Posted on 02/07/2021 4:34:32 AM PST by Onthebrink
It’s no secret that we’re in the midst of a public health crisis in California. But public school children — more than 6 million students — are suffering through a silent crisis at home and they desperately need our help before it’s too late.
For the last 10 months, most public schools in this state have shut their doors and opted for remote education. Kids have been forced to limit their social interactions to a Zoom square on their computer if they are lucky enough to have a stable internet connection. Playgrounds have been locked and spending time with friends and family isn’t allowed.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I have a better idea-leave them shut down forever, fire 50% of the school staff, move to permanent internet based education and pass the savings along to the property owners who have been getting robbed by the board of education for decades.
It’s no secret that we’ve been lied to for nearly a year about COVID. What’s the truth? Anybody’s guess.
The only good to come from shutdowns was parents being exposed to their children’s schooling.
Almost every parent I know says their kids are done all their work in 45min-2hrs. School is day care/brainwashing.
It hasn’t been two weeks yet.
It’s not school being closed that’s the problem.
It’s the forced isolation.
Teachers Unions are overplaying their hand on this.
Seems to be the teachers’ unions that are making sure the schools stay shut. Chicago teachers are threatening to strike over keeping the schools shut down.
Hopefully, this will increase the home schooling movement.
My son was involved for a semester and the school had plenty of meet-ups for educational purposes and social interaction.
schools are open here in paradise... 😎
Your idea is a good one. If Americans were honest about the importance of education they would stop the massive spending and come up with better solutions. Most people think that throwing money at education is the solution, and as long as spending and taxes increase they are making progress. That's been going on for decades and education has not improved.
Education can draw from business and I dare write, Hollywood. From the business side: the lessons (knowledge) that children learn is essentially a homogeneous product. Math is math. Science is science. History is history. Particularly at every level of education including undergraduate studies at university. A homogeneous product is the starting point. It is a commodity that can be produced once and delivered millions of times. The production side of things is where Hollywood comes in - or some type of equivalent.
While that is a starting point, it is not the complete solution. Not all people need or can consume a homogeneous product. People require variety. Not all people eat plain bread. Some require gluten-free bread. Others want artisan breads. Many want whole grain. And others get by on that cheap fluffy white stuff. But it is all bread. This all points to a need for flexibility and variety.
Students, the consumers of education, require variety in product. Students have a variety of learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. A single in-person teacher will have difficulty delivering to all three styles of learners when a classroom is mixed.
Another problem facing teachers is delivering to students of different cognitive abilities. The usual solution is to go at an average or a slower pace so most students can handle the material being delivered. That solution bores intelligent children and they lose interest. Self-paced education is the key to this and delivery online is an effective solution. Students can take an approach to any given subject the requires mastery before moving to the next topic.
Online education is not necessarily a cure all. There are some things that require facilities to learn. Take science labs for instance. More rudimentary lessons can be learned hands-on with kits and at home labs, but there comes to a point that technique becomes important and a skilled person is required in-person. Science isn't the only subject. It is just one example. The solution is to downsize physical schools and turn them into hands-on skills centers, and perhaps in-person tutor centers. Students can go neighborhood based centers only for a fraction of the time they would normally sit bored in school today (or whenever they used to go to school).
It is probably a mistake to forget that a lot of children are just bored with education and the lessons they receive. Sometimes it is the repetition of the same material over and over again. Other times it boring and lousy teachers. And then some subjects are just plain dry. This is where online education can be superior to in person education. Remember we are talking about millions of students and tens of thousands of classrooms being replaced. The cost for those classrooms and all those teachers is incredible. Instead, fund highly produced educational lessons that can be reused year after year. Think of this as being on the lines of the some of the better programming once found on the History Channel (not that reality crap.)
Don't use a single teacher in the production. Use a variety of experts, graphics, video, texts and exercises combined into a superior product that would be impossible for a single teacher put together. Tailor that product to learning styles, cognitive abilities and student interest to go into greater detail, but maintain a minimum requirement of mastery for students.
Most subjects do not change from year to year, particularly in grades K-12, and even most university undergraduate courses. This gets back to the notion of a homogenous product. Math is still math. Reuse the product over and over again. Leverage economies of scale but with a product that meets the needs of a wide range of students.
As for kids being social, let them play with kids in there neighborhood. They can be involved in other activities that are outside of a school setting. It need not be supervised by adults. That wasn't required when I was a kid and certainly not required today. Get over those fears that Johnny and Sally will be kidnapped if they go the playground alone or wander that neighborhood. Those fears are bogus, just like the fear of the ChiCom flu.
Sports? Club sports work, in fact most kids seriously involved in sports today do club sports year round and interscholastic is secondary to club sports. There are other models that do not require schools, and recognize that in the past Americans got along quite fine without heavy involvement of schools in everything they did.
I guess six months late to the pen is better than no comment at all
Allow them. It's only a problem in the Northeast and in the West. Schools have reopened in the South amd in the Midwest.
Online courses would work well in homeschool families. You could have several families get together and form cohorts. That would probably be one way to go, if you decide to go homeschooling.
You make a lot of excellent points but you forgot one thing.
Millions of Americans rely on K-8 school to serve as child care, enabling them to report to those jobs that can’t be done at home.
That could be dissociated from school as well (as you suggest sports can be as well—and that trend is certainly accelerating in CA with club sports etc), but it’s expensive while public school kills 2 birds with one stone (education plus child care). A lot of things that used to be public seem to be dying on the vine (libraries still closed, parks with basketball nets cut down, etc).
I do not want to pay for people’s child care. It is their responsibility. Schools were never intended to be child care. Mommies can stay at home. Daddies can go to work.
No longer can most “moms stay at home and dads go to work” more than for brief periods of time after childbirths. It’s no longer financially feasible for most households.
And do you realize most children born in the United States are to a single mother? There is no “dad to go to work while the mom stays at home.” Marriage rates are dropping like a rock.
We have to live in reality. The reality is that K-8 school is indeed child care, effectively. You are not “paying for it” in the sense that you are already paying for public schools. The kids are there in school anyway, learning. The fact that they are also being supervised is a byproduct and benefit for working families. And when schools are closed, parents can’t go to work.
There is just about nothing worse than sending children off to government indoctrination centers. Children are being raised by Marxists to become Marxists. 99% of public school teachers are leftists. It is time to get rid of every single last one of them.
I understand (and agree with) all you are saying: that ideally all parents should be married, people shouldn’t have sex with people they don’t want to raise a child with, women need to keep their legs shut and men need to keep their zippers up, public schools are leftist, etc.
And also in ideal world all families could afford private Christian schools and/or could competently homeschool.
But since we are living in the real world, the one we have now—full of sin and bad choices—and since taxes already are spent on public schools, those schools need to be OPEN so child care can be provided and parents can go to work. “Distance learning” does not offer supervision of children.
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