Right. And instead of changing school to adapt to kids (e.g., less sitting in chairs, more free play), we change kids to adapt to school (e.g., medicate, discipline, hold back).
Our approach is completely backwards.
I think it has to do with scalability; our current education system scales much better within the ridiculous budget constraints education faces (in the US).
Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
The spending efficiency of public schools in US is horrible, and they tend to focus on quantity over quality with teachers, due to a misguided idea of reducing student teacher ratios that Malcolm Gladwell has written about.
This constant excuse repeated everywhere about not enough funding isn't backed up by data.
I spent my entire childhood in public schools. 3/4 of my teachers were lazy shitbags who treated it like a govt job. The other 1/4 were punished every time they broke the mold in any way to fix things.
The day public schools realize that their primary role is educating kids OVER providing jobs to as many teachers union members as possible, we can start fixing them.
My wife teaches English at a pubic school on the other end. Their student body is mostly minorities. The library contains only books written by dead white men which the students are inherently mistrustful of. They can't afford new novels, so the teachers print excerpts at home and bring them to class. In 2017 they blew their printing budget. In 2018 and 2019 we printed more than 35k pages at home because the school couldn't afford more toner. In 2021 they'll be in the black re: toner again, so my home printer will get a break until they blow the budget again. Public schools are funded based on property taxes of the surrounding neighborhoods. Some of them have money to burn, others can't afford books.
My wife's school has the best teachers in town. Nobody goes into teaching for the money, and nobody teaches as a school like hers because they think it's gonna be an easy job--those sorts gravitate to the schools with money to burn and students that aren't also homeless.
More important than fixing the absolute amount of funding that public schools have is fixing the way it's distributed. It should a flat rate per-student, adjusted only for cost of living at a city-by-city granularity, not a neighborhood-by-neighborhood granularity.
Once the public school experience is more equal across the board it will be easier to distinguish the good teachers that lack supplies from the bad teachers with resources to waste.
>Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
NYC public schools are #1; DC isn't in the top ten (https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...). Baltimore is #3, though, and four DC suburbs are also in the top ten, all no doubt offering much better education than the Baltimore (or DC) schools.
>My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
Private schools pay teachers less money than public schools, too.
- Cost more money for the state - Cost more time to the teacher (its an issue since early grade teachers are already swamped) - is in "testing" since the late 90's at least and is not quite there yet.
So we took another approach, more like germans. Reduced schools hour and add 2x2 hours of learning something else. Woodworking, board game, wird sports, anything the teacher can put in place (often boring stuff tbh, but i heard really good initiatives from friends that stayed in the social "business").
Well, in the end, it costed more money, took more time from the teachers anyway, was poorly implemented all around and was rolled back in some areas. But weirdly, while rural areas often get the short end of the stick when this kind of change rolls out, in this case, this created a lot of social link and learning opportunities (as they got no money, they had to ask parent/grandparents and people living around for help and this often was a success)
"This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function.
"At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion.
"The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, "mental health" programs, etc.)"
Boys may have a harder time staying still and paying attention, but that isn't just a school thing. Doing any sort of research for any sort of theoretical learning in life requires those same things. You'll never get to fulfill your every desire in life. Learning the discipline to control yourself now and have fun later is just as important a life skill to learn as any. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Citation, desperately, needed.
The anecdotal evidence available to me from my experiences and my social circle strongly contradicts that.
You may want to reconsider that assumption.
If a stranger breaks into your home and kills your kid, the natural response for a lot of people is to kill the person that did it. There are a lot of reasons why we _don't_ allow that in civilized countries. People have to be socialized to reject that natural behavior.
More to school children, they as adults will not be successful if they frequently act impulsively. Adulthood in society is finding a fulfilling career, maintaining healthy relationships, paying your bills on time, and setting fulfilling long term goals for yourself. None of those things are helped by impulsive behavior.
* Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
* I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
I mean... no shit? The point wasn't to compare revenge killing to fidgeting. The point was to illustrate that impulse control is necessary for a civilized society to function.
> Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
It's frankly insulting that you would take the stupidest possible interpretation of my argument, make a counterargument, and claim slam dunk.
How do you think it is that kids become adults? Do you just let kids run wild, controlling none of their impulses, and then they turn 18 and suddenly they're in full control of themselves? That's absolutely laughable.
It's development for a reason: you're _developing_ the kids. They are going to be at a lower level of ability than an adult with regards to impulse control. That's why you start to teach them. Babies can't chew hard food. It's impossible. So you don't give them hard food. It's _NOT_ impossible to teach a kid to control some of their undesirable impulses.
> I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
Uh... wat? No, you can't train _all_ impulsiveness out of anybody. But you can absolutely train people to recognize and mitigate negative impulses.
Almost the very first skill any kid learns is to control the impulse of blurting out when they want to speak in a classroom. They are taught that they should raise their hand and wait to be called on. And lots of parents have to teach their kids that they can't hit other kids.
With respect to how both environments force humans to adapt to the institution, and thereby manifest a perverse socialization, yes. The differences are in magnitude, not direction.
I'm reminded of the flawed "alpha" theory of wolf behavior. Turns out the observed dominance struggles were directly related to being in captivity; this form of "socialization" doesn't emerge in the wild.
I, for one, appreciate not having to worry about going hungry, dying of thirst, freezing to death, or being chased down by a pack of wolves. You need a society to facilitate that. Society doesn't work without social norms. And you wouldn't be on Hacker News speculating about this if not for society.
Also, where are you getting this idea that kids in school are abused?