Why are kids being forced to eat lunch in silence?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Happy, healthy, motivated kids do better academically - as well as in everyone other way.
I thought this would be about somewhere like Britain's strictest school, but even there kids are encouraged to talk.: https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/
Silence is just horrific. It is like some form of punishment made daily normality.
It does however improve the "potential" for academic achievement on paper, because schools can advertise how many daily lessons their students take. Number go up and all...
Schools are trying to dial down the noise in canteens but that's all. Having someone eating in silence would be a form of punition.
It is also interesting how heated the discussions over meals can become (for adults), where you discuss politics, religion, sex stuff and whatnot and people can get deeply engaged.
And then the meal ends and so does the discussion (or drama) ,as if it never happened. This is usually store disturbing/surprising to foreigners who are not used to such a separation.
There have been several school shootings where i read the details of what had happened to the perpetrator and hated to think yep that young person was behaving rationally when they lashed out violently because it was their only recourse in the situation they were forced to endure for years. People go on about gun control and mental heath but ignore the fact that there are a lot of children enduring conditions that would be called atrocities if they were prisoners of war.
And it’s all at the hands of foolish people who are trying to have the “best interests” of children in mind.
Five year olds forced to eat in silence for only fifteen minutes sounds like an absurd over the top young adult dystopian novel.
They famously were not the Sex Pistols .. what's next, attributing songs from The Celibate Rifles or Machine Gun Fellatio ?
TBH I wasn't sure if you were aware and were knowingly going with the I can't believe it's not butter of UK punk.
The oddest thing about your comment, though, was the armed guards and school shootings references following a UK band callout - The Dunblane massacre aside (which was an adult shooter back in 1996) neither feature much in UK or Commonwealth schools, for the most part they're US phenomena, if not in uniqueness then certainly in ubiquitousness and frequency.
In at least one famous incident, this skill proved very useful:
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/eyewitness/html.php?sectio...
With modern measures of "safety" students are subjected to more and more restrictions, and it seems they're becoming more passive as a consequence. That may actually be the intended result. But it seems to be harming students more and more as they seem less inclined to oppose obviously stupid policies and decisions. Later in life that passivity towards authority will harm them as others take advantage of or even abuse them in a professional setting.
To say nothing of the boredom of 15 minutes of a silence.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia > Misophonia (or selective sound sensitivity syndrome, sound-rage) is a disorder of decreased tolerance to specific sounds or their associated stimuli, or cues. These cues, known as "triggers", are experienced as unpleasant or distressing and tend to evoke strong negative emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses that are not seen in most other people.
Instead of making kindergarten more "serious" like upper grades, we should be making upper grades more like kindergarten: fun, creative, autonomous, multimodal, physically active, socially engaging, etc.
It seems to me that taking kids away from socialization in school is just going to lead them to even more social media where they'll probably not learn the best social skills. But it could just be my weariness of social media make feel this way.
If you want to teach more stuff, then how about you just make the day longer? This decision seems less like something that was done for the children, and more for having another checkbox filled while keeping the kids easy to process.
I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will be worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything. Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the children.
Picked French at 15, but really got serious in my early 20s. It has allowed me to re-read a lot of my favourites (Dumas, Verne, Flaubert) in their original language. Also a lot of what I consider cornerstone of modern society in their original versions (Zola, Le Bon).
Had to pick up Portuguese on the job at 25, my previous experience learning languages made it fairly easy to do.
I discovered new songs, movies, plays, and authors with each new language.
Now I speak 4 languages, and I want to get to a fifth in the next decade (some Chinese, Arabic or German).At least to me it has opened my professional and intellectual viewport. It has made me better at abstraction, and while travelling across wide parts of the world, I never feel too disconnected (Americas, large parts of Europe, Africa and Oceania feel very accesible to me.)
I can see how if English is your native tongue the value of learning other languages might seem marginal, but for the rest of the world being at least bilingual is a necessity.
And I also think the only reason English "stuck" is because it's so damn ubiquitous everywhere, and as a kid and teenager I wanted to be on the internet, to watch foreign films, play foreign games and talk to people abroad - all in English.
So I actually agree with both of you - learning a second language(English) is essential, but if it's a language you don't have much exposure to outside of school, it's a waste of time.
Now not directed at you, the age ranges in your post did make me do some research. Apparently being a "native speaker" is not so well defined. Learned in childhood yes, but what's the age cutoff? Saw some references to before 5. Any thoughts on this? Seeing as you've lost the German with similar exposure.
Just curious, ignorant single language American here.
And I'm not sure - our son is 3 and speaks both English and Polish without any trouble. I myself only started learning English and German at 6 and 8 respectively, which I do think is too late to be trully and completely bilingual - like I'm fluent in English and after years of living in the UK I don't think I have much of an accent left, but I don't think I can ever be as good as someone who learnt English from birth.
As an adult I have lived in a lot of different countries, including over 12 years in non-English speaking countries. I've been living in my current country for over 5 years, and I speak barely enough to get by in a shop.
