Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)
thesunmagazine.org
thesunmagazine.org
Too many people has apocalyptic views of the world. And to push for individualistic behavior when you think that your society is disintegrating seems to just accelerate any problems that may exists. 30 years later the collapse still has not happened.
> The children I teach have almost no curiosity, and what little they do have is transitory;
I have yet to see a child that is not curious, you need some war-level trauma to stop children curiosity. I would guess that the author real complain is that children are not interested in the same things that him, and that is why he is pissed off.
> they’re just nice kids from central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them couldn’t add or subtract with any fluency.
I am all for better schools and I can not even imagine how bad schooling has been in mainly black neighborhoods but to "just let the kids learn by themselves" seems as absurd as the idea of "tabula rasa". Kids need to learn to learn but they also need to be taught.
> The Swedes realized this in 1976, when they effectively abandoned state adoption of unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted.
This one is interesting as Abortion laws are changing in the USA.
> Family is the main engine of education.
This makes sense. I just think that schools also have their place no only for education but as socializing places.
> to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds.
Sweden has a generous parental leave. That is a good way of achieving this goal.
In general the article expresses a too extreme view of things. But it has some good points even if I do not agree with all the conclusions.
One day when I was volunteering at one of these schools, a student came up to me showing a picture of a robot how cool it was. When I mentioned that it was relatively easy to build, he got super stoked, told his friends and before you know it, we had a class of 8 students pursuing their own interest, learning CS/Breadboarding/Electrical-Circuits, all student driven, building cardboard-box arduino-based robots afterschool.**
These student led classes were majority black students and pushed forward most by black students. Everything was honestly instantly working great, and at the end of every class my students made to promise not to forget to show up to the next session (I don't recall missing a session, I believe this was out attachment for the course).
Self-driven learning is a thing, and all we have to do is give kids grounds to explore -- in this case to create designs from from their own imagination (ey, isn't that why we're hackers here : D? We can all relate).
* Small class sizes help (or student:teacher ratio of 6:1 ideally). This is the ratio (lower works too) that really works, and I've seen only at really rich schools (see Branson/UHS/Lick Wilmerding) and programs based on it. I've seen this emulated to great success in Summerbridge SF, and too at a summerschool I helped start in the bay area based on project-based/student-led learning, access to technology, and most importantly these small class sizes that enables hosting these free-learning classes.
**Again money is important, materials costs for this class were supported by my concurrent 4 jobs, doing mainly part-time engineering work for startups, electrical-engineering curriculum development for a summer-schools, as well as tutoring.
The people part is the issue. The teachers I know hate the bureaucracy and policies. Private schools seem to be better at hiring, even when they pay less. Dealing with certain parents is a nightmare too.
If you have a classroom made for 25-30 students, it wouldn't be too hard to partition it in half, then have two instructors leading each half of the room.
I went to a robotics class and a game design class as a kid and they both had something like 20 students with two instructors. It went fine. Sure some of it was introductory instruction, but then we'd build our own stuff as individuals or teams. So there might not need to be much reconfiguration at all.
Awesome, as this is really one the core things the original post wanted us to discuss:
_Should we_ require students to study so many things that they don't find interesting?
Some of the original post's thoughts:
> It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
And:
> “How will they learn to read?” you say, and my answer is: “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the life that unfolds around them.
My take is unoriginal, even summarized by someone else's quote: “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” -- Leonardo da Vinci
And if really can be attributed to da vinci, then one can say same core energy really existed in minds over half a millenia ago.
So I assert that while that this experience granted was indeed an awesome experience, there's a large swath of folks pushing for this "project-based" learning, and more self-driven learning paths.
https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl
What's the harm in allowing students to connect the dots on their own?
This can not be understated. Coming from a country that would be considered "Eastern European", there is an astounding amount of individualism pushed in schools, and yet, it seems that the most prosperous and "equal" countries take the opposite approach.
What I cherish the most from my time in Scandinavian Universities is how much emphasis there is on collective work. Those who work in group will always achieve and learn a lot more than those who do it alone, unless the latter are truly exceptional.
Many people in the US who have done group projects at school will disagree - you typically end up with dead weight or overbearing partners (it tends to get better when you get out of the compulsory school years).
With the right partners, I completely agree though. In my undergrad and even moreso in my masters I had some good groups.
