Posted on 05/16/2016 2:12:19 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
A progressive organization published a list of the “ten worst things” in education. You can learn a lot about why public schools are mediocre by looking at this list.
The ten items provide a distillation of what progressive/liberal educators value, and conversely what they consider not worth mentioning. Progressive/liberal thinking dominates our schools, so this is not idle chitchat.
Some of the ten items may be problems but they are hardly “the worst.” As you’ll see, there is almost no mention of academic failings, namely, that kids don’t master basic skills nor learn much essential knowledge. (You’ll also notice a casual use of the phrase “research shows”; progressive educators always claim their ideas are supported by research!)
Here is the list of “worst things,” slightly edited for length:
Sometimes you have to get up when it’s still dark….
Most schools dispense curriculum from the top down, from distant sources. Children learn best when the approach is learner-centered, based on their interest.
Students are forced to stay in classrooms and are not allowed to leave….
Children in most schools are forced to sit in rows of desks and not move around…
In most schools learning takes place in rigid periods, governed by bells. Research has shown that children need to learn according to their own rhythms….
In most schools bullying is rampant and there is no effective mechanism to control it….
In most schools, irrelevant homework is assigned, which students are forced to do at home and turn in at school. If students are following their own interests, homework is not necessary…..
In most schools children are segregated into classes of students who are their exact age…
In most schools children are forced to compete for grades in every subject. Grades have been shown to be a false motivator, based on someone else’s idea of what they should be learning, rather than their own intrinsic interest.
In most schools students are forced to take many hours of standardized tests, often without ever knowing whether their answers were right or wrong. Teaching to tests pushes students in exactly the wrong direction.
This progressive list embodies what might be called the Summerhill philosophy: leave students alone to do what they want. (Summerhill, shown in photo, is an arch-progressive school in England.) This laissez-faire might work for mature, highly motivated children. Most people, at every age, are not highly motivated. Ten-year-olds don’t typically know which if any subjects are worth study. So why not play video games?
As a results of airy progressive theorizing, the worst thing happening in schools is that many of them are no longer functioning as schools.
The whole point of a school is that adults determine which content has stood the test of time. Adults organize classes and instruction so that children can learn this knowledge as quickly and pleasurably as possible. Not taking these two steps is a violation of the social contract between children and schools.
Stephen Hawking wrote in “My Brief History” about his years at Oxford. Only the very best minds in all of England were there. They were free to follow their interests. Most of them wasted a lot of time as a matter of adolescent honor.
The worst problems in the typical public school is that children are not taught to read in the first few grades with systematic phonics. They are not taught traditional methods of doing basic arithmetic, so it’s automatic and easy. Students can reach college not knowing what 7×8 is.
They’re not taught basic knowledge. Instead, Constructivism dictates that teachers must stand aside while students teach themselves.
To hide all of that, this progressive organization throws up a smokescreen. They complain that students are forced to follow a plan, rather than living free. In the process, these progressives undermine traditional education, which is presumably their intent.
In the United States we have something quite parallel with Summerhill. We call it summer vacation. That’s when students can follow their dreams and desires for three months. Our system of nine-months-on and three-months-off functions very well. Summerhill says children should be on vacation year-round. If you want to make sure our public schools get even dumber, this is a good plan.
Three idle months means that, come September, children are recharged and ready to learn. They are more likely to appreciate the direction that traditional education provides. Now we need adults who are eager to take advantage of this readiness for learning.
(For truly bad things in education, see “Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.”)
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Maybe public schools have become the employer of last resort while talented people found jobs however menial, elsewhere. Every teacher I talk to hardly speaks English. One told me she cannot balance a checkbook.That is why she teaches “math”. Have we sunk this far?
Damn the bells! Damn the routine!
Looks like they want to implement the Lord of the Flies. We know how that worked out.
Well that’s what you get when you let the Feds through money and the department of education control things
I do think education needs to be changed in some fundamental ways.
My friends who have home schooled their children report that having flexible hours and allowing the children to choose the order of study works very well.
