Earlier quoted context omitted.
Schools used to be designed exactly this way, with kids of varying ages/abilities all in the same room learning and teaching each other. It's actually quite successful and more aligned with how we are wired to learn (tribal/community style). The Prussian model we use currently was not designed to create more educated people, it was designed to most efficiently create factory workers. That's an important factor to kee…
All those 18th Century Prussian factories? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
121–130 of 143 posts
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discipline is dead here (US). Very few people have discipline as adults, so the kids don't learn it either. Society doesn't value it, so it generally doest pay off. I used to show up early to work, took my responsibilities seriously, and not take shortcuts. Guess what? I get paid the same either way, so what's the point? We're "fat and happy", so something would have to change culturally.
I used to think so too, but I changed my view after seeing how high schools work here in the bay area. The schools here are super demanding, and students work crazy hours. It looks to me that the US schools are great for top students: demanding projects, strict disciplines, wide selection of extracurricular activities, abundant resources like AP courses and college programs, access to world-famous labs, professors an…
I'm not sure how we can measure the number of students with discipline. GPA isn't a good measure as some kids may get As easily while a less gifted but dedicated student might get a B. Even measuring advanced placement isn't great since not all places have that tract and you still miss those less gifted but dedicated students. Plus, we seem to have a lot of grade inflation over the past 50+ years, which could mean it's easier.
There are certainly some students who are really disciplined/dedicated about their school work, but I would guess the number is less than 15%.
I did pretty well in school, but likely could have done better if I were really disciplined about school work. I usually rushed through homework and spent just a reasonable amount of time on projects. I'd rather be playing video games or sports, or hanging out with friends. I'd put extra work in on stuff I was interested in and probably learned just as much outside the classroom as in. Even stuff like school band I would rarely practice and still do well (sort of forced into it because the school would give busy work to the non-band members during the occasional practices during school hours). I went to a private school and participated in advance classes, and I still think 15% is about the number of students who studied hard and the rest of us could either do it easily or some would cheat.
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their easily could be, we just can't imagine as a society putting this much effort into caring for the young. Especially those of the wrong skin color. The US is the wealthiest country in the world, we could easily change some of the governments wealth distribution to educate all students 8:1
Still no. You would need to triple the number of teachers and greatly increase the number of rooms across almost all public schools in America to get those kinds of numbers. There simply aren't enough people, or enough space to do so. The only viable solution is to find a better way of educating children in these larger groups.
"There simply aren't enough people, or enough space to do so."
The people part is the issue. The teachers I know hate the bureaucracy and policies. Private schools seem to be better at hiring, even when they pay less. Dealing with certain parents is a nightmare too.
If you have a classroom made for 25-30 students, it wouldn't be too hard to partition it in half, then have two instructors leading each half of the room.
I went to a robotics class and a game design class as a kid and they both had something like 20 students with two instructors. It went fine. Sure some of it was introductory instruction, but then we'd build our own stuff as individuals or teams. So there might not need to be much reconfiguration at all.
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that particular incident was not mentioned in the parent comment. But since you’ve brought it up, what else do you call an organized campaign to assault, threaten to assault, vandalize the private property of, threaten the family of, defame, and/or falsely level criminal charges against public officials? https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/13/school-b... “At an Illinois school board meeting, a man…
Governments don't make blanket statements about all parents in response to "a man" getting arrested. Activist school boards working with government enforcement are directly destroying lives. This isn't some "old people yelling at clouds" that you make it out to be. There's a reason so many school boards are being flipped. It's a response to the obvious hostility towards parents and people are actually waking up to it…
Project Veritas has been caught lying in their reporting (deceptively editing footage, misrepresenting court records, etc.) too many times for me to take them seriously.
Their wikipedia page is particularly damming, every allegation lovingly well-cited: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Governments don't make blanket statements about all parents in response to "a man" getting arrested. Activist school boards working with government enforcement are directly destroying lives. This isn't some "old people yelling at clouds" that you make it out to be. There's a reason so many school boards are being flipped. It's a response to the obvious hostility towards parents and people are actually waking up to it…
Project Veritas has been caught lying in their reporting (deceptively editing footage, misrepresenting court records, etc.) too many times for me to take them seriously. Their wikipedia page is particularly damming, every allegation lovingly well-cited: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
https://news.yahoo.com/connecticut-ag-launches-probe-school-...
Apparently the vertias video was good enough to get the AG to launch a probe.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/private-school-staffer-pla...
Apparently the veritas video was good enough to get this person put on leave.
Took me 30 seconds to find these. I have a feeling you're going to shift the goalposts again though.
