Stuff like this is why we get parents claiming that teachers are trying to indoctrinate children.
The question then becomes who's value system should "win", IMO it should be the parents, the parents should have the final say in their child's upbringing not the schools or "community".
It was starting to change even when I was in public schools 30 years ago, and from what see it has only gotten worse.
Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc.
That is with out getting into any of the "culture war" topics
People have been saying this about schools since forever.
FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority.
One time we got new math books in that were horrible. Obvious errors everywhere. The teacher gave us extra credit for spending the day finding math errors in the book.
9th grade European History started off with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In 10th grade sex ed students got to vote on a movie. Nerds and Goths teamed up, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show.
In 3rd grade, a group of students opted stayed inside during recess and construct hot wheels courses (tracks and ramps) out of whatever classroom supplies we could find laying around.
10th grade parents day, my genetics teacher tricked parents into extracting frog sperm from a solution and playing with it. The students were nonplussed, we'd been working with DNA for quite a while by that time.
12th grade final report, I wrote a paper on the future of LED lighting, where I rewrired some incandescent flashlights into LED flashlights (obviously back before LED flashlights where a big thing).
8th grade final report, 30 page history of video games starting in 1970 and up until the mid 90s.
7th grade debate class, Rome VS Greece, on the side of Rome we argued that "Greece doesn't get to take credit for philosophers it had put to death."
8th grade math class, we just went and full on learned college level stats.
6th grade, I read the book Druids. For those not aware, it has sex in it. Quite as bit of sex in fact. Good bit of historical fiction though, I learned about the Romans invading England!
It's been true since forever.
> FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority.
Those are the values that schoolteachers publicly espouse, but even if they want to live up to it, they can't. It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, and have to keep an overcrowded classroom from turning into a madhouse.
> [the rest of the anecdotes]
Yeah, I had cool teachers, too. It really doesn't take away from the extremely rigid structure of the environment. It helps make things bearable, but the best-learned lessons are the ones you experience, not the ones you read, and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do.
IMHO we need to ditch the standardized tests. The more testing we add the worse education seems to get.
Or rather, to rephrase that, the more tests we add the more homogenized education gets, which may very well be the point.
Without teaching to the test, you have some teachers who don't do much teaching at all, and other teachings who do an amazing job teaching students 3x what the students would otherwise learn in a "normal" classroom.
Teaching to a standardized tests ensures that everyone gets at least a basic education, but it also means some kids get a worse education.
So that kind of sucks, but it may very well be a net positive measured in "number of gets who get at least a decent education."
For society at large, we have to judge if it is worth giving some kids a 3x education and other kids a .5 education, or if we want everyone to get 1x education.
Crappy choice honestly.
> and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do.
I never was much for "do what you're told".
I do however support the idea that learning some things is just painful. The only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. The only way to get better at presenting is to present. The only way to get better at math is to solve equations.
Practice does indeed make perfect.
I would not be as good as presenting today if I hadn't been forced to do countless presentations in school, which I hated! Each and every one, I complained that they were a useless exercise and that we'd be better off studying from a book than listening to the poorly done presentation of our peers!
But the presentations weren't so we could efficiently learn about the trials and tribulations of the Oregon trail, it was to make us learn how to prepare talking points, go through a topic in a reasonable manner, and speak clearly in front of a group.
So, thanks teach. Thank you for making me do the thing that I really didn't want to do.
If so, consider how that itself is a "belief" that has at times been explicitly rejected by local political parties.
In other words, there's no such thing as value-neutral education.
The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.
- unfair power structures disproportionately harm those without power
- including everyone in decisions about the allocation resources is an effective way to solve disparity
- communities that form rules to govern themselves are more just and fair than communities where rules are formed by a minority
If history and fables lend themselves to revealing these lessons through metaphor and tales of human struggle, the seeds for learning from them will be much more successful at growing than if the seeds are planted with a bludgeon.
It would be nice if my school didn't treat my child like a mindless robot to be programmed and instead provided context with content.
Some teachers are fantastic despite the lack of incentive, many are not, and the situation seems to be getting worse.
>they should come to their own conclusions
And if the problem with schooling is a decreasing ability to generate exactly this, what then?
Children, people in general should be presented with a diverse set of views and morals (and not just the loudest A vs. B near, but at a small distance from extremists).
I took a philosophy class with undergraduates and a few of them were vocally rather upset when confronted with the fact that there wasn't just a "truth" that could be learned and for each topic there were several opposing views. Those students had experienced so little of that in their 20-odd years of life that being presented with it really bothered them.
The problem here isn’t challenging your beliefs, it’s blatant stupidity.
My guess is the reality here is the legos were a source of conflict and so they got taken away. Just like many has occurred for probably since toys and children existed. Justifying it with an equity argument is just rage bait attention seeking.
Public education, like many government pet projects, attract warm bodies, inefficiency, because there is no incentive to be efficient. It's free money to them.