I think homework is a lazy teacher’s crutch. If you can’t effectively teach a concept in an hour, sending them home with hours of “practice” isn’t going to make them any better. What is does do is give the children with supportive, interested parents a huge leg up. Kids that lack someone at home to help them become frustrated with school and are more likely to drop out early.
I could go on and on, but all you really have to do is check out the school systems that are kicking our butt. Some are strict and long (mostly Asian countries), but some, like Finland, have taken on a much different approach with great success.
Teachers, in general, are bad at math
That “math teacher” has an education back ground, they suck
The best math teachers are the ones that came from industry. Not only do they know math, they also can demonstrate how it can be used.
bump
Wait a bunch of pussies.
I’ll bet, in five years, someone will open Snowflake U.
5.56mm
All of them are Snowflake U these days
What kind of University needs safe spaces and grief counseling because students saw “Trump” written on the sidewalks in chalk......
If I had been allowed to “follow my own interests” in school, I’d have played ball all day and never learned anything. It’s almost as if libtards want to sabotage our children to make America less great.
If you live in the north, big whoop.
Most schools dispense curriculum from the top down, from distant sources. Children learn best when the approach is learner-centered, based on their interest.
This actually is a problem.
Schools should choose their curriculum rather then having one forced on them.
Students are forced to stay in classrooms and are not allowed to leave….
Not a problem.
Children in most schools are forced to sit in rows of desks and not move around…
Also not a problem.
In most schools learning takes place in rigid periods, governed by bells. Research has shown that children need to learn according to their own rhythms….
So home school.
In most schools bullying is rampant and there is no effective mechanism to control it….
In prisons the guards make no attempt to control the top dog inmates.
In schools the teachers make no attempt to control the bullies.
In most schools, irrelevant homework is assigned, which students are forced to do at home and turn in at school. If students are following their own interests, homework is not necessary…..
I am flat out against homework before seventh grade.
In most schools children are segregated into classes of students who are their exact age…
This can be a problem but mixing ages is not practical unless you want to go back to the one room school house.
Which is not totally a bad idea.
In most schools children are forced to compete for grades in every subject. Grades have been shown to be a false motivator, based on someone else’s idea of what they should be learning, rather than their own intrinsic interest.
Nonsense. Grades measure how much you retained of what you were taught. And you can explore your interests once you have learned how to learn.
In most schools students are forced to take many hours of standardized tests, often without ever knowing whether their answers were right or wrong. Teaching to tests pushes students in exactly the wrong direction.
Tests are fine. Once again they measure how much you actually learned. Why would they never know if their answers were right or wrong? As to "teaching to the test" as long as the test covers what you were suppose to be learning there is nothing wrong and everything right with that.
(For truly bad things in education, see “Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.”)That link (which didn’t carry thru in your posting) lists those 10 things as
- BOGUS READING INSTRUCTION -- Whole Word, Sight Words, and Dolch Words (there are many aliases) have created 50 million functional illiterates, for the simple reason that this method does not work. (No one learns to read fluently with Sight-Words. Some people learn to read, if at all, IN SPITE OF of Sight-Words.) This hoax and the accompanying gimmicks known as guessing, picture clues, et al should be eliminated from the schools.
- REFORM MATH -- Arithmetic jumbled and mumbled. Reform Math is a monster with many names (Connected Math, Chicago Math, Mathland, etc.) created by the same people who gave us New Math and now want to give us Core Standards. Reform Math forbids mastery, requires spiraling from topic to topic, and promotes using a calculator to compensate for a lack of basic skills.
- COOPERATIVE LEARNING -- Students always work in groups. A good approach for fostering a herd sensibility; a dreadful approach for creating independent thinkers and self-starters.
- CONSTRUCTIVISM -- A destructive fad. Teachers are reduced to facilitators, their knowledge and academic training rendered moot. Students are required to invent their own new knowledge. This process will be long and slow. After all, the human race has been around for millennia and has collected tens of thousands of prime facts, insights, discoveries, theories, etc. What sort of loon turns a child loose with this order: try to recapitulate the intellectual history of the human race? (A far better approach is to give children a wide range of foundational knowledge ASAP.)
