Gordy:

I agree generally with your proposition.  However, having read thousands of
essays which recount experiences because they are vividly recountable, I think
the perception that a lot of things get in the way of the intention of sending
kids off to school to get educated is accurate.

A lot of kids describe realities in which parents are working more than one job,
a lot of single moms, neighborhoods with gangs to walk through, and even the
disruption of losing a home and having to live with relatives or on the streets. 

When one reads through this material, it is obvious that there are better school
districts, but that many are not so good.  The work suffers in some places to
the point where it may be unreadable.  Apparently illiterate kids who can’t
make themselves understood - even when telling a story about their own lives
- are getting graduated. 

There were all too many stories of teenage girls vividly describing seeing a
positive result develop on a drugstore pregnancy test and then going through a
traumatic circumstance involving varying degrees of support from parents,
friends and the boyfriend.  A lot of the time, these are heartbreaking stories of
betrayal and lost potential. 

I was reminded of the old bromide that ruefully reflects on the miracle of
surviving teenage years at all.

Stuart, thanks for that. 

I happen to think that it is not wild tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy insanity to strongly suspect that our education system does more mental and psychological harm than good, and that it serves power, not children.  But at the same time, the society that creates this education system also creates certain economic realities that are hard to obviate, therefore most parents who are somewhat aware of these problems must nevertheless glumly send their kid off to school anyway, perhaps seeking to mitigate the experience as best they can through smart parenting.

Perhaps this will interest some here:

I just ran across the information that, a book entitled Making the Grades, My Misadventures in the Standardized Scoring Industry, by Todd Farley will be out by October.  I pre-ordered it from Amazon.  He worked as a test scorer for Pearson, and then as a test writer for that company and others over a fifteen year period. 

I did a stint this spring/summer with a standardized scoring company.  This is an environment in which a couple of hundred people are hired all at once.  They are trained to score student papers scanned into a computer, and quickly assess a score and move on, so as to keep up with a high rate of production.  For those who can’t keep up with the rate of reading, or accuracy as measured by a couple of statistical techniques, there is summarily being fired and walked out through ranks of fellow employees who are pressured by this threat to conform to the criteria.  Primarily, the criteria is a statistic compiled by sending the same paper through at least two or three times, thus measuring how scorers measure up against each other.  As I came to see this, what this does is instill a basic fear of not conforming.

From reading thousands of papers, some English essays and some social studies or science responses to questions, I would say that the motive behind this, if it is to bring poor school districts up to parity with the more well funded school districts may have a point.

However, the rise of standardized scoring came about with the need to supercede the impossible political argument over funding allocation between rural and urban districts, particularly in states where there is a political deadlock.  So really, it isn’t actually about students.  It is political.  When leadership abdicates responsibility, bureaucracy is set up to obfuscate the picture so decisions can be made by an “objective” process no one can really get access to.

There is considerable weight behind this system.  If you study the people involved in creating and managing the tests and the sociometric data analysis behind it, there are hundreds of highly paid people going to conferences on these subjects.  Some of these sociometricians are paid in the range of several hundred thousand a year. 

Most of the scorers seem to be retired or out of work teachers.  In terms of offering critique of the system, the fear of being fired seemed to supercede any other consideration, at least within the term of the job. 

I developed a worry that this sort of management style, borrowed from migrant labor, making it a sort of information age lettuce picking, might be artificially “standardizing” the whole debate by infusing a chilling effect against non-conformity into the whole atmosphere around these issues.

In wonder if the teachers in this discussion have picked up on this and are similarly concerned…

godistwaddle- you have taught your students to think by dragging them trhough nasty little poems, such as those by Donne.  I have never read any nasty poems by Donne, I liked them, but then I have never been dragged trhough them.  I wonder if maybe what the students may think is that they will never read poetry again. 

Certainly Americans don’t read or know much history.  I wonder if dragging students through history texts in school, which according in James Loewin in LIES MY TEACH TOLD ME, are boring, isolated facts which are often untrue and have misleading implications, have anything to do with a lack of historical context of American thought.  He analyzed a dozen history texts and thought them dreadful.

Do you think this is accidental, do you suppose?  Do you think a power structure actually wants the young to critically evaluate its polity’s history, which according to Gibbon consists of the ‘crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.’  Do you think that a power structure wants a population of critical, questioning people who participate in the governance of the power system.  Or do they want people who do as they are told?

The question is important because how you answer it will determine what you will consider Eduction.  and ‘Thinking.’  Thinking can be considered as specialized problem solving to do one’s job.  Or it can be considered a holistic view of people and power that can be used to incease the welfare of people by critiquing oppressive power.