Given what I have read about such individualistic behaviour, I am inclined to believe that public transportation as found in Denmark wouldn't function in the US simply because it requires a form of trust between citizen and state. You just enter the bus / metro / train, you generally don't have to show ticket or anything. You are "caught" however if an inspector happens to be on board and goes for a check. I have had such checks only on the M2 line in Copenhagen (the one from the airport). People just buy the ticket from their phone and understand their responsibilities.
For example, the boy scouts teach integrity, teamwork, and also self-reliance (individualism).
I assume it would be more challenging to use this model in our largest Metro areas.
I don't think individualism and participation in community are necessarily at odds with one another. Communities of choice can be really powerful and meaningful in peoples' lives. I think the tricky part is figuring out how to equip young people to find and build communities in a society that no longer provides it by default.
I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but that doesn't reflect my experience at all. Some children are indeed curious, but I wouldn't say anywhere near most. Saying that only serious trauma stops curiosity comes off as overly optimistic, but what do I know.
After all, would you make the same statement about adults? Are nearly all or most adults curious except for when there's trauma? My guess is that you would struggle to make a similar statement about adults in general. If adults aren't that curious, but children are, then why is that?
I learned very little in school, myself. Instead I read my brother's textbooks long before I was 'supposed' to because I thought it was fun and spent the bulk of my time in school devouring the parts of the library I found engaging.
perhaps somewhere along the line, the curiosity got squashed. That happened to me science and math in high school with boring classes. I loved science before then.
See inner city, ghetto living experiences
I think I agree. Some time ago I was doing volunteering at a HS. We were basically teaching basic computer skills ( Excel, Word and so on ); helped with problems with resume or something along those lines. I think 9/10 kids logged onto FB and/or played Plants vs Zombies. I did try to engage them, but their goals were clearly different. They were interested, but in nothing that those volunteer hours could offer. The kid that is interested will seek this stuff out. The rest will play Plants vs Zombies.
I will admit it was a little disheartening for me and I stopped doing it for a while. I am debating proposing something similar now at my local library, but I am worried the results will be about the same.
I have no children (so grain of salt), but what I think kids need is more what you'd call "guidance".
Not necessarily teaching them, but more showing them how to learn, and how to discover interests and pursue them, which may lead them down a life path.
I had it easy. My dad just had to leave some computers lying around. None of my other siblings went into tech. 2/3 of my siblings did a bunch of different things before settling into their current careers.
If that curiosity is all satisfied at home on youtube/television then kids really won't much real curiosity for school. Kids are curious but not about everything all the time
Like come on, we were stuck in the boredom cube for 6ish hours a day, the alternative is nothing and most of us still didn't pay attention.
than to have it be taught IN A BORING WAY WITHOUT CONTEXT
Learning my multiplication tables was fun when it was turned into a race with my friends. Memorizing the state capitals and abbreviations was fun when it was turned into a game.
You can turn most anything into a fun way of learning it with just a modicum of effort. One problem is too many teachers get beat down to only teach what they are told to teach through some ready-made commercial curriculum. We have a huge number of teachers who are poorly paid. Too many run-ins with difficulty and admins who want things done their way, and that teacher's lifelong career gets sapped of any joy and they default to just teaching as they're told to teach.
If education was better funded in order to pay teachers very competitive wages, you'd attract more can-do teachers to the field instead of bright eyed young college graduates who end up leaving the profession within the first 5 years because of how stifling the bureaucracy of it all is. Pay the job well to attract and retain the best and brightest and you'll get amazing results through creativity and mastery of the art of education.
We don't do that, so you often get what you pay for.
You make a tired stereotypical argument that better pay attracts and retains better people: the idea that money can fix all problems is a thoughtless crutch.
Better pay retains those people that despite the intolerable working conditions, people who slavishly force themselves to remain. Why presume there is a correlation between teaching ability and slavishness?
The argument that better pay attracts better people makes little sense for jobs that people desire regardless of pay: becoming a teacher is often a calling. the great teachers I know are not necessarily academic (high GPA) achievers, instead they have a passion for teaching children, and they learn skills that are not testable by written exams.
You yourself even point out that money is not the issue: “young college graduates [leave] the profession within the first five years because of how stifling the bureaucracy [is]”.
