Posted on 08/03/2006 11:38:51 AM PDT by neverdem
Boys who are inclined toward the military are reasonably sure that there is a 'point' to what they are being commanded to do. Granted, there are sometimes tasks that could be considered pointless, but they are toward an overall goal. The same cannot be said, necessarily, for assignments given in schools. You're also dealing with young men in the military, not middle school aged boys.
That's like comparing apples to oranges.
Ever hear a kid say "well yeah, and what are YOU going to do to me?" In school, they can't do very much anymore. In the military they can throw your arse in jail.
Generally young boys won't understand the concept, but it's drilled into your head very very quickly in the military.
Just your friendly neighborhood ping. :-)
Read the book. Your view of what is going on in the education system may once have been the real world. It is no longer. Christina Hoff-Sommers "The War Against Boys." The stats and information presented are chilling and compelling.
It is no longer an attempt to help girls, who today succeed in the education system today at a far greater rate than boys by any measuring stick you can use. It is an attempt to push boys down and make them fail and to make them start behaving like girls. If you think my previous sentance is a good idea for public policy, then don't read the book. It won't convince you.
It's the principal reason we homeschool our boy. I don't want to let him anywhere near the education establishment.
Interestingly, a recent study found a persistent gap at virtually every grade level between boys and girl--this applied across public and private schools. In one subject, for one year out of 12, the boys were equal. The only case for which that is NOT true is homeschoolers (and the homeschool girls did at least as well as their public or private school compatriots).
What does that tell you about the education establishment's treatment of boys?
Finally, I agree "we should not throw away any of our talest." I would suggest that is exactly what we are doing. We are making sure that half of our population is coming out of school poorly educated and screwed up. We are doing that to satisfy the anger of women who make decisions about how to educate our children who resent men for good or bad reasons. Bottom line, you are talking about a lot of middle aged women working out their revenge fantasies on 3rd grade boys. It sucks.
A lot of the homeschoolers on our state board decided they could do a much better job with their kids than the public schools, and they can work with their kids in a more relaxed atmosphere.
Oh, really? Then where's my cash? I've had classes where there were more SpecEd kids than non-SpecEd ones, and my paycheck was exactly the same as when I taught all honors classes. Don't confuse a (stupid) local policy with general ones...
Because Ancient Egypt is directly in the Classical line of Western civilization (see the Ptolemies, Hellenistic culture, the Rosetta Stone), and the medieval Serbs, interesting as they may be, are not.
They could probably come in in a survey of medieval culture, but what specifically was their contribution to medieval scholastic thought?
You can't study everybody, so historians tend to concentrate on the main trunk of the tree, not offshoots and remote twigs. Unless of course you want to make a study of a particular group out of personal interest (my ancestors the Highland Scots are pretty darned far off the beaten path, but I took Gaelic just because.)
Forcing antiquated, uninteresting books on captive teenagers leaves such a bad taste in the mouth as to ensure that most of them will never pick up a book again.
I disagree -- "classics" are called "classics" because there is a core body of literature that every educated person MUST know. Shakespeare is woven into the fabric of the English language, the best playwright of the age that wrote the most beautiful English ever produced (they also brought you the King James Bible.) Dickens and Hardy each illuminate a time and a place in English history. Like it or not, that is important. Tolstoy is essential to understanding the Russia of his age (just as I would submit you can't understand the 19th c. French without Stendhal and Dumas).
And teenagers are not the best judges of what is meritorious reading. My daughter thought she was going to hate Paradise Lost . . . once she got through the first book, she was hooked. She also didn't care for All the Kings' Men at first, but changed her mind about half way through. (We both still hate Catcher in the Rye, but that's one you have to read to get the flavor of a particularly depressing period in modern American literature.)
Well, I went to a school in the 70's where they dispensed with all that outdated stuff. We never did Shakespeare, or read classics. We did a lot of 'creative' poetry writing; we read science fiction, we read some other strange stuff. We did the "who to throw off the lifeboat" exercises over and over, studied communist countries, and the 'culture of poverty'. This was all supposed to prepare better for the real world than all those old, stale lessons that those older than us had. We never had to memorize math tables, never had grammar (we got brand new books in 5th grade, but never opened them). My understanding of history was woefully inadequate to put current events in any context (WWII was never mentioned in any of the years I was in school, because it wasn't 'current events', wasn't 'social studies' and wasn't far enough back to be history to any of my teachers).
Science worked out pretty well, as we did a combination of labs and studying the scientific method.
Foreign languages weren't required, but I was interested so I learned enough spanish and russian to understand the similarities in language. Incidentally, in Spanish class I learned english grammar.
In english I've found that there are often references to literature that I don't understand, having never read the books that most other people have. I learned to write on my own more than I did in english class, where we did more True-False and multiple choice exercises than we did actual paragraph writing.
In summary, as a student of the 70's in a college town, where we were the guinea pigs for many of the things you see in public schools today, I don't see them as that positive. I didn't get a great education (even though the school district then and now considers itself "world class"), but I did learn to read well enough to learn whatever I needed to catch up on for myself. Of course, that probably wasn't because of the 'whole language' reading we got. It's more because my older sister (having the older teachers who weren't trying all the latest methods) came home from school every day when I was 3 and 4 and had to play school, where she was the teacher and I learned to read and add...
Metmom,
I agree with you that it's important for us to keep up with what's happening in schools today.
You didn't ping me to this one. No one asked me to send a ping. The topic itself was ping-worthy. I have three sons, so it's a hot topic for me especially.
I didn't notice the foul language until later. I'm no saint myself, but the writer could've made his point without the foul language.
And I don't know why he twisted it all at the end into a story of white victimhood, either. It doesn't fit in with the whole idea of the first part of the article. All boys are affected by the "feminized classroom."
I'm going to try to read through the thread now and comment further.
The bonus is for the special ed teachers and the special ed administrator. They were mightily pissed off when our son was pulled out of special ed.
Well, we'll never know.
******************************************
I guess the teacher never read Joseph Conrad, either:
My mind buzzed like a fly, trying to discover some hint of mischief.
“Who’s the author?”
“Ah, Joseph Conrad,” he replied, consulting the frontispiece. “Can I? Huh, huh, huh?”
“I guess so.”
AND some kids are smarter than others. They too will rise to the top. You cannot have equal outcomes -- too many variables in humans. And some kids just sit there like dumbheads.
you da man - keep em coming....
maybe you could just post a DAILY post like pookie18 does, and call it
Neverdem's Reading List
ping to it once a day and add to it all day long....
'My brother in law majored in "english", yet avoided all the classics and ended up with an entire library filled with postmodernist nonsense about transexuals and queer theory (whetever *that* is). I have also never seen anyone so young, become so angry and bitter.'
"A Confederancy of Dunces" has replaced
"The Scarlet Letter"...........
We were seriously looking at homeschooling. However, I really wanted my daughter to have a certain reading program. When we found the private school with the reading program, we did the math and it basically came out the same price: homeschooling and hire a reading tutor or private school with the reading program. I think the private school must subsidize some of the reading program from the other kids tuition.
Anyway, after having such a bad year last year, I am all set to homeschool my kids if the private school doesn't work out. I have ISPs that I can join. I have researched curriculum. I am all prepared. Last year, I was in such shock about school problems.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.