How do you suppose Education is conceived by class-based power structures?  I wonder what view is instilled when dragging students through a standard history text.  or a nasty poem.

hippie4ever: I am afraid that you subscribe to the “funnel-in-the-mouth” strategy. I am deeply thankful that my teachers were not of the kind that you describe. I learned so much outside school, mostly by reading, that I would have easily demonstrated to my co-students that teachers were mostly talking inaccurate and dated nonsense, especially in history. In my Junior High School a teacher advised other students to ask my help on advanced math. However, I could not have helped them sight reading music because there I am an absolute non-alphabetic.

Re: Gordy

“Grown-ups are not generally a great gauge of what is important and what is inane anyway.  They think about sex and products and resent their job, then presume to tell kids what is really important.”

Good one.  How can we expect adults, who may have been the victims of a skewed system to suddenly engage themselves outside that with they know and understand, it’d be culture shock.  Many people choose education as a major because they LIKED the system, they were comfortable there.  They could simply “do their job”, then go home and think about sex and products.  It works for them.  And for them…. that’s good enough.

In this same vein, how many thinkers for precisely this same reason did not choose education as a major.  Teachers who don’t like what’s happening, are our only saving grace.  I thank them.

Education/Learning/Thinking is a completely different animal than what, for the most part, we call “our schools”.  The abortion argument applies equally well here, “an acorn is not an oak tree”.

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”....... Spinoza

I think I can see where thinking and education are intertwined but anarcissie, you’re correct, in the different peoples that want to control thinking from parents up to the big boys of religion and government and now the economic sector where it seems too obvious that those sectors want you to just accept their BS and do as you are told for the education THEY want you/us to have.

Your right, Anarcissie, we were discussing Education, who changed the subject to ‘thinking.’  I think the finest aim of Education is to teach people how to spell real good.  I certainly miss it in the lack of my own itellectul development.

godistwaddle:
’... I also believe learning to think requires thinking practice, but the practice can be upon any subject.  Thinking is hard work, for the teacher as for the student, which is why it’s not practiced as much as the clarinet. ...

Most people do not think, in the sense I believe you’re using the word, and they don’t want their children to be taught to think.  And those who have power certainly don’t want children to be taught to think.  They may favor a minority to be taught to think in a limited, instrumental way, so as to obtain a new crop of managers and technicians for their enterprises, but thinking in general?  Please!

I don’t know how this subject could possibly have cropped up in a discussion of education.

Gordy: “Dragging” was a bit of self-deprecation.  I loved John Donne, and lots of the kids (AP) did, too.  Donne has lots for teens:  sex, religion, and death.  I firmly believe that a teacher who has a real love for and grasp of his subject (as opposed to a degree in “education”), along with the enthusiasm required to teach, becomes infectious in his love for learning and thinking.  We all, even poor students, remember teachers who really got to us—I had several.  I think it unfortunate that the best learners and thinkers do not often go into education.

I also believe learning to think requires thinking practice, but the practice can be upon any subject.  Thinking is hard work, for the teacher as for the student, which is why it’s not practiced as much as the clarinet.

Gordy, August 16 at 3:01 pm #

I would be interested in a link to the study you cite.

I think this is the study I was referring to:

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/175/10/1199.pdf

Hippie4ever, I did not say anything against discipline or authority per se, just that they alone cannot ‘carry a lesson’. 

I do however think that we should stretch our imaginations a little bit beyond tweaking the current classroom scenario.  And I think you underestimate the power of genuine engagement - as I already said, you can work hard but never resent it if you are engaged: work and play are not always these separate poles (some highly popular videogames require immense concentration and forward-planning), but the boredom of the typical lesson certainly makes them seem like separate poles. 

This reminds me of a fact about nutrition.  Adults are always getting into pitched battles with their kids in trying to force them to eat healthy food, to clear all the veggies on their plate.  A study was commissioned where infants were given various foods from every food-group and left to eat whatever they liked, whenever they liked.  Most adults would expect the infants to eat only or mainly the sweets and burgers, but in fact they voluntarily selected a perfectly balanced diet for themselves. 

Most people, like other animals, are born pre-equipped with a fantastic set of senses and instincts that guide them along the most beneficial course - a naturally selected behavioural trajectory that you can work intelligently with or stupidly against.  Adults (advertising being part of this - it is made by adults) encourage children to think of junk-food as forbidden fruit, try to make them eat veggies when they don’t want to, then pity themselves for having been encumbered with such a mysteriously willful and resistant child. 

I think we make a similar mistake with education.  A little more empathy would make all the difference - it is just too easy to say to a powerless person “yes, it is horrible now but I promise you will thank me one day”. 

Godistwaddle, I don’t think schools especially teach thinking-skills; they mostly just categorize children according to how they can apply whatever thinking-skills they happen to have to formulaic exercises. 