Most private preschool teachers in New Zealand work for nearly minimum wage, and I have friends who are teaching preschoolers (under 5 year old). These are smart, motivated, dedicated women working long hours and they remain in the profession earning little: even those that move up the preschool career ladder earn well below equivalent jobs in other industries.
In New Zealand teachers of 5+ year olds get paid a more reasonable salary. I have many friends that remain teachers for decades mostly because of the joy and satisfaction they get from the job, not because they are tied to the job by money or lack of opportunity.
Fix the conditions, not the pay.
Edited: improved writing.
I mean no but the issue is the system has to be changed as to not encourage stifling bureaucracy. Unfortunately a monopolized school system with a captive customer ('pay up to this exact single school district or you know just sell your house and uproot yourself and move') is anti-thetical to the kind of free-market competition that aids in rooting out inefficient bureaucracy.
I love the responses I often get when suggesting to let the parents use their own discretion to pay directly for their children's education using the per-child tax allocation. Somehow striking teachers are simultaneously people we're supposed to listen to as people who know how to fix the system when things go wrong, but god forbid we allow a system that allows the parent to pay the teachers directly and privately to bypass the broken public school administrators.
Somehow teachers are simultaneously the source we can listen to about how to fix things when they strike, but suddenly become distrustful evil capitalists if we're allowed to let them privately educate on the free market in lieu of public school system. I wish the public would make up their mind.
I see it as a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Are teachers paid less because they suck, or do they suck because they're not paid well?
Putting aside wages, does education really need more funding? What exactly is more expensive about teaching the fundamentals now than 50 years ago?
> you'd attract more can-do teachers
That would be possible not by merely increasing teacher pay. One of the biggest complaints by most teachers is that they are not allowed to deviate from the state sponsored lesson plan. Why would anyone who is qualified to be teaching children be inspired to be a mouthpiece for the state and nothing more? Teachers shouldn't be getting lesson plans from the state. Their students should either pass the exams or the teachers get fired. Yes, I'm using the word fired here, because I don't believe in teachers being protected from fucking up the minds of children. Maybe teachers who are actually qualified to teach children will find that inspiration in having their prestige be on the line, and the truly evil teachers out there wouldn't last as long if they weren't effective at educating.
Who were the best teachers you had? I bet they weren't the ones who just read out of a textbook and did whatever the state guidelines told them to do. Usually the best teachers and professors are so interested in their subject matter that they can effectively convey information and its importance without reading notes verbatim. We need more teachers like that, but when I was growing up there might have been one of those in every 10. Hopefully it's better than that now, but I don't see why it would be.
As long as the system itself is rotten, it really doesn't matter what pay teachers. The way the that the education system in America is constructed does not attract virtue. It attracts those who can fit well into bureaucracy and do what they're told in exchange for protection. There are still good teachers within that system, but I need more than one hand to count how many lazy, stupid, and sadistic teachers I've encountered.
That said, some things have to be boring. The fun comes later with application:>
All kids are a bit curious, but it's hard to get them to 'stick' to something.
Is our children learning?
I’ll start with your grammar and end with a look out my window, where smoke from forest fires currently fills the sky.
This has been the central theme of progressive education movement in the US. IIRC, Jo Boaler has been advocating that kids could discover most of the maths by exploring and learning by themselves. I fundamentally disagree with this belief, though. It took thousands of years for our greatest minds to simplify our maths to its current incarnation. Discovering "everything" by myself wastes my time and reduces my chance of working on something more meaningful.
A much more common position is that self-paced exploration — but using the latest textbooks and also a variety of teaching styles — could interest students much more than “no child left behind” style common curricula which constrain both the teacher and the student.
Personally I think the current system is terrible for below- and above-average students, and perhaps passable for average students.
The Prussian model we use currently was not designed to create more educated people, it was designed to most efficiently create factory workers. That's an important factor to keep in mind. I would argue the school model is working, it's just not doing what you think it's doing. Any discussion of "improving" schools that doesn't completely overturn the Prussian model is just grifting for more funding.
You can get some of the benefits of this environment today if you are willing to pay a premium for Montessori style private schooling. My daughter loved it and was WAY ahead of everyone else, including the "honors" kids, when she transitioned to a regular public school.
And you still missed that we had multi-age schoolhouses for generations that were successful.
