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Oh darn, another thread I missed earlier but I can't help but comment as I have mentioned before on Babble my opinion is the whole school system needs to be bombed and started over again.
First don't measure student performance. Just teach or provide opportunity to learn. If the child is not learning then it should be examined why. You don't have to measure on a scale to see how much percentage a child has learned to know if there is a problem. Look at it, is it the subject, is it the teacher, the home environment, the peers, the way it is being taught. Are there behaviour issues that need to be addressed before a child is taught the skill or skills (trying to teach a child that says no is like trying to feed an anorexic person - they want that control you can't make me learn, you can't make me eat). Then come up with a solution.
Second relax the damn standards. Kids have to go into grade one reading or else they flunk term one (oh sorry, it is a progress report for term one now, likely because the standards are so high they didn't want to give grades for the first term). My mother was a primary teacher. I learned to read at 3, my brother was 7. Some kids just aren't ready at a certain stage. If they are ready then teach or expose, if they are not have realistic expectations of when they should be doing something before deciding it is a problem.
How do you know if kids have learned? Because they can do, they can apply their knowledge. You don't need to grade or measure or pick out specific tasks that a child does when they are 7 and can pick up a book and read it. Look they can read. Prior to the final act when kids struggle you know it, you can see it when they are trying to do something and just can't. When they are ready to learn something and it just isn't coming to them. They get frustrated, upset, they keep trying and it's not working. Any subject can be brought forth in something of interest. Someone really likes Italy. So plan a trip. Have them read about places to visit (reading, history), figure out a timetable to visit places (time, measurement, distance). Figure out what they need that will be different (social studies). The list can go on. After they have learned about Italy sit and talk with them, ask them about the different aspects and how they came to their conclusions. You will see relatively quickly what they understood and what they didn't. Even better go on the trip with them. If there are parts they don't want to do or parts that are not enjoyable either change it to make it enjoyable figure out why and you will see where they are stuck.
When someone is stuck it is not a bad thing, as the school system likes to point out with it's grades and pass fail system. When someone is stuck it is an opportunity to problem solve, for the teacher, the parent and the child to figure out what to do next.
The last statement is about "enhanced" performance. Why is what is good enough for the kid not good enough. Why do we have to make them better? Some years I learned absolutely nothing. Other years I learned 2-3 years worth of stuff. Such is the ebb and flow of life. My child right now is 6 months old. He is not crawling, he is not rolling over, he hates tummy time. He sits okay but not as well as other babies and up until two weeks ago could have cared less about toys though other babies his age were playing with toys ages ago. I do not care, I am not worried. Even though these are the building blocks of all learning and everything he will learn is going to be based on what he picks up in the next 2-3 years I don't care. He is walking like a 10-12 month old right now (ie hanging onto people), he is extremely social and can communicate better than a lot of 2 year olds. I am not overjoyed at his enhanced learning in these areas just as I am not concerned about the areas he is behind in. He is learning at his own level. He is happy, he is smart and he is showing no signs of frustration, anger or upset in the learning process. I am fairly well versed in development (as teachers should be) so if there is a serious problem I would spot it or if there were issues that he was experiencing I would spot it. I work with kids with special needs and I hear time and time again, I just knew that something was wrong. I just knew in my gut. People have got to learn to trust not only their gut when they know something is wrong but their gut when they know something is right. So many parents are so worried about if there kid is measuring up, if they are as good or better than other people's kids. They lose focus on if their kid is okay because they are so focused on if their kid is another kids okay. Why is there such an emphasis on getting better, being better. Oh yeah because people have been indoctrinated into thinking that people are only valuable when they do better than what they have done before or others have done. And they are only valuable when they do good on one scale that all kids are compared with when there should be a hundred scales or a thousand. Or none at all.
People lose the forest through the trees. These things that the kids are learning are not tasks in and of themselves, they are building blocks of much larger tasks. Instead of teaching a task and being so focused on learning the task in one specific way the focus should be on the entire task. How is this student going to get to the larger task. I don't care if a child learns to read with phonics, with site words, with animated alphabet. It is the reading that is the final task. People get caught up with, well he can't sound out a word. Well he can sight read 1,000 words maybe he doesn't need to sound them out anymore because he can take words he knows and just put them together. Oh but we would like him to sound out words. Focus on the goal and realize that the smaller tasks may help lead them to the larger goal or they may not.
Kids learn, just expose them to the information and they naturally learn but people think kids have to be tested to make sure they are learning the right things in the right way in the right order in a right amount of time. All beliefs passed to us through the school system.
