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Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

thesunmagazine.org

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Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#131

Post by npteljes »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #25
fiftyfifty wrote: post #23

I 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. This is false. Schooling has had nothing to do with it, capitalism is what has lifted the most people out of poverty, not schooling.

This is false. Capitalism made children work from age 5. I do like it, all things considered, but it seems to work best (for all) with strong social programs and a load of protections and regulations.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#132

Post by Jcowell »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #73
giantg2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Those who work in group will always achieve and learn a lot more than those who do it alone, unless the latter are truly exceptional." Many people in the US who have done group projects at school will disagree - you typically end up with dead weight or overbearing partners (it tends to get better when you get out of the compulsory school years). With the right partners, I completely agree though. In my undergrad and…

I'd wager that it is the sense of individualism that causes the feeling of carrying dead weight as the dead weight does not feel any sense of responsibility towards the group. Given what I have read about such individualistic behaviour, I am inclined to believe that public transportation as found in Denmark wouldn't function in the US simply because it requires a form of trust between citizen and state. You just ente…

This is used in NY for it’s Select Bus Service Lines

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#133

Post by theptip »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #75
theptip wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

I’m probably a radical, but I’m open to not forcing children to learn things that someone deems “important to learn” which they are not interested in.

I think it’s great to give kids a taster of many subjects, but from my education I’m pretty sure that 90% of what I was taught was useless. The STEM stuff I would have done anyway because I loved it. And I have later come back to full in blanks in history etc. (Though I do acknowledge it’s hard to tell whether school builds a substrate or pattern for general learning, even if the raw facts were useless at the time.)

I had peers that were forced to learn languages, English lit, maths, etc, and then left school to be tradesmen or musicians, where they used approximately zero of what they were forced to learn. (And trade school starting earlier could have taught them the trigonometry or scales they needed very quickly).

The problem is we are trying to manufacture high school graduates rather than crafting or sculpting them.

I agree that the existing classroom model doesn’t work for this new way of thinking about learning. Siblings have done a better job of arguing for specific options than I could. But yes, I’d rather try something with different structure. For example, can you stream kids by interest rather than by age group? 30 kids all into history, with varying ages, might learn better than 30 7th-graders all trying to learn the curriculum on WW2 or whatever was decided is “important they know” and which most don’t care about.

Everyone has their own pet definition of what is “important to learn” in school, mine is the meta-level “learning is easy and fun if you care about what you are studying”.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#134

Post by albrewer »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #81
fiziks_hckr wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

Small class sizes don't just help, they are essential for this type of setup, which is why it can never work at scale and will not be relevant to 99% of kids in the country. There simply aren't enough teachers.

Increase teacher salary to $100k a year and cap teacher to student ratio at 20 and see how hard it is to hire them. I'd go straight back to school to get a teaching cert to change careers, even though it'd be a pay cut. Imagine getting the best and brightest people pounding down the school doors to teach. For reference, that would triple the starting teacher's pay at my local high school.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#135

Post by theptip »

zozbot234 wrote: post #62
theptip wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

"NCLB" curricula focus on the basics for a reason - we're failing to teach those basic skills. Maybe we need a system that's not so terrible for the "average" below-students (as opposed to those who expressly get skilled teaching attention as 'special-needs' cases).

There’s definitely a “Seeing Like A State” point on legibility here. NCLB tries to make the performance of disparate state/county education systems more legible to the federal government, so that it can apply carrots and sticks to “improve” (for some definition of the word) performance.

By simplifying the problem to performance at this curriculum, you gain the ability to measure, but also corrupt the thing you are trying to measure, by forcing schools to teach to the test instead of teaching better (where there are direct tradeoffs between the two).

I think NCLB fails to recognize that education is something which benefits from local expertise, which means you need to fund teachers/schools and get out of the way, rather than try to standardize it. I recognize this is very hard politically.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#136

Post by theptip »

lupire wrote: post #114
zozbot234 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NCLB" curricula focus on the basics for a reason - we're failing to teach those basic skills. Maybe we need a system that's not so terrible for the "average" below-students (as opposed to those who expressly get skilled teaching attention as 'special-needs' cases).

We are failing to teach those basic skills not because of bad schools, but because of bad home environments (food, safety, etc)

You’re making this statement with way more confidence than the data supports. Both are significant.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#137

Post by TaupeRanger »

theptip wrote: post #133
TaupeRanger wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m probably a radical, but I’m open to not forcing children to learn things that someone deems “important to learn” which they are not interested in. I think it’s great to give kids a taster of many subjects, but from my education I’m pretty sure that 90% of what I was taught was useless. The STEM stuff I would have done anyway because I loved it. And I have later come back to full in blanks in history etc. (Though…

It is "radical" for a reason. Look at how bad things are right now, and multiply it by 10 if you decide to get rid of all curriculum that kids aren't inherently interested in:

- Goodbye to any understanding of politics or social studies - Goodbye to historical knowledge - Goodbye to any understanding of our own bodies (except for kids who are interested in animals or medicine?) - Goodbye to classical literature - Goodbye to economics and personal finance - Goodbye to being able to appropriately and accurately express oneself when speaking and writing

ALL of these are very important parts of human knowledge that are essential to high functioning in society, but 99% of children have absolutely no interest in them whatsoever if left to their own devices.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#138

Post by theptip »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #137
theptip wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m probably a radical, but I’m open to not forcing children to learn things that someone deems “important to learn” which they are not interested in. I think it’s great to give kids a taster of many subjects, but from my education I’m pretty sure that 90% of what I was taught was useless. The STEM stuff I would have done anyway because I loved it. And I have later come back to full in blanks in history etc. (Though…

It is "radical" for a reason. Look at how bad things are right now, and multiply it by 10 if you decide to get rid of all curriculum that kids aren't inherently interested in: - Goodbye to any understanding of politics or social studies - Goodbye to historical knowledge - Goodbye to any understanding of our own bodies (except for kids who are interested in animals or medicine?) - Goodbye to classical literature - Goo…

I suppose we're unlikely to convince each other here. I'll just note that your list of "goodbyes" seems a bit overly-apocalyptic to me, and it's not even clear to me that many students leave the education system with meaningful knowledge of more than a couple items on your list. The students that do leave with knowledge of economics or classical literature almost certainly were interested in those things when they were introduced.

> 99% of children have absolutely no interest in them whatsoever if left to their own devices.

This would be the crux of our disagreement; I think that ultimately this depends on empirical investigation. It's hard to do such studies, since SES and other confounds are extremely hard to control for. I'm sure that 99% of kids have absolutely no interest in the current curriculum, but that's precisely my point; the curriculum is horrifically boring in many places if you don't connect with the subject matter.

I do think it's reasonable to note that most other developed countries have better public education systems than the US, and for the most part follow a fairly traditional model, which demonstrates that there are gains to be had in the US without revolutionizing the system. I'm in favor of trying to achieve that too.

And I'd of course not advocate for burning the whole thing down and starting with something new; I think experiments could be made with, say, one day a week of "interest-based learning" along the lines I put forth above, while still keeping the core curriculum alive.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#139

Post by calculatte »

thebooktocome wrote: post #124
calculatte wrote: post #96

Earlier 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

It's funny how everyone who claims PV "deceptively edits" is forced to retract those statements because there is no evidence of such.

Wikipedia isn't, and has never been, a valid source of truth. PV has won every time such claims have been brought to court. So cite all the biased articles you like. They post the videos. Edit all you want, those words came from those educator's mouths. That contains more truth than you'll ever find in a news article attempting to spin a narrative.

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