If you want to argue for smaller classroom sizes, I'm on board, but you won't get a single vote from me for school funding until you're ready to completely upend the Prussian model. It converted our public schools into literal prisons for children and is a scourge on this Earth.
I think you get close to the real problem with this assumption. Classes need to be smaller. Even at a university, where the people are supposed to be more disciplined and attentive than a random middle school class, only the lectures are held for many people, and the practical stuff is done in much smaller groups.
In order to have more successful social systems, we need more resources in it. More money, and more people whose job is to care about the other people.
I think it’s great to give kids a taster of many subjects, but from my education I’m pretty sure that 90% of what I was taught was useless. The STEM stuff I would have done anyway because I loved it. And I have later come back to full in blanks in history etc. (Though I do acknowledge it’s hard to tell whether school builds a substrate or pattern for general learning, even if the raw facts were useless at the time.)
I had peers that were forced to learn languages, English lit, maths, etc, and then left school to be tradesmen or musicians, where they used approximately zero of what they were forced to learn. (And trade school starting earlier could have taught them the trigonometry or scales they needed very quickly).
The problem is we are trying to manufacture high school graduates rather than crafting or sculpting them.
I agree that the existing classroom model doesn’t work for this new way of thinking about learning. Siblings have done a better job of arguing for specific options than I could. But yes, I’d rather try something with different structure. For example, can you stream kids by interest rather than by age group? 30 kids all into history, with varying ages, might learn better than 30 7th-graders all trying to learn the curriculum on WW2 or whatever was decided is “important they know” and which most don’t care about.
Everyone has their own pet definition of what is “important to learn” in school, mine is the meta-level “learning is easy and fun if you care about what you are studying”.
- Goodbye to any understanding of politics or social studies - Goodbye to historical knowledge - Goodbye to any understanding of our own bodies (except for kids who are interested in animals or medicine?) - Goodbye to classical literature - Goodbye to economics and personal finance - Goodbye to being able to appropriately and accurately express oneself when speaking and writing
ALL of these are very important parts of human knowledge that are essential to high functioning in society, but 99% of children have absolutely no interest in them whatsoever if left to their own devices.
> 99% of children have absolutely no interest in them whatsoever if left to their own devices.
This would be the crux of our disagreement; I think that ultimately this depends on empirical investigation. It's hard to do such studies, since SES and other confounds are extremely hard to control for. I'm sure that 99% of kids have absolutely no interest in the current curriculum, but that's precisely my point; the curriculum is horrifically boring in many places if you don't connect with the subject matter.
I do think it's reasonable to note that most other developed countries have better public education systems than the US, and for the most part follow a fairly traditional model, which demonstrates that there are gains to be had in the US without revolutionizing the system. I'm in favor of trying to achieve that too.
And I'd of course not advocate for burning the whole thing down and starting with something new; I think experiments could be made with, say, one day a week of "interest-based learning" along the lines I put forth above, while still keeping the core curriculum alive.
By simplifying the problem to performance at this curriculum, you gain the ability to measure, but also corrupt the thing you are trying to measure, by forcing schools to teach to the test instead of teaching better (where there are direct tradeoffs between the two).
I think NCLB fails to recognize that education is something which benefits from local expertise, which means you need to fund teachers/schools and get out of the way, rather than try to standardize it. I recognize this is very hard politically.
And anyway one should wonder just how much tinkering with school system can push you forward, at some point you should realize that education is not only dependent on the school environment.
I used to show up early to work, took my responsibilities seriously, and not take shortcuts. Guess what? I get paid the same either way, so what's the point? We're "fat and happy", so something would have to change culturally.
What do you imagine happens in Israel, Russia, India, or China when people do that? They get profit sharing? Seems unlikely.
They don't get fired, maybe get a raise or promotion. In the US, you won't get fired for doing the minimum because they don't have anyone to replace you with who would be better.
That why it pains me to see that progressives thought that lowering standards would help students in need. The three years of Covid showed exactly the opposite.
There are certainly some students who are really disciplined/dedicated about their school work, but I would guess the number is less than 15%.