I think the better question would be "how can we change our schools so we can educate ourselves, the adults about the each child in the system".
According to Mel Hurtig's 1990s book, Pay the Rent or Feed the Kids, there are reasons why kids from better off families have a head start on reading and writing and overall development by as early as kindergarten. Their parents are able to afford to surround them with stimulating environments and provide them with learning experiences most kids in poor families tend not to have. It could be the difference between having access to reading and writing materials, or visiting an outdoor gardens or a zoo. For some kids their first real learning experiences don't begin until kindergarten instead of pre-school or a family vacation or whatever. It's all about life chances as Marx described and as Malcolm Gladwell tells people today.
This is a bit of a misnomer. If you are talking about parts of the world where there is no school because of poverty and family situations where the family themselves have no access to higher education concepts of course the child will never achieve higher education concepts. But herein lies the rub. It is not up to us to take the child away from the family that is just not capable of passing on the information because they don't have the higher learning concepts (or are not passing it on because they don't have the higher level concept that all people are equal and have an equal ability to learn and achieve something in this world) it is up to us to educate the family so that they can learn the higher level concepts themselves and pass this learning onto the their children.
It is the belief of the school system that learning needs to take place by people who are smarter than the family and have the specific steps and strategies that are correct to teach the child A=B=C that the family doesn't have. I mean the family teaching or helping to teach the child to get to C is not going to work because they don't have the A=B bit that the school does.
What you are talking about is not the cause but part of the equation. The X factor is the true cause. The kids are not learning properly not because there is no school. In fact the reason that there is no school is the same reason that the kids aren't learning at the same rate as other areas with schools - it is because of poverty (which is a huge factor to school success and a huge factor to the number and types of schools available) these kids are not learning to the same extent of other children. Go figure, this is a concept I learned in sociology. I was never tested on it and it was only briefly touched on yet it was a concept I heard and thought hmmm, interesting, I will look into this X factor thing and I did. I probably spent more time looking into causality and X factors than I did on learning the material for the course that I was tested on.
Totally disgusting Snert. What is with these snipes at the poor? Chris Spence has a decent idea, why don't you critique that?
Snert, this comment is anti-poor and minimizes/makes fun of racism. Stay out of this thread, and stop making comments like this or you will be suspended.
I'll go, but not before taking a quick moment to clarify: my comment about "lazy" students had NOTHING to do with the poor, and everything to do with the overall tone of the thread I referenced, in which posters were suggesting that non-Asian students just needed to pull themselves by their bootstraps. I'd clarify with regard to making fun of racism too, but I honestly have no idea where that's even coming from.
Actually, i'm with you most of the way. Teachers should be allowed to teach - every individual student, in individual ways - instead of do paperwork half the time and try to keep order among too many kids the other half.
I have a whole elaborate educational system in my head, which would probably work for most of the kids, most of the time - which is more than this one is doing right now.
But this is the one we have and it beats all hell out of no public education. You can't take one basic institution out of a society and change it to suit some quite different society - like taking one of the zebra's legs and substituting a cheetah's. It all has to work together; it all has to change together.
School...feh!
I suffered through K to 8 showing up most days to recieve an absolutely substandard education from a bunch of singularly unpleasant nuns and their badly underpaid and bitter minions. That's where I learned to despise school. In high school I was in 9 twice and 10 three times without ever actually passing grade 10. By the end I was truely phobic and rarely showed up.
Got a high school equivelency in a one semester course at a community college, which qualified me for university, where I eventually graduated with reasonably respectable marks, thus demonstrating IMHO that high school was a complete waste of time. For me education was always a pretty autodidactic process, totally unrelated to school.
Schools introduce a curriculum of state approved subjects that are designed to produce nothing more than human subjectivities who are bound to the state through conditioning. The classroom itself is a microcosm of the wider society, where everyone is led to believe at the earliest age possible that the environment constitutes a level playing field where success is wholly dependent upon the degree of effort applied. The ones who achieve the expected level of understanding within this system of merits and rewards are granted passage to the next stage of life, without ever being prompted to consider the ramifications and reasons with respect to the status of the absent ones who may have began the same journey with them years ago, but have since fallen out of competition. Most will carry the lessons learned from these incubators as templates with which to model the remainder of their existence as they take up their careers and lives. Some of them become political leaders for the very structure that supervised their development.
I'm glad to see that you did not let school get in the way of your education oldgoat.
One of the greatest challenges of the school system is that students have very unequal educations during the first five years of their lives. The starting line is certainly staggered.
