Make School a Democracy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It seems like you are right. It's just another year, another scheme to ask for more money in education.
No problem. Start "tracking" like many of those countries. Flunk a test at age 12 and no college for you. Easy. Now we don't have to bother with all those "useless" students.
Hope your kid passes.
Montessori[2] wrote the book on this approach, has been around a long time and has been rigorously studied in practice.
This is not a novel concept. What we need to be doing is getting away from the hierarchical institutional model for governance which drives most schools into being either pre-jail or pre-industry subsidized holding pens for children while adults go do "real work."
Making schooling "democratic" while the rest of a nation remains un-democratic is like pissing in the ocean.
[1]Summerhill, Waldorf etc... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
Not a bad idea, because it does no actual harm, and at the very least, relieves pressure on your bladder?
the sense of community, your body leaving you to rejoin the great beyond. the barrier between self and other is always murky - and taking a piss in the ocean brings that murkiness right up to the front of your awareness.
10/10
False. Montessori is: there are a number of age-appropriate exercises scattered around the classroom. Every day you come into school and play with which ever ones you want, in whatever order you want. Source: I went to Montessori, and my mother taught Montessori.
As you describe, you had to choose from a set of pre-canned, "age-appropriate" exercises (a whitelist). Can you see how this is quite different from being able to spend your time however you want? (except for specific rule violations, i.e. a blacklist)
Not only that, but in my experience there were also quotas. Though at any given time I could choose what I did at the Montessori school, I had to eventually do a certain amount of math, reading, and so on.
Congratulation.
One of the top reforms I'd like to give to schools is to provide "student senates" and the like with actual, meaningful sums of money somehow so that they can legitimately practice governance. Playing token figurehead really doesn't teach them anything I want them to learn.
I say this as someone who ended up being friends with a lot of these people throughout my life. While in community college, the senate actively pursued agendas, it would be more accurate to describe them as a students' union than a senate. Valuable, but still not actually a senate of any kind.
Most of these friends who were in these positions? They were doing it because it would look good on the resume. Oh, that wasn't the only reason, and they were all good people whose character and intentions I'd vouch for. But still. And this, frighteningly, is the strongest similarity to adult politics: public office as stepping stone to industry status.
My strategy can be summed up as, if you teach kids real civics, you provide stronger support for those with good intentions. I can't speak for other countries, but in America, I think that the knowledge of civics is rare to none; even on Hacker News, supposedly a bastion of intelligent and experienced people, you find egregious mistakes on basic constitutional theory. That's not really their fault: they've been trained to misunderstand how government works by, well... politicians with bad intentions.
Reaffirming that success in school is largely due to parental support -- including approval of the methods.
It seems that these children are being provided education packaged in such a way that their presumably under-educated parents will accept in order to maximize parental involvement which maximizes positive outcomes -- a fantastic application of creative eduction: teach the parents and the children.
I wonder if children attending schools where the majority of their classmates' parents have an education at the 90th percentile have the best outcomes. That's the promise of private schools for the children of the ultra-wealthy, right?
I have a hard time believing that these massive multi-billion dollar organizations full of trained professionals apparently can't have any impact on outcomes because it's pre-determined before the students step into the classroom.
This is just a thought on why multi-billion dollar organizations might run into decreasing marginal return on education dollars spent to help the children uneducated families.
It actually does. Namely, you need to improve parental situations in order to improve the child's situation. A better societal support structure for the parents means that their kids will do better in school, because the parents will have the time, space, and motivation to provide the necessary support.
It's something of a circular argument (which is not exactly rare in societal problems like this), and it may arguably be non-optimal, but it's a valid avenue for improvement.
Given learning by 'doing' is known to be worse I wonder if they have hit some sort of local maxima.
I'm curious - would you be able to expand on this? I find that I prefer learning by doing projects, building, etc as opposed to reading/problem sets/etc. Has there been research to compare the two approaches?
If as an adult you don't have a lot to learn doing is fun so why not. But if you want to train hard, back to boring.
There's different research out there, basically the doing side was introduced without research hence the scramble to work out the better method.
I think it is compounded by the fact experimental schools often do better, since they are putting in effort. A known performance enhancer.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/08/21/math-wars-rote-memor...
->
Democracy: A system of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule either directly or through freely elected representatives.
Cooperative: 1. working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit. 2. demonstrating a willingness to cooperate :
It's "a farm, business, or other organization that is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits."
2) The article mentions John Dewey, but doesn't really get into who he is. I strongly recommend reading his book, "Democracy and Education".
As a taste:
"A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity."
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DewDemo....
I still stand by my point; cooperative is a much less ambiguous term for this, and I think what John Dewey describes is one as well.
Words are important and taken on face value people may extrapolate that it's the government type, democracy, that will bring better education. When in my opinion it's a cooperative environment, peer review, meaningful engagement and a sense of ownership.
Edit: For me a democratic schooling would be voting for the teacher you would like to have; which will be the popularity contest most such competitions devolve to.
The problem here, I think, is that the notion of democracy is largely misunderstood. Many people are afraid of the term because it's been abused so badly.
Your description of a "cooperative" isn't any different from a democracy. So the issue isn't which word is better. It's whether you want to improve all of society or just schools.
> Edit: For me a democratic schooling would be voting for the teacher you would like to have; which will be the popularity contest most such competitions devolve to.
I think that's a massive conflation of "democracy" with "election". There's a school near where I live where the teachers pitch classes and the students vote on which ones are offered for the quarter (might have the interval wrong). This is democratic to me.
Nevertheless, it's an appropriate remark.