I did pretty well in school, but likely could have done better if I were really disciplined about school work. I usually rushed through homework and spent just a reasonable amount of time on projects. I'd rather be playing video games or sports, or hanging out with friends. I'd put extra work in on stuff I was interested in and probably learned just as much outside the classroom as in. Even stuff like school band I would rarely practice and still do well (sort of forced into it because the school would give busy work to the non-band members during the occasional practices during school hours). I went to a private school and participated in advance classes, and I still think 15% is about the number of students who studied hard and the rest of us could either do it easily or some would cheat.
I still believe that there is also value in rote memorization and practice, as you simply can't recognize patterns unless you have the fundamentals upon which those patterns are based, mastered. Only then can you start abstracting complexity away mentally, and then do effective "discovery" of new concepts.
I didn't encounter this teaching method until college, but I don't see why it can't be applied at an earlier age. One of my earliest memories was when I "discovered" that 2 + 2 = 4. I distinctly remember the moment where the concept of addition and subtraction clicked for me, and it didn't happen in a classroom. I was playing by myself and counting my fingers out on the front lawn.
This is what companies want. They want a diploma just for the credential, but they don't really train you and just want you to learn on the job.
Honestly I'm convinced anyone who believes this stuff has never watched a toddler.
Here we are 25 years after Gatto gave this speech, our society has not "disintegrated" yet, Well-schooled people are far from irrelevant, in fact they have given us nearly every single modern comfort and technological breakthrough in modern history and they have continued to do so over the last 25 years.
What Gatto is proposing would just create even more inequality and social injustice, where only parents with the means to see their children get a good education can do so, either by having the background and time to homeschool or the money to provide private schooling or tutors for their own children.
It really depends on how you define disintegrated. What he mentioned has manifested over the last 30 years. Slowly, and quietly. Now, it has come to a head. The lunatics actively arguing parents should have no place in schooling, the obsession of children with transient media figures, the state of school bells determining the bounds of one's life, and the general lack of society to embrace the creativity and novelty of a kid's wild imagination. It was present when I was a kid but much more muted. These days, watching the children in my family grow up, they are far more interested in becoming someone they aren't, rather than the something they want to be.
I would consider this disintegration.
You don't get to wave off everything at whim when there are real concerns out there. A large percentage of the population would disagree with you that "disintegration" is not happening.
But since you’ve brought it up, what else do you call an organized campaign to assault, threaten to assault, vandalize the private property of, threaten the family of, defame, and/or falsely level criminal charges against public officials?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/13/school-b...
“At an Illinois school board meeting, a man was arrested after allegedly striking an education official. A school board member in Loudoun County, Va., fielded abusive, profane and threatening emails, Facebook messages and phone calls for months. In Florida, protesters camped out in front of a school board member’s house and burned an “FU” into her lawn with weed killer. They called her a Nazi and a pedophile. Someone falsely reported her as abusing her child to the Florida Department of Children and Families. “Be careful, your mommy hurts little kids!” an activist yelled at her daughter.” (links to incident reports in original source)
That’s not merely “voicing their opinions at public meetings.”
There's a reason so many school boards are being flipped. It's a response to the obvious hostility towards parents and people are actually waking up to it. Your downplaying and strawmanning of the situation shows that you actually don't know what's going on.
"Father arrested at school board event says they tried covering up his daughter’s rape by man in girl’s bathroom"
"Round Rock ISD police force arrests parents at their homes"
"Dissident Parents Targeted by School Board in Arizona"
Not to mention the numerous instances of school admins promoting discrimination, violence, and their biased political agendas.
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/exposed-greenwich-ct-ass...
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/prestigious-nyc-private-...
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/nyc-assistant-principal-...
This isn't education. It's indoctrination backed by authoritarianism.
Their wikipedia page is particularly damming, every allegation lovingly well-cited: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
Apparently the vertias video was good enough to get the AG to launch a probe.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/private-school-staffer-pla...
Apparently the veritas video was good enough to get this person put on leave.
Took me 30 seconds to find these. I have a feeling you're going to shift the goalposts again though.
Wikipedia isn't, and has never been, a valid source of truth. PV has won every time such claims have been brought to court. So cite all the biased articles you like. They post the videos. Edit all you want, those words came from those educator's mouths. That contains more truth than you'll ever find in a news article attempting to spin a narrative.
What does this even mean? The US spends more an education than anyone else and it dominated the world's economy because it's blown up everyone else who tried. This is a tautology. The countries with the schools people who rank schools like best are ranked best. That doesn't mean they are actually best.
