Posted on 03/21/2019 5:51:34 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
(Summary: In many ways, public schools seem deliberately organized to diminish intellect, not to enlarge it.)
An acquaintance sent this note: “My sister tells of teaching math to college freshmen. The question was: If X plus 5 = 10, what is the value of X? It took her an entire week to get the kids to finally say ‘5.’ So the following Monday, just on a hunch, she gave them another problem: If Y plus 5 = 10, what is the value of Y? And no one could answer!”
Remember, these students have been admitted to a community college. Presumably, many studied Algebra around the ninth grade. The teacher is an experienced veteran who knows mathematics. How can anyone explain this anecdote?
You would surely conclude that public schools did a terrible job. But the situation seems more ominous than even this summary suggests. These students have been made dumber at 19 than they probably were at 12. They can’t understand a simple idea, even when it’s explained to them for days. It’s almost as if someone had performed a long, slow lobotomy on these young brains.
How do the public schools achieve this diminishment?
Suppose you were serious about achieving exactly that goal. There are techniques you would automatically use. Books could be written on each technique, and probably have. But I’ll be brief. It’s the totality of the effect that we need to contemplate, not the details.
1) You ensure a general disorderliness, with lots of interruptions and chatter from loudspeakers. Discipline is slack. Ideally, unmanageable students are kept in the classroom. If children feel insecure and frightened, that’s helpful.
2) You curtail or eliminate recess and physical activity. You want the children confined and lethargic, or bored and restless.
3) You divide students into small groups. They are graded as a group, praised as a group, and addressed as a growth. They learn not to trust their own thinking.
4) You keep children constantly engaged in trivial “activities.” They sing a song or talk about their favorite day of the week. What matters is that the activities have no academic content.
5) You ensure that the classroom does not contain maps, especially of the US or the world. Geographical details are rarely mentioned.
6) You make sure that teachers think of themselves as facilitators. They do not communicate information to the students. Teachers emphasize that facts need not be memorized. History and science are skimmed, not taught.
7) Literacy is constantly referenced; and the classroom is filled with books. However, the methods used to teach reading are designed not to be effective. (The central sophistry is to teach English, a phonetic language, as if it’s a hieroglyphic language.)
8) Math is referenced every day. However, the methods used to teach arithmetic are designed to be ineffective. New topics are introduced helter-skelter. Often these topics are exotic and complicated. Weird techniques are taught. Even in the sixth grade, most children can’t multiply and divide, and don’t understand decimals and fractions. They are dependent on calculators. As college students, they don’t know what 7×8 is.
9) You insist that grammar and spelling are obsolete; cursive is a waste of time; kids shouldn’t learn a second language. Anything rigorous and logical is dismissed as “inappropriate for our children.” It’s important to create an atmosphere where deadlines don’t matter, tests are soft, grades are inflated, everyone is promoted, and students learn that little is expected of them.
10) The goal is that most students feel at once overwhelmed and empty. They know they are ignorant and barely literate. Whatever education is, they didn’t get any. Many have been told they are dyslexic or have ADHD. Many have received tutoring, counseling, or sedation. Many pretend to be sick so they can stay home.
11) All educational failure is blamed on factors the school can’t control. Children are said to be not ready, not smart, or neurotic in some way. Parents are said to be not involved, not helpful, or hostile to the educational process. The schools constantly praise their own wisdom and performance.
The totality of these techniques, kept in play month after month, virtually guarantees that no education takes place. If some students are stubborn and insist on acquiring information on their own, they are labeled “gifted” and removed from the general population.
The whole process is carefully anti-educational and anti-intellectual. Whatever a real school would do, you do the opposite. A remarkable thing happens. The children grow physically; they age before your eyes. But what they know at 10 or even 15 is not distinguishable from what they knew at 8. What they know as high school graduates can be measured in smidges. They arrive in community college able to drink, drive, vote, serve in the military, or marry, but unable to grasp that if Z+5 equals 10, Z must be 5. Much more than we would like to thank, the K-12 experience is a lobotomy performed in slow motion.
McKinsey & Company, the famous consulting firm, put it this way in 2009: “The longer American children are in school, the worse they perform.”
(©Bruce Deitrick Price)
Btt
I returned to college in 1989. While in grad school I had to teach, do odd jobs, be a gopher for my Prof and give tests.
The first time I gave one, I was shocked to see students cheating openly. Looking on other people’s paper etc. I warned them and they kept doing it. I finally had to threaten them.
They weren’t dumb btw, just cheaters.
CC students take placement tests. Some are placed into remedial classes. Your friend’s sister probably teaches remedial math.
Other students are placed into the college-level math courses.
Educators are taught badly if children have already lost interest just as they are entering the sweet spot of education, around 5th and 6th grade where children naturally have open brains and in years gone by, when taught well, they are able to learn languages like Latin and deeper math concepts.
They thing is educators don't even know they are teaching for bad results. It was planned that way in order to create adults who cannot think.
The schools are creating political activists. “Torpedoes” for left wing dogma. Academics is secondary.
That's why every time I see a $RedForEd sticker (in Arizona) I want to cover it with a picture of an iPad entitled "Your Replacement." :)
It’s called negative learning. At some colleges you can test graduating seniors and they will perform consistently worse than they did as incoming freshmen.
The question was: If X plus 5 = 10, what is the value of X? It took her an entire week to get the kids to finally say ‘5.’ So the following Monday, just on a hunch, she gave them another problem: If Y plus 5 = 10, what is the value of Y?
Obviously the value of Y is X.
I despised school starting in first grade. By the time I got to second grade, I was horrified because I realized that HS graduation was an eternity away.
Over the summer months (at least in the first few years) I’d forget the misery, and look forward to the first day of school. Then before the first week was out, I was well aware that it was going to be a lonnng way until June. :(
I have few memories of 1-12th grade, except that I hated it. Kindergarten was pleasant enough though. I enjoyed one class in HS which was one semester. It interested me greatly. Otherwise, the experience was dominated by drudgery and stress.
I don’t even like thinking about it now. Wish things had been different. I admired others who could focus and had a purpose and made their education meaningful. All I wanted to do was bolt. No adult ever noticed that there was a problem. I just figured that’s the way it was, so it did not occur to me to say anything. I was probably right about that.
At least back then, the subjects were real and there were standards for functional results. What’s going now is an abomination on any number of levels.
I know a good early childhood teacher who is subbing this year in public schools. She has observed that kids in upper elementary can’t read and don’t know basic arithmetic. Then she subbed in a lower grade at the same school and saw that the teacher reads everything, including test questions, to the children, then lets them correct their answers until each child achieves a 100. Even for reading tests. So the children are passing but learning nothing. This helps the school’s end of year “report card”, I guess, but the kids are doomed to ignorance unless they have parents that teach them at home.
A friend of mine characterizes K-12 public schools as ”failure factories”. I couldn’t agree more.
Ok. Where is the corner pocket on a pool table?
...read this, ping....
I believe GOD developed math through the creation of this strange and beautiful universe.
It all figures.
I can't help but think that these "educators" are themselves products of the same degraded system that they're now administering to their pupils.
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