kids don't always get the undeserved A.
For administrators:
- Replace the portion based classroom improvement with relative ratio of money under their control to money that makes it to the classroom, relative to other schools in the district/state/nation. Until you start measuring and negatively impacting administrator pay for a lack of efficiency, the current bloated eduocracy will continue to burn money inefficiently.
Other things:
- Stop this crazy extra long summer break thing. Yes, kids need a break to be kids. No, it doesn't have to be three months long, with the resultant loss of retention.
- Keep teachers with the same class longer (i.e., follow a class through grades 1, 2, and 3). Increases the accuracy of any measurement of improvement.
- Admit that some students learn differently than others, and put the students in classes/tracks based on that. Get those that learn visually together, etc.
- School vouchers. It's one sure-fire way of getting parents more involved, and one great measurement of parental feedback. If all the kids move to another school, you can bet you kinda suck. I have not heard one cogent argument against this (the typical one is that it takes money away from the schools, which is bull, because no voucher program ever had the voucher value anywhere near what the schools got per student - only if the administrative overhead is so ridiculously high that it's greater than the difference between per-student funding and voucher value is there any damage, and the solution then isn't to not use vouchers, but to fix the overhead!).
- Long or no tenure period. It's ridiculous that after just 3 years in some places, poor teachers can have a lock on their job. If you don't have the ability to get rid of the bottom 5% of performers, guess what you end up with?
As an "educational libertarian" (I believe that we should fund education through college - but only when a system is in place that creates efficient spending) I'm disgusted at the morons who think that we can solve the problem by throwing money at it. Guess what? Per-student funding in the U.S. is quite high. Efficiency of that money is extraordinarily low. And the "teachers" unions (esp. the CTA) is made up of mostly administrators! Their grab for additional funding is all about self-preserving their bloated bureaucracy (as an aggregate behavior in the face of no measurement of efficiency).
Until we start measuring what we want to see - improvement, efficiency - we will never see those things and we will continue to throw good money after bad.
> cat ~/.signature | grep -v bullshit
>
Homeschoolers exceed national average for 2003 ACT.
Sorry, couldn't find data for last year. Not sure how often this stuff is compiled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Those who lack natural social ability should be required to take some socializing classes. Offshore outsourcing has made brains almost a cheap commodity. What is left is more social-oriented. You cannot as easily find jobs being a dark-corner nerd anymore.
Table-ized A.I.
There are several problems with the educational system in the US. To many for me to try to address all of them here. They range from incompetent parents, to unreasonable expectations, to the perpetuation of every kind of "ism" known to the human species. But, there is one key problem that can be addressed.
The simple fact is that our k-12 educators are by and large incompetent. As an early poster pointed out, the bell curve has a left end. If you look at SAT and ACT scores you find that the majority of education majors have the lowest scores of any group that manages to graduate from college. Of course, they all graduate with very high GPAs due to grade inflation. (The university I went to, the University of Utah, changed the way they grant honors. It is not based on raw GPA, but on on the difference between your grade in a class and the average grade in the class. The did this because of the rampant grade inflation in the college of education. )
There is a simple way to solve this problem. Double the salaries of everyone working in education. That's correct. Double the salaries of the incompetents. Why? If you double their salaries then the best (or at least not the worst) students will go into education. Over 5 to 10 years the good will push out the bad and our education system will have a chance to begin to work properly.
Oh yeah, one other thing that could help right now, don't let the coaches of the schools competitive sports teams teach real students. The real students don't deserve to be abused that way. It is bad enough to have to take classes from incompetents. It is cruel to subject students to people who are not only incompetent, but stupid, arrogant, and really don't care at all about anything but their teams.
I didn't mean for my observations to be in contradiction to your suggestions, they were just observations, take them any way you wish. I happen to agree with most of your suggestions. One thing that always interested me about the Taiwan system in the 1950's and 1960's is that they purposely separated out all the children with the highest test scores in the entire nation, plucked them from their hometown schools and placed them all into one special school. These students received special care and were groomed to be future government leaders. Of course the experiment failed when these kids reached college age and began to have radical ideas which threatened the very government that had nurtured them. Most of these kids left to study in America. Some have now come back to Taiwan and taken on the leadership positions they were meant to hold. In America our egalitarian society looks down upon separating kids out based on achievement or natural intellectual ability. But parents do it anyway by withdrawing their children out of public schools and sending them to expensive private schools which essentially achieves the same thing the Taiwan system was trying- creating an elite class of technocrats.
Start with The Schools Our Children Deserve : Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards", and Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. After you have read these you will be much better prepared to speak of improving our children's education.
These are just two books from a vast library that shows alternatives to society's choice for education. Suffice to say that I do not believe society has always chosen wisely.
But it goes deeper than that. Read The Natural Child if you are a parent and wish to make a real difference.