Schooling absolutely helps people get out of poverty. But that doesn't mean it's the type of school that dominant in the West. We have a school and university system that's extended day care and teaches both incredibly slowly and way too fast. With smaller classes we could reduce the 12 years of schooling the average child gets today to 4. We never will because the parents don't know what to do with them and there aren't any jobs for 12 year olds.
This is false. Schooling has had nothing to do with it, capitalism is what has lifted the most people out of poverty, not schooling.
This is false. Access to cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels is what has lifted the most people out of poverty, not capitalism.
Without burning through millions of years of oil and coal in the span of a few centuries, we'd all still be farming and eating mud, regardless of which economic system were in play.
Remove capitalism, and industrialized society will still limp along, in a relatively prosperous manner compared to centuries past.
Remove access to cheap energy, and it will collapse overnight, with misery and death on a scale the world has never seen.
Meanwhile, capitalism would have done very little to reduce poverty, without all that dirt-cheap energy.
I think the poster's point was that, even if capitalism helped, the cheap energy from fossil fuels was the absolutely necessary part. Personally, I'd not be surprised if modern capitalism doesn't even work so well without cheap, abundant energy. Is it so effective when almost all your energy is human and animal, with a little water power on the side? I dunno. Maybe not much more effective than other approaches. Maybe even less effective.
> Remove capitalism, and industrialized society will still limp along, in a relatively prosperous manner compared to centuries past.
Barley limp along, maybe. As I mentioned above cheap energy alone is pretty much useless. North Korea has cheap energy, they aren't doing very well. Japan has cheap energy, and they are doing fantastic. The USSR had cheap energy, there were still bread lines. There has been no other institution, other than capitalism, that is done more to lift mass quantities of people out of poverty in such a short period of time. That said I do whole hardheartedly agree that cheap energy is the foundation and that if cheap energy goes away there will be millions of people that will die (but that is true weather a nation is capitalist or not).
But that industrialization can't happen without cheap energy. Energy is the critical factor, here.
(May sound snarky but a genuine question.)
Instead of trying to produce a "whole person" out of the schooling system in America, we are trying to produce specialized devices for the performance of certain tasks. Some of the students are sorted into the "high power devices" bin (lawyers, programmers, etc.), some into the "low power device" bin (manual labor), and some into the rubbish bin (physically disabled, mentally ill, etc.). Much like Intel bins their chips, in fact. Once you bin the parts from the school system, then you start to ship those parts throughout the workforce, or perhaps do some modifications to them in a university to achieve the most optimal output.
I guess there were a lot of people who saw this before me, and I am sure that like them my view will never get mainstream traction. Someday, perhaps, an AI will be developed to read our internet comments, and I'll be labeled as someone who needs maintenance and shipped off to a re-education facility.
It inspired me to start honing my writing skills with intentionality, and sharpened my interest in activism.
I have mixed feelings reading this article now -- it's not quite as well written as I remember, although I still agree with many of the critiques.
> it's not quite as well written as I remember,
Maybe because it is a speech? :-)
> What follows is the text of the speech he gave upon being named Teacher of the Year.
We don't know if the words were said exactly as written, or how it was delivered, which often is more important than the text itself.
Maybe kids are just not curious about what the author teaches? As a parent, I have to admit that kids are not necessarily curious about what we value. My kids are not curious about STEM, at least not yet. They are, however, are very curious about how to use TNT in minecraft, or how to learn cartwheel. It's unfortunate (or forutnate?) that not every one is born curious about STEM or any subject like their teachers or parents do.
And even then, the schooling I went through hardly rewarded curiousness. You were incentivized to cram information to pass tests, so that you could get good grades, to get into good colleges, to cram more information to the pass more tests, to get good grades.
Even when my teachers seems to enjoy curious students, the curriculum was certainly not structured to incentivize it.
I thought there was a solution: teachers give good questions for homework and exams. When I was in school, I rarely got repeated questions. Most questions challenged my understanding of fundamentals. It's hard to believe that people who only cram can ever get decent grades in tests like IIT's JEE, China's National Entrance Exam, or Japan's university entrance exams, or Korea's national entrance exams. As for the US, it's hard to imagine that anyone can solve decently hard problems in textbooks like Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics or Cormen et el's Introduction to Algorithms (The US does not mandate challenging problems in high schools, so I use examples from college).