So is the rest of it. Compare the schools in rich and poor neighbourhoods, at any level, or public schools and religious ones; there is a lot of variation. They do all have one thing in common, though: they teach you to read and lead you to the front door of a public library. If you are lucky, as i was, they also give you access to some very good teachers - adults who show you ways of thinking, ways of learning, ways of perceiving the world, that you might not have come up with alone. We can improve universal education, sure. But let's not be too hasty about abolishing it. What's the alternative?
Absentia, who was speaking of abolishing public education and providing an alternative? I certainly wasn't.
Seems to me a good educational issue around which those on the political left could unite is the issue of corporations in the classroom. I see that the Province of Quebec has, for example, banned advertising to children under 13 and i presume that includes the classroom as well.
What with the deliberate underfunding by conservatives, liberals, and others misanthropic neoliberals who hate children, the stampede of the introduction of new - and invariably proprietary - software and technology in the classroom, and the corporate efforts to privatize ever more public spaces under capitalism .. this would seem to be a no-brainer.
A society that doens't protect its young doesn't deserve to live. And our current capitalist moloch doesn't protect children. It predates on them. A more complete denunciation of capitalism, short of its tendency towards war and mass death, is hard to imagine.
I didn't mean to imply that you had.
Refuge said blow it up and start over - which has some merit, imo. And the thread title suggests something very like. But no practical alternative has been brought forward.
What sort of neoliberal thinking is that? Why would you want to bl*w up a public institution other than to make it private? Or is the idea to "wait for the smouldering ruins to clear" before having to bother answering that question?
I don't see any difference, in practice, between such a view and the view of the child-haters. Maybe you should read what happened in New Orleans where the public system was "bl*wn up" (using the Shock Doctrine that Naomi Klein wrote so eloquently about) and see the horrific consequences of that.
If we want to get into misnomers and paradoxes, I would say that a formula for free thinking is as good a contradiction in terms as there is. And it is doubly-contradictory because it assumes there is one way of learning.
There are alternative methods out there, and alternative-thinkers within the system, so I don't think it is a matter of re-inventing the whole thing . Neither do I expect though, that a person is going to learn to really think in school, and speaking personally, I probably learned more from school through its bad examples than from its good examples, which is itself a good form of education (it is certainly more memorable).
Frankly, I'd be satisfied if schools were successful in providing everyone with basic literacy and other subjects, and keeping an eye on people's social skills, and possibly having the resources on hand for those who want to do more (although we do have libraries and other places for that).
Yup there are plenty of "alternatives" just across the border. Charter Schools, religious schools, other private schooling, and so on, for starters. It's done phucking wonders for the educational levels of US students. Just look at the data. All sorts of children have been "left behind" thanks to the child-hating legislation in the US. And so on.
Alternatives are typically supported BY the public system, especially for those who "fall between the cracks". That's because the public system has a mandate for ALL children - not just those lucky enough to be ahead of the rest, or rich, or both.
Alternatives within the context of a strongly supported public system? Hell yea. Otherwise, fuggetaboutit.
@ N. Beltov
My point was that there are progressive alternatives and ideas out there, so it is not as if we need to reinvent something new.
I understand what you are saying, and agree with part of it. But it has nothing to do with what I was talking about - except that I think there are limits to what can be provided in a school environment.
I am not sure why you implied that I might be referring to religious schools, but you are quite mistaken.
(edit)
To be clear, when I mentioned social skills I was talking about an initiative in our kids' school to promote respect and self-esteem, and deal with sexism, racism, homophobia, bullying, and other forms of violent and negative behaviour. When I was in grade school the main social skills we were taught was to line up and march into class, and that we would be struck if we didn't follow orders.
A generation before, my dad would have been forced to write with his right hand if my grandmother had not stepped in.
It is far from perfect, but I think some improvement has been made.
Forced "right handedness" is not enforced, AFAIK.
It's true that's there's still some of that "lining up and marching" but from what I've seen, it mostly has to do with showing respect for other students, and teachers, not making a lot of noise in the hallway, etc.. For very young children in primary education, lining up, holding hands, and so on, is a way to keep the children safe ... especially when they're outside, etc. They're also easier to count - which is important.
Are you forming your opinion about the present system based on your sometime unhappy experience in the past? Be careful about that.
Actually I wasn't unhappy at all N. Beltov, and that is not properly any concern of yours, nor is it relevant to this conversation. I don't speculate on whether you have had enough coffee to drink this morning, so perhaps we should just stay on topic.
The point I was making is that school in the past was definitely a bit more authoritarian and backed up with physical force than things are today. Yes, if my grandmother had not stepped in the teacher would have done her best to beat left-handedness out of my father. And I think that although the system we have is far form perfect it has improved.