Teachers are now largely unnecessary, COVID made everything done online. It turns out in person teachers are largely ineffective and replaced with a YouTube video. Schooling simply has not kept up, and the unions want it that way.
This is not that dissimilar from someone thinking that businessmen don't need programmers because they could just cut out the middlemen and copy and paste from stackoverflow. It's not real analysis its a powerpoint presentation and its not well connected to reality.
Compsci is a popular one where the concepts are far easier understood by a YouTube video than a smart board.
The ideas of what teachers do and what they actually do are entirely different. Teachers overwhelmingly are there to hand out assignments bought from a company. If you don't understand it, teachers don't care, it's keep up or drop out.
Or vice-versa?
That is not to say the parents should direct what the schools teach on a individual level that is however to say I believe in 2 main principles for schools. First and foremost schools should be completely transparent, all parents should have access to copy's of every lesson plan, workbook, assignment, paper, etc. Second I believe in "Backpack" school funding, meaning funding for schools is not done on a geographic area, it is done by enrollment, and parent can choose to enroll their child in the public schools, or a private school or yes even a religious school at which point that school would get the funding for that student.
It should be an easy matter of local politics, not media hysteria and state-level laws...
Or in the case of my own upbringing, my first ten years of school was at a school was run by a church and my parents had every opportunity to be aware of the church's beliefs. A decade or so later, they apologized for me, they told me they hadn't realized how extreme some of the religious aspects of the curriculum were, but had found out more slowly over the years...
I don't understand how/why parents let themselves be suddenly surprised by things, seems like you should pay attention from day 1!
The problem is that they do not have the same scope and responsibilities even if they are note entirely exclusive. The teachers of the article clearly overstepped their bounds and the trust most parents have in teachers not to shape the mind of children with political beliefs.
But the author themselves seem to have a clear political position, that power and privilege, and even property, are unjust.
Perhaps that's true to some extent, but the point should be pressed on adult society first, not snuck through the backdoor onto the upcoming generation.
Here's a simple heuristic: if a teacher presents a false proposition as truth, is corrected, and has the epistemic humility to revise what she teachers, she's not indoctrinating.
A student would have an easier time disproving the Pythagorean theorem, the Heliocentric model or even the history of slavery than convincing these teachers that they were wrong. The former claims are all at least contingent on evidence.
Read this article carefully. At every occasion, she is projecting her beliefs and judgments onto the children. There is no amount of evidence that could falsify her conclusion. It's pure, unadulterated blind faith. Whenever the kids reject the teachers' assertions, the objection is categorically interpreted as evidence of how "ingrained" into the kids' psyches capitalism, inequality and the rest of the parade of horribles are. Pay particular attention to how "Drew" is framed, the kid who evidently was a leader in this group. He's very hesitant to accept the teachers' judgments, and only does so after significant argument. When he does, he is praised for toeing the Party's line, and shortly thereafter the kids are given the legos back, with significant restrictions. Again, these are framed as if the kids actually agreed to "all houses must be the same" (I almost want to try to impose this rule on my kids - I imagine I'd be stepping on many fewer Legos, though time vegging out in front of Netflix would probably increase). But given all of the other admissions against interest that the author makes (including that the teachers didn't want to impose authoritarianism and so they took the legos away), I imagine these were not at all open-ended discussions, but were strongly manipulated by the teachers to achieve a certain outcome. The author isn't the first socialist to preach the gospel about control over the means of production who nevertheless treats the demos as if they are incapable of managing without her help.
They are teaching kids about power, ownership, etc. You can disagree with what they consider a fair distribution of power, but you can't just say that they are wrong and you are right.
Rather than deciding that the kids were indoctrinated, maybe leave it to the kids to decide what to take away from this?
Kids aren't stupid, I'm pretty sure they will realise that the "fair" rules they came up with limit what they can build, and maybe at some point they'll change the rules so that some of them can build bigger stuff.
> Several times in the discussion, children made reference to “giving” Lego pieces to other children. Kendra pointed out the understanding behind this language: “When you say that some kids ‘gave’ pieces to other kids, that sounds like there are some kids who have most of the power in Legotown — power to decide what pieces kids can use and where they can build.” Kendra’s comment sparked an outcry by Lukas and Carl, two central figures in Legotown[.]
The article goes on to transcribe "Lukas" and "Carl" rejecting the author's framing, and insisting that "giving" meant something more like "finding and sharing."
Of course, the kids here are right to push back, since "give" implies only mere possession of a thing, even of an unowned thing like knowledge.
But that didn't stop the teacher!
> These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children’s contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.
A reasonable teacher would have reacted by questioning her own assumptions about the kids' motives. Perhaps they believed they had ownership (a legal-political claim) or perhaps just possession (a physical-factual claim). This teacher short-circuits this kind of self-skepticism, the aforementioned "epistemic humility," and immediately filters the kids' actions according to her ideology. Her tendentious interpretation of honestly quite reasonable arguments from the kids is a pretty strong indication that she's indoctrinating rather than just teaching.