I feel everything I’ve ever learned was “taught to myself” even though I’ve spent close to two decades in school. Of course a teacher can catalyze the process by presenting material in an organized way. They say “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink” and at first this seemed like an appropriate analogy for learning - but after some reflection is only partly relevant. Peer groups can be beneficial with catalyzing learning as well - of course it depends on the peers.
This is a big topic but found it refreshing to be exposed to some novel (and old) thoughts
this is an especially apt metaphor for compulsory education, because when a horse is thirsty, it is perfectly capable of finding water on its own
More people should read this. It may be the most important document on the state of the American education system in it's history and it's a full 3 decades old.
https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
(though his site is having some problems, it looks like).
English/reading is way overemphasized, and overly focused on emotional fictional literature. Sorry, I don't give a damn how Juliette feels; maybe I can pretend to care for a year, but 9 years? It didn't matter later in life that I got Bs in English, despite it actually being a useful subject. Maybe this is where the US curriculum differs from other countries the most.
Economics should be part of the standard curriculum. Plenty of average people participate in an economy every day without understanding it, other than having street smarts.
Math class is seemingly based around the final destination of Calculus AB or BC, but calculus is overly specific if you think about it. Sure, teach the basics, but don't drill the kids for months on solving integrals with trig sub for one. There are so many other math subjects that get ignored.
Math proofs are basically nonexistent in high school. Everything is just thrown at you then becomes a game of memorizing algorithms and crunching numbers. I get why so many kids don't like it.
History is OK but usually lacks connection to current events.
Isn't that what people read for fun? If you have to teach reading and grammar, I'm sure that there are worse choices.
And you do need some serious background in Calculus for most college-level STEM fields, including probability/statistics/data science.
I do agree that the social sciences (including Econ, but not only!) are seriously missing in school education, and it's quite silly to teach so much history/literature/natural science/math even as we ignore them altogether.
Teaching math proofs is really, really hard. Even most college math majors don't really learn them all that well. Maybe if proof assistants develop to the point where it can be a fully "gamified" subject, it could work in K-12.
My classmates and I always read books for fun, and none of them were the kinds of books in English class. They were more adventurous things like Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter, and Ender's Game. Also seemed like the girls could tolerate the English class books a lot better, which felt unfair. Looking back, the only time I enjoyed the books was the one year I had a male English teacher picking them.
> And you do need some serious background in Calculus for most college-level STEM fields, including probability/statistics/data science.
Sure I remember using calculus in those college fields, but it didn't require what I'd call a serious background in it. Students could just beef up their calculus skills on-demand if needed. I especially never used all that training in solving complicated integrals by hand, which was seemingly half of Calculus BC.
Unfortunately home schooling isn't an option for most, even if it is possibly one of the best options within the current system (atleast education wise, not for the conformity).
"Our teenage-suicide rate is the highest in the world — and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not poor. In Manhattan, 70 percent of all new marriages last less than five years."
These are very interesting and maybe I'll do some more research on these.
Would love to have been able to see a source on that whopper- even in the days before most had computers, I don't see any reporting showing ~8 hours a day of consumption for children.
I know that the US census had the average at like 6 hrs a day. No matter what the real number is... its a lot
As more families choose to eschew government schools, it's hard to argue that he was not ahead of his time with his observations.
> But I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge, they’ll also become self-teachers — and only self-teaching has any lasting value.
Makes me think of Dorothy Sayer's 1948 article, The Lost Tools of Learning [0].
[0]: https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfL...
It was well written and resonated with my experiences and what I found school to be, as a child growing up. I thought it was a good submission for HN.
Wow, he nailed that one, didn't he?
> But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers.
In 2022, replace talking with dancing.
> The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
Played any multiplayer FPS recently?
> But no large-scale reform is ever going to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of “school” open — to include family as the main engine of education.
As he proves a few paragraphs later, this is the one thing the school system will never do because the two institutions (school and family) are in direct competition with each other for the hearts and minds of children.
I’m glad I read it after I finished school and before my kids start.
the difference being drawing (evoking, pulling) something already there out of the student (education).
versus putting some knowledge from the outside inside of the student (teaching).