31–40 of 143 posts
As more families choose to eschew government schools, it's hard to argue that he was not ahead of his time with his observations.
> 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…
Is our children learning?
I’ll start with your grammar and end with a look out my window, where smoke from forest fires currently fills the sky.
> The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little they do have is transitory Maybe kids are just not curious about what the author teaches? As a parent, I have to admit that kids are not necessarily curious about what we value. My kids are not curious about STEM, at least not yet. They are, however, are very curious about how to use TNT in minecraft, or how to learn cartwheel. It's unfortunate (or foru…
Very much this, and it shouldn't even be a shocking revelation to most people. Nobody I know in my life enjoyed every subject they were taught in school. At best, they had 1 or 2 subjects they could be called curious about. Many had none (that were taught in school). And even then, the schooling I went through hardly rewarded curiousness. You were incentivized to cram information to pass tests, so that you could get…
I thought there was a solution: teachers give good questions for homework and exams. When I was in school, I rarely got repeated questions. Most questions challenged my understanding of fundamentals. It's hard to believe that people who only cram can ever get decent grades in tests like IIT's JEE, China's National Entrance Exam, or Japan's university entrance exams, or Korea's national entrance exams. As for the US, it's hard to imagine that anyone can solve decently hard problems in textbooks like Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics or Cormen et el's Introduction to Algorithms (The US does not mandate challenging problems in high schools, so I use examples from college).
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.
Wow, it's wild to see this here. About 20 years ago, a grief counselor I was seeing after the death of my mom shared this article with me after I told him about how school felt pointless and cruel. I stopped seeing that grief counselor not long after (I think my family couldn't afford to see him) but the impact of this essay was deep. It was the first piece of writing I had read by 14 that critiqued something as mund…
> it's not quite as well written as I remember,
Maybe because it is a speech? :-)
> What follows is the text of the speech he gave upon being named Teacher of the Year.
We don't know if the words were said exactly as written, or how it was delivered, which often is more important than the text itself.
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.
(May sound snarky but a genuine question.)
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…
> Here we are 25 years after Gatto gave this speech, our society has not "disintegrated" yet It really depends on how you define disintegrated. What he mentioned has manifested over the last 30 years. Slowly, and quietly. Now, it has come to a head. The lunatics actively arguing parents should have no place in schooling, the obsession of children with transient media figures, the state of school bells determining the…
This has been the central theme of progressive education movement in the US. IIRC, Jo Boaler has been advocating that kids could discover most of the maths by exploring and learning by themselves. I fundamentally disagree with this belief, though. It took thousands of years for our greatest minds to simplify our maths to its current incarnation. Discovering "everything" by myself wastes my time and reduces my chance of working on something more meaningful.
Off topic but why are there so many fairly fresh accounts posting hot takes that reach high on the front page lately?
It was well written and resonated with my experiences and what I found school to be, as a child growing up. I thought it was a good submission for HN.
> "just let the kids learn by themselves" This has been the central theme of progressive education movement in the US. IIRC, Jo Boaler has been advocating that kids could discover most of the maths by exploring and learning by themselves. I fundamentally disagree with this belief, though. It took thousands of years for our greatest minds to simplify our maths to its current incarnation. Discovering "everything" by my…