She has a lot to say on the topic of power, but her analysis curiously falls just short of being applied to herself and her fellow teachers. They are evidently free to use their power to shame, shun and harangue the kids about word choice, distribution of bricks, capitalism and who knows what else.
Using power as a weapon to shame & shun is in itself an indication of indoctrination. I doubt many of us would rationalize Scientology's "e-meter" readings as well-meaning hokum when it's clearly a manipulative ritual employed as a tool to coerce followers into toeing the line. Why, then, should these teachers get a free pass?
Given the totality of the article (or even my excerpts), what is more likely to be true: she holds consistent beliefs about power and equity which she thinks she must inform these kids about, or she feels she is an enlightened activist whose mission is not merely to inform but to impose her beliefs by all means out of faith in her cause?
8 year olds are masters of portraying their self-serving actions as selfless acts of generosity -- I see that all the time. It's easy to see who calls the shots when you watch a group of kids play, but that kid will totally insist that they are just doing what the group wants.
As for your assertion that the teachers were shaming the kids, that's something you are reading between the lines. Maybe they were, but I'm going to give them the benefit of doubt and assume they were respectful.
This conclusion doesn't follow. I said the kids' explanations were reasonable relative to the teacher's. This is almost self-evidently true given the repeated inconsistencies that Kendra admits throughout.
> 8 year olds are masters of portraying their self-serving actions as selfless acts of generosity -- I see that all the time. It's easy to see who calls the shots when you watch a group of kids play, but that kid will totally insist that they are just doing what the group wants.
I'm under no illusions that 8 year olds are angels. So when they do act up or get a bit out of hand, how should we react? I submit that when the kids are taught the power of how to speak up when they're upset, how to listen to others' perspectives and how to cooperate toward mutual benefit, then they all become freer and more powerful; when all of their conflicts must be mediated through adults, especially ideologues such as Kendra and the other teachers, then they become more dependent and servile.
Having some of my own experience with kids, I've found that usually encouraging empathy and conversation with other kids is more effective at teaching them than brute forcing my own authority as a parent/grown up on them. My grown-up authority is the strongest when I can point out a lie or some other factual flaw, e.g. responding to "Jane tried to trip me!" with the context that "Jane was looking at me and away from you, so do you think it could have been an accident?" It's weakest when I substitute my own judgments and interpretations for theirs.
Also, Kendra admits that the teachers had spoken to the kids about being more egalitarian before the demise of Legotown. Wouldn't it have been better and less manipulative to address that problem when it was happening, rather than after a crisis? And I don't use that word loosely. If when I was eight my friends and I had built a huge Lego city that was destroyed one weekend, I would have been utterly devastated, especially if our teachers imposed their unilateral will to abscond with the legos afterward.
I know other adults whose parents pulled crap like this when they were kids, and it left psychological scars. I doubt afternoon daycare teachers could have that significant of an impact, but the fact that their capacity for harm is limited is no justification for their abusive behavior.
> As for your assertion that the teachers were shaming the kids, that's something you are reading between the lines. Maybe they were, but I'm going to give them the benefit of doubt and assume they were respectful.
The kids had all of their Legos taken away, then were forced into hour-long recorded conversations. Their only option for seeing the Legos return–which, again, they had built into what sound like genuinely cool structures through some approximation of cooperation–was to completely accept their teachers' class struggle framing with one kid ("Drew") singled out as the "leader"/chief exploiter, and then agree to rather draconian rules such as every house being identical.
I share your take-away in general. But at least in this case though, the parents of these kids probably [publicly] align with the ideology of the teachers, although I think it's reasonable to suspect many of them privately have other opinions (I derive this belief from the fact that these are affluent white families who chose to send their kids to a primarily white and affluent after-school program. These families may talk the talk, but are they walking the walk?)
> Hilltop is located in an affluent Seattle neighborhood, and, with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.
I think it’s more likely they didn’t go out of their way to put them in more diverse environments.
If you didn't, can you explain what you mean?
But if you mean affecting children's values and social outlook, then indeed, teachers do that. Sometimes they do it unconsciously, in which case it's typically the prevailing social values, explicit and implicit, which children are imbued with; sometimes it's more conscious.
I wouldn't say that we turned out alright at all.
> From our conversations, several themes emerged.
> Collectivity is a good thing:
> Personal expression matters:
> Shared power is a valued goal:
> Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for
> As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants. They expressed the need, within collectivity, for personal expression, for being acknowledged as an individual within the group.
These were 8 year olds. The writers definitely steered the children into the results they wanted.
* This came after the "points" game. Deciding to be collectivist makes sense, after a game that's designed to result in obviously unfair distribution of ownership. These kids are probably used to these kinds of object lessons: it sounds like this is the program's preferred method of teaching.
* They still wanted to make one huge LEGO Town. Thus, they need to come up with a plan for resolving conflicts, and it can't just be "I own it."