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#126I just don't think I can agree with Gatto's main premise that schools aren't educating students or that a formal education serves no purpose in the modern world. We have seen world wide that schools are THE most effective tool for lifting people out of poverty. We also see that the countries with the best schools are dominating the world economy. There are also plenty of counter examples we can find: entire countries…
>We have seen world wide that schools are THE most effective tool for lifting people out of poverty. We also see that the countries with the best schools are dominating the world economy. What does this even mean? The US spends more an education than anyone else and it dominated the world's economy because it's blown up everyone else who tried. This is a tautology. The countries with the schools people who rank schoo…
I would like to see the numbers. I want to believe schooling really "changes lives" like the universities selling student loans want you to believe (I myself being a victim of this). However, I have a sneaking suspicion that if we took a cohort of high school students who weren't particularly interested in so-called hard learning and taught them valuable trade work it would have a similar effect. Sure, you can wrap trades in education to make your point, but I think GPs point was that formal beyond high school education is what lifts people out of poverty.
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#127> My children watch fifty-five hours of television a week, according to recent reports. Would love to have been able to see a source on that whopper- even in the days before most had computers, I don't see any reporting showing ~8 hours a day of consumption for children.
quick google search: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-... I know that the US census had the average at like 6 hrs a day. No matter what the real number is... its a lot
Yeah I saw that but those numbers are by household, not children-specific. ~8 hours is a lot to claim for an average child (even in 1990) and I wasn't able to find anything backing it up.
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've taught in schools from all corners of San Francisco, and can't agree more with majority of what was said in this article, except maybe the money part*, I'll leave a footnote for this. One day when I was volunteering at one of these schools, a student came up to me showing a picture of a robot how cool it was. When I mentioned that it was relatively easy to build, he got super stoked, told his friends and before…
You have a viewpoint that is shaped by a very niche experience. Your experience was with students that happened into an interest that was itself a project that can drive learning in a handful of subjects. This kind of approach doesn't work so well when the subjects that need to be learned don't lend themselves so well to exciting projects or even when the students don't get to self-select based on their interests.
> This kind of approach doesn't work so well when the subjects that need to be learned don't lend themselves so well to exciting projects or even when the students don't get to self-select based on their interests.
Awesome, as this is really one the core things the original post wanted us to discuss:
_Should we_ require students to study so many things that they don't find interesting?
Some of the original post's thoughts:
> It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
And:
> “How will they learn to read?” you say, and my answer is: “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the life that unfolds around them.
My take is unoriginal, even summarized by someone else's quote: “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” -- Leonardo da Vinci
And if really can be attributed to da vinci, then one can say same core energy really existed in minds over half a millenia ago.
So I assert that while that this experience granted was indeed an awesome experience, there's a large swath of folks pushing for this "project-based" learning, and more self-driven learning paths.
https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl
What's the harm in allowing students to connect the dots on their own?
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#129> But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic — because the community life that protects the dependent and the weak is dead. Too many people has apocalyptic views of the world. And to push for individualistic behavior when you think that your society is disintegrating seems to just accelerate any problems that may exists. 30 yea…
> I have yet to see a child that is not curious, you need some war-level trauma to stop children curiosity. I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but that doesn't reflect my experience at all. Some children are indeed curious, but I wouldn't say anywhere near most. Saying that only serious trauma stops curiosity comes off as overly optimistic, but what do I know. After all, would you make the same statement about adults…
> If adults aren't that curious, but children are, then why is that?
perhaps somewhere along the line, the curiosity got squashed. That happened to me science and math in high school with boring classes. I loved science before then.
Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a bit of a strawman. I don’t know Jo Boaler but I have never encountered the idea that students could rediscover everything from scratch. It’s clearly a dumb idea. A much more common position is that self-paced exploration — but using the latest textbooks and also a variety of teaching styles — could interest students much more than “no child left behind” style common curricula which constrain both th…
Good luck in a classroom of 30 kids of wildly varying abilities and interests doing "self paced exploration". Maybe 1/100 kids would actually choose to learn any traditional school subject. Structured learning is required for the other 99/100 to learn important and valuable parts of human knowledge that they wouldn't pursue otherwise.
>Good luck in a classroom of 30 kids
I think you get close to the real problem with this assumption. Classes need to be smaller. Even at a university, where the people are supposed to be more disciplined and attentive than a random middle school class, only the lectures are held for many people, and the practical stuff is done in much smaller groups.
In order to have more successful social systems, we need more resources in it. More money, and more people whose job is to care about the other people.