And regarding an overhaul of the whole system, I think it is more important that students leave with the ability to read and do math (something school SHOULD be able to accomplish but is not) than trying to force upon them the ability to think. That second goal is something a lot of students will get, and which some teachers do inspire. And personally, I would like for schools to foster free thought as much as possible. But you're never going to be able to enshrine it as part of the curriculum, and it doesn't do much good when the whole system is falling apart so badly that kids are leaving school unable to write.
They are leaving unable to write because there is not enough support to help them enough to learn these basics. And other social factors as well, far beyond the ability of the schools alone to address. Why blame the messenger?
Basics like reading and math are great. So is being able to survive in our current, highly technologized society. So is developing a capacity to deal with the truckload of partisan talk - called advertising - that children are increasingly bombarded with. Shall we ignore all that?
"Forcing" upon students the ability to think is a very revealing turn of phrase. Do you have the same venom towards teaching students to think for themselves? To detect partisan messages and distinguish them from statements of fact?
Helping to develop citizens, not zombified consumers, who think for themselves is one of the most noble aims of any educational system. This goes beyond political sectarian views, etc. It is only the most reactionary, anti-intellectual, neocons, Conservative politicians, religious fundamentalists, and other misanthropes who are hostile to to this noble aim.
Where the frack are you coming from? Good grief.
Well clearly you can think for yourself N. Beltov, but I have to wonder how much you use your reading and comprehension skills, because that fiery condemnation and stirring call to duty had nothing whatsoever to do with anything I wrote. In fact, you are accusing me of the exact opposite of what I said.
I thought I understood this idea pretty well. Apparently not. Perhaps you could explain how I should have "properly" understood your meaning.
Read my second-last sentence in #51.
Like I said, people should learn to think for themselves, and I think it would be good for schools to make that possible as much as they can. But critical thinking is certainly not something that can be forced or taught out of a book; it is something most of us have to learn from experience, and some people are most comfortable doing what they are told and NOT learning that part of education.
My point is that school is not designed to be the best place to learn free thinking - at least not as part of the standard curriculum. Plenty of it happens subversively, fortunately, and I don't think that is going to change much. But trying to standardize it isn't something that I would think would be too successful. You are always going to wind up having someone's spin on what "free thought" is.
And the fact is that the more basic job that is not being done - specifically reading and basic comprehension - is probably the most important cornerstone of free thought. If you don't have the words, how far can you get?
Don't know about other provinces but fostering the 'ability to think' is actually enshrined in the curriculum. Critical thinking, applied thinking etc are integrated within the language and literacy curriculum in Ontario. Whether it's taught this way by every teacher or taught well by every teacher may be a question but it is there and is expected.
N. Beltov: A fairly comprehensive set of quidelines and expected outcomes around "Media literacy' is also part of the language curriculum from K-8 as well. They include working with different media (technical aspects) as well as analysis of media, messaging, advertising how it works etc etc. Again it might be not covered that much or not very well by different teachers but it is there.
ElizaQ
Yes, I hear you. And I presumed we were talking more about political and social awareness rather than basic analysis, though of course one follows on the other.
As you say, the degree to which it is really taught comes down to the teacher. I was lucky enough to have one or two good ones.
And really it only takes one to make the difference.
I had not been aware of any child-hating in this thread. Lots of criticism of the education system as it is now - being geared toward producing good corporate drones rather than actualizing each student's potential. And moving more in that direction with every textbook and computer, every vending machine and advertisement that enters our schools. Most of us don't like that trend.
I'm not a fan of private school or religious school, myself, but neither would i forbid it. Home-schooling or co-op might be a good option for some children who don't fit well within the system. (Gifted and poor, is what i'm thinking of at the moment: being a sensitive kid in a tough school with no music or art program could be a pretty awful experience... There may be other reasons, such as physical frailty.) Yeah, i think creative alternatives could and should exist; that smart, caring people ought to be consulted and that communities ought to be involved in solving these problems.
Blowing it up is just a figure of speech, meaning radical change.
perhaps you should read more of Paulo Freire, 6079_Smith. Critical thinking is the heart of his teaching methodologies. And he had better results, using his approach, that the orthodox "reading and writing and rithmatic" crowd had with theirs. Seems to me you're just regurgitating some old, worn out, false dichotomies.
Yeah, probably you're right N. Beltov. Thank you for setting me straight. And I should say you have quite the teaching style yourself.
Sounds to me like you should start your own school, or at least get on the board where you can show us how we should be doing it right.