- WAR AGAINST CONTENT -- A witless policy pursued since the time of John Dewey. The apparent goal is to make sure that children learn as little as possible. In any case, that is the result.
- NO MEMORIZATION -- This is standard operating procedure in all grades and in all courses. It is an excellent policy if you wish to ensure cultural illiteracy and societal amnesia.
- SELF-ESTEEM -- Another destructive fad now rampant. Students must be praised even when they do bad work. Furthermore, a concern for self-esteem can justify eliminating virtually all content from classrooms, on the grounds that some students won’t be able to handle the material. A quiet plague.
- MULTICULTURALISM -- This sophistry requires children to learn more about faraway cultures, both in miles and years, than about their own. As the children have no frame of reference for understanding other cultures, little information is retained, other than the persistent message: your own country is no damn good. Multiculturalism helps in the war against content. Kids are kept busy, going nowhere.
- HOSTILITY TO GENUINE TESTING -- A helpful policy if you wish to conceal that children aren't learning much. (A complex point. If schools are genuinely trying to teach knowledge, they will want to find out how much the students are learning. Same as it ever was. Problem is, in the schools today there is a lot of disingenuous testing of trivial things that didn't need be taught in the first place. Common Core Math illustrates this phenomenon.)
- TOO MANY IMPOSTORS -- Ideologues pretend to care about education even while focused on manipulating the minds of millions of children. (Keep these extremists away from the schools, and the other nine problems will miraculously vanish.)
This didn’t list the number one problem with education for the past 50 years.
Government sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.
Government mandated busing of students across town may have placated the desegregationists, but it dragged students out of their own neighborhoods where they were already established and dropped them suddenly into a strange world where they were unknown and often unwanted, had no friends any more, in the case of elementary school age kids had no idea where they even were...
I saw the tension that caused, I was in the middle of it. Fights, destruction of school property, increased racial tension, the focus was suddenly not on education any more but getting the right number of blacks and whites in the same building.
Since then the quality of education has consistently gone downhill, while the politicians responsible bragged about how they were fighting the “good fight for equality”...never mind the increased problems and degradation of education itself. Now the teachers are not even interested in teaching, just keeping their paychecks coming in. This country has dropped from 8th in the world to 28th in 20 years. From 17th to 28th just during Obama’s term.
These days the actual curriculum and teaching methods have been seriously changed, the high schools in this country are handing out diplomas to complete illiterates at an alarming rate. Just look at any web forum or blog, the comments section under most news articles, for that matter the news stories them selves...I see serious spelling and punctuation mistakes all over online news articles every day. I never saw that in the newspapers of 30 years ago. They had someone called an editor who was responsible for locating all spelling, grammar and punctuation errors and marking them, then sending it back to be fixed.
Then I look at the comments section...incredible how many people either don’t know the difference between too, to and two or are too lazy to do a little proofreading before they post. Lose and loose are often confused. Several others I can’t remember at the moment, and the plural of a noun does not require an apostrophe...if you own two cars it’s not spelled car’s. But I see it every day. By people who want me to be impressed by their incredible intelligence and firm grasp on current events. Right...you can’t spell simple 5 letter words or even use the proper ones and I’m supposed to be impressed?
This is where government meddling in education has gotten us. Students are not being taught to add, subtract, spell and write, they’re being taught to pass a test.
I knew a junior high school history teacher in Louisiana, I repaired her computer a couple of times. She could not fail a student who didn’t make passing grades, she was required to send him or her to the next grade, even though he or she had not learned the required course. The school had put TVs in place so they could be used for some lessons and to watch related documentaries. All the students wanted to watch was “Swamp People”...
I was never allowed to use a calculator in school, they didn’t exist in pocket sized units until I was almost out of high school anyway, and for a few years were not allowed. Then for some stupid reason schools started letting students bring calculators. So now they can’t add even simple numbers, the calculator does it. Stupid...