Other than my ability to learn languages being non-existent, the issue here is everyone speaks English very well, so it's easy to fall back to it. The other day I went and asked for something in a shop, tried really hard, and the cashier just responded to me in English. In my work everyone speaks English too.
On the other hand, from the time she started speaking, my daughter was fluently able to speak English and her native language. She would come and ask me for something in English, and if I said no, she'd go ask my wife in her language :D
Whenever I pick her up from kindergarden the other kids talk to me in English - they say they learnt by watching YouTube. My colleagues all have similar stories, that they learnt English by watching American TV shows.
I'm guessing what happens is that for a lot of non-native English speakers there is a big advantage to learning English, and once you learn that, your brain figures out how to learn other languages.
But for native English speakers we don't have that, so learning any kind of foreign language is hard. This is probably why countries like Spain or China have low-levels of English speakers (and those that can speak often don't speak well and/or have strong accents), because there isn't much advantage for them to learn it.
Sure but the post you’re replying to is stating that he didn’t retain anything from years of foreign language classes in school. Most people learn fluency in additional languages outside of a classroom setting.
Myself and I believe all of my cousins took Spanish classes in school. I've hardly used it since then and my Spanish is terrible. However, theirs is much better. I think it largely depends on what type of career you are involved in and whether frequent interaction with regular people is involved. Most of us in the software world only interact with others in professional environments who speak English well.
Of course, if you're interested in a foreign language, for any reason, I wouldn't discourage you from learning it. I just would not make it a required part of a curriculum.
It also allows you to interact with those important people.
The people making my sandwich, cleaning my office, etc. can be more readily interacted with in their preferred language.
Go take a tech job in Miami and get back to us…
Personally, I do think learning a language is best achieved through immersion rather than brief 45-60min classes. It's not ideal but it still works to a degree.
There is a lot of research showing the benefits of learning and continuing to practice a second language. All the way to dementia risk.
I also regret the time I spent learning Japanese and Italian. There’s limited time to get a lot across to kids. It needs to be thought out. Those hours were completely wasted for me (no side benefits, nothing).
Flying to South America because Canada has a couple more long weekends doesn’t make much sense.
They both would open up huge amounts of the world and make cultures accessible.
Maybe Mandarin could be valuable for business?
Of all the things I learned up to the end of high school, the foreign languages and all the math are the things I value the most. I still remember French well enough that I could ask for help with various things if I needed to, and I can read it even better than that (well enough to get the gist and some of the detail of something I read, as long as it isn't really heavy with slang). I only had one year of Spanish, but that at least allows me to understand a lot of basic signage in the language and some other reading comprehension. I can watch shows and movies in French and understand some of the lines without the subtitles, and even understand how and in some cases why the subtitles don't match the literal translation.
So if your point was against language education in school in general, I very strongly disagree. I use my foreign language knowledge somewhat regularly, even though I live in the US and have never had a job that required or even used it. There were plenty of kids in my classes who picked it up faster and spoke and read/wrote it far better than me, so I don't think I'm particularly good with foreign languages. This leads me to suspect that you might just not be a languages kind of person, and that's why it's meant so little to you?
Shut the kids up so that they eat more quickly and have more time for studies?? That is SICK
Unless you're rich, school choice in the US is often not a thing. It's not really practical to sell your house and move to another district over something like this, and uprooting your kid like that has its own downsides.
I don't think that follows. It's quite possible they have the money to buy a house in a "good" school district, but not the disposable income for private elementary school (even assuming there's a private school available and it's equivalent or better).
There are various neurological theories the teachers have told me why the brain isn’t ready for reading, maths, etc until you’re six and have passed the exam. Hence 5-6 is still playtime and naps with some training on how to behave.
> Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, proponents of educating children at an early age began lobbying for more kindergarten classes. ''The movement was never to make kindergarten compulsory,” says Barbara Beatty, an associate professor of education at Wellesley College and the author of Preschool Education in America. “It was to mandate that districts offer kindergarten.”
> Now, more than 100 years’ later, state policies still vary on how--and even if--districts must offer kindergarten.
> But even as talk of the importance of high-quality preschool education reaches unprecedented levels, some states--Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania--do not require districts to establish kindergartens, according to an Education Week survey conducted for Quality Counts.
(In these states districts don’t have to offer kindergarten)
> Currently, 13 states--Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia--and the District of Columbia require children to attend kindergarten. In Rhode Island, Tennessee, and West Virginia, the law requires that youngsters attend kindergarten even though they do not have to start school until they are 6, the age at which children customarily enter 1st grade.
(Only 13 states mandate that your kids have to attend kindergarten)
This feels like... torture. We want to limit children's social media usage and cut off their in-person social interactions in school? How is this not horrifying to all the parents? Whatever happened to "think of the children"?
In Elementary school, my friends and I would come up with things to do at recess, talk about our weekends, and plan sleep overs. This is bonding time that is gotten no where else. (Assuming the kids are not dropped off an hour before school starts, or picked up after the parents get done working at 5pm)
Extend the day by 10 minutes and give the kids that extra time.
I know you were joking, it just drives me crazy picturing my kids in that situation