I don’t want to be extreme about this; I’m not saying that state education is all bad, but it sure as hell ain’t all good either, and the claim that dragging a kid through John Donne is an efficient cause of them going on to become an independent thinker… well, I dunno… 

I can recall thinking, as I developed, about unpleasant as well as pleasant things - hard problems of life that are not easily answered.  I did not want to spend every moment doing mindless things.  I was not saved from total inanity by stern grown-ups.  Grown-ups are not generally a great gauge of what is important and what is inane anyway.  They think about sex and products and resent their job, then presume to tell kids what is really important. 

I hated Shakespeare when it was being forced on me.  I did not learn anything from that experience, even though I was way ahead of my reading-age.  From that experience I in fact retained an aversion for Shakespeare.  As an adult I had another look, and suddenly it seemed relevant and inherently interesting, and now, no thanks to my schooling, I love Shakespeare.

Sometimes while dragging my teens through a particularly nasty little poem (John Donne, anyone?), one would ask, “What use will this be in the future.”

I’d reply, “I sincerely hope it will be of no practical use.  I’m trying to help you learn to think, not become a mindless drone for industry. You learn to think by practicing thinking.  You can be trained for almost any job in a rather brief period.  Thinking, on the other hand…”

“If you have good reason to respect someone - i.e. they are competently teaching things that are inherently meaningful and useful to you - you will accept their authority.”—Gordy

Gordy, we are dealing with children, and they don’t always know what is inherently meaningful or useful. Children are impulsive, and nowadays (understandably) believe that they’ve a right to be continually entertained. Now, sometimes learning can be a lot of fun, and a good teacher knows how to structure lessons so they give each student an opportunity to contribute something to the class discussion or project.

However, sometimes learning involves concentration and hard work—especially if a teacher must impart a large chunk of information to allow students to synthesize data to then arrive at a valid conclusion. But that isn’t fun and many will shirk, if allowed to do so.

I agree that it’s a good thing that paddling and other tortures have been banned; those were certainly the bad old days and we should not revisit them. As for the GOP position that public schools are evil: of course they would say that, insofar as public schools teach science over religion in science class, and reserve religion to a relative place in social studies.

Public schools also teach civics, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Quelle catestrophe!

“Education should produce self-sufficient independent thinkers, surely? “

Exactly the point. Deliberate underfunding of the public education system is an attempt to destroy that system and produce mindless robots fit only to ask if one “wants fries with that”.

‘No Child Left Undamaged’ teaches answers to tests, Charter Schools , in large part, teach that profit trumps education. Again the purpose seems to be turning out placid and unprotesting citizens.

I concur with the last post of PlasticDoor excepting that I think discipline would come with a fully engaged student, and our current crop of bored out of their minds children gravitate to undisciplined thought and action because that is what they are being taught.

PlasticDoor, it is a balance - authoritarian discipline should not be carrying a lesson by itself while the kids slog in misery or numb obedience. 

Bart Simpsons are created BY authoritarianism - they are reacting against authority and boredom. 

If you have good reason to respect someone - i.e. they are competently teaching things that are inherently meaningful and useful to you - you will accept their authority.  You will allow them that role.  I have seen this; it is an art - you can’t expect to send crap teachers into classrooms with the instruction to crack down on any troublemakers and expect this to turn out anything better than miserable drones, sullen malcontents and obsequious followers.  Education should produce self-sufficient independent thinkers, surely?

Tests and statistics are the only thing talked about. There is little about incentivization and motivation to learn. The paradigm is to teach to the child’s interests (“constructivism”). Well, that’s where you get a Bart Simpson. 

Restore authority to the teacher. The teacher must have discipline in order to teach. Motivating one student or a classroom full of students without the authority to demand discipline gets you ... yep, Bart Simpson. Students learn self-discipline from adult leaders who teach self-discipline.

Public schools in cities would do just fine if they were well funded!  Public schools in Baltimore City are dismal pits of despair. Ten miles away, in Baltimore County public schools, the population’s per annum income infuses their schools with outstanding education, yielding outstanding students. Money IS the solution.

Funding is the root of the education problem. Pay teachers to teach, not to give tests. The measure is in the long-term results, not the short-term results.

Spruce up the grounds. Students crammed 40 to a room in dingy, broken-down buildings, many with torn and tattered curtains and broken desks and chairs, not to mention lack of books and materials *above and beyond* the requisite learning matter, leads to dejection and apathy and anger and resentment.  School yards of broken concrete and tarmac are eyesores.

Charter schools are not the best answer, only ONE answer.

Paolo, August 15 at 12:45 pm #

Saying it doesnt make it so, Paolo, though you seem to believe it does. The public school system has been one of the most important forces in the democratization of this nation, in the attempted making of a truly classless society. It has also educated many generations of our nations children along the way.