Government is the number one problem with education these days. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t like Bush at all, “No child left behind”. That’s why the aforementioned teacher (how many of today’s high school grads even know of that word?) had to pass kids who made failing grades. Or according to her anyway.
I almost never use a spell checker, I keep mine between my ears. Occasionally the one built into Firefox lets me know I did a typo and missed it, which is nice, but for spelling itself, I don’t need it 99.999% of the time. Today’s kids don’t even know how to use the damn thing. Much less spell it...they’re too busy texting on their iPhones...which I think should be unavailable until they graduate high school. A plain 10 key phone if they have one at all, and turn the damn thing OFF during class should be a requirement. Otherwise it’s a major distraction.
The number two problem is discipline. There is none. Kids don’t learn discipline at home, schools are not allowed to instill it either. So today’s urchins are running around like little monsters unchecked, like a video I saw not long ago of a high school kid smoking in class, when the teacher tried to stop it, the kid walked up and blew smoke in the teacher’s face. I would have been expelled for that. I doubt this kid even was held accountable at all.
I was paddled by a teacher for arguing with her. I was right. I was still paddled. Not because I was wrong, because I argued with a teacher. My mother had a heated argument with teacher and principal, she still refused to change my grade. Today if a teacher touches a kid it’s a lawsuit.
Here’s what happened - we had a spelling test. I got confused on a word, that I before E thing, erased it and did it the other way. I KNEW that was wrong, and changed it back to the original spelling. The teacher counted it wrong because I had erased it. I challenged it, I spelled the word right, and she had never said anything about not erasing. She paddled me for arguing about it. I refused to back down, demanded she change my grade. I had never missed a spelling word, my entire 12 years in school that was the only one. We never did get my grade changed, so I insisted my parents give me a quarter, I went to the store a block away and got a Bic ink pen. Had a fight over that too, but I won, nowhere in school rules did it say I couldn’t use a pen.
So I used a pen from then on. The teacher asked me what I would do if I made a mistake, I told her it would STAY a mistake. I never missed another word on a spelling test. Didn’t miss much on any other test. By high school, after the school busing thing, I was entirely disillusioned by the school system, my grades dropped until I barely passed most subjects, and failed Civics twice. Too many credits in music, not enough in PE, and 1/2 credit down in Civics, I didn’t graduate.
I continued my education on my own, never wanted to see another school. I was sick of it. That’s the one thing that gives me hope for future generations, virtually all of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known have a built in imperative to learn. No matter what else they do, they always have a drive to learn that they can’t stop. I’ve studied a lot of different subjects, whatever grabs my attention. I’ve probably carried myself to at least a 4 year college level, probably more like 8 years, I was reading college text books when I was in 5th grade. Other people I’ve known with high IQ levels, over 120, have all had the same story to tell. (mine is around 145 to 150, tested at 151 when I was around 7 or 8 years old. The last time I tried an online IQ test it was 146) Virtually every highly intelligent person I’ve ever known was the same, always had this undeniable drive to continue learning, whether in school or on their own.
So I keep hoping the few who do want to learn will, and the world will not degenerate into a mass of total idiots. But the government will not help, it will only hinder education if allowed to control it.
Re: ‘This is where government meddling in education has gotten us....”
I generally think that it’s not government per se. If they were just apolitical bureaucrats and did their jobs, we would be all right.
But I believe that John Dewey, his colleagues, and successors were Fabian socialists, collectivists, or outright communists. They saw public schools as a simple safe way to transform the country. It wouldn’t be a coup d’état with tanks in the streets. It would be a coup d’état with professors of education in positions of power.
So, in a remarkable way, education is a field almost entirely taken over by a hostile ideology. Nobody else would come up with all the counterproductive ideas we see in the public schools.
EGGsactly Batman.
We ceded the high ground of rducation to the Socialists/Commies in the 60s when we let them infiltrate and slowly take over the positions of authority in colleges and universities. And of course where do out nation's grade school teachers go to get indoctrinated but those same colleges and universities.
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