But then, our Prussian style school system ISN'T designed to create independent, free thinking citizens.
It's designed to teach kids (future adults) to DO AS YOU ARE TOLD!!
The idiot progressives now say achievement is White Privilege. For real.
Time for the “Little Red Schoolhouse!”
I certainly would have done better in school. I was running rings around my classmates until 11th grade, when I stopped caring.
I barely graduated, not due to poor grades, but poor attendance.
Perhaps if they weren't spending time with social justice indoctrination, and letting kids have time off from school to take part in BLM riots, branding math as racist, elevating LGBTQ+ studies instead of Western Civilization, maybe those kids might be better prepared.
Duh.
The government school system is hopelessly broken. It is infested with functionally illiterate “teechers.”
The state of New York recently passed a law requiring prospective school teachers to take a literacy test to get their license, but repealed it the following year because 36 percent of whites, 54 percent of Hispanics and 59 percent of blacks failed on the first try.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/nyregion/ny-regents-teacher-exams-alst.html
This a brilliant idea and well presented.
The posers running things will never allow it.
this will be just a finish the level and move on, with nothing mastered.
Schools can’t be fixed unless all the psychologists and the Drs of Education are purged from the school system as well as shutting down the Dept of Education.
And the unions disbanded.
Let’s see...
Small classes with individual attention for stupid and lazy people.
Giant classes with no individual attention for gifted and motivated students.
That will sure work out well. /s It’s probably better than what we have, but it’s not what our best and brightest should have.
Hey! Montessori already do what is proposed in the essay above. And, they do it very successfully.
Solution: Begin the privatization of all schooling from Pre-K through to university graduate school.
The problem is the monopolistic chokehold that government schools have on the education market.
Today it’s not just K-12, but PreK-12. Children who do not know their numbers, letters, colors, as well as how to read and print their name and simple words by the time they get to kindergarten, are already academically behind those students who can.
Also in Texas and other states, qualified high school students can apply for and be selected to take accredited math and science college courses their junior and senior years, which can result in getting a state college degree in another two-years. While a private university may not give credit for those courses during the two years, there the student might be allowed to initially enroll in advanced university courses with the result that after four years, the student has completed the course work needed for both a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
The problem of a grade school advancement based only on achievement is NOT that smarter students will end up taking academic classes with older students (as occurs even now). Smarter students can usually handle the age disparity.
The problem is that older, but academically-slower students will end up in classes populated mostly with younger children. This can cause problems.
BTW, one teacher explain to me that in some schools, emotionally-unstable students were put into classes with above-average students because those students were better able to deal with the occasional disturbances from the emotionally-unstable student than average students in standard classes.
I came up through the CA public schools in the 60s and 70s. At the time they were the best in the nation.
But when I hit the military in 1977, every complaint I had about the public schools was resolved.
The shift to self paced individual learning was a Godsend for me. School was no longer boring or stupid.
It was now challenging and exciting.
And that’s exactly what the author proffers.
Tailored education has been a dream for a long time, especially when people started realizing the power of television and computers to educate people. But educators, who are largely of a personality type that values process and group efforts, have fought it. Right now the only ones with IEPs are those with learning disabilities. Every learner should have one. Most, if not every, learner has some subjects which are easy and some which are difficult. Yet schools are not equipped right now to deal with that, other than to force those who have an easy time learning a subject to teach their classmates who are slower on the uptake instead of letting the advanced student advance to their potential.
I would have loved to have been in a system like this - I probably could have been done with college before I was out of my teens.
You have IIRC 12 workbooks a grade in the five subjects (Math, English, Social Studies, Science and Spelling).
You were tested and given the workbook set that you tested out in in that subject.
You advanced through as quickly or as slowly as you needed to.
That would defeat the main purpose of schools - subsidized babysitting. If kids were allowed to learn at their own pace, many would finish quite early. It’s absurd to think our education system has anything to do with real education anyway. They are still doing things the way they were done a hundred years ago, only with worse results.
That’s racist.
Even in the conveyor belt approach, there have been paths for widely disparate capability levels - fast track for some, and a slow track for others.
That’s racist too. now we all are expected to not act white.
“ Instead, high school would last as long as it took for the student to achieve the standard in all academic subjects and mature in their total development.”
This is clearly racist, as some demographics will graduate at 16 or 17 on average, while others will be kept until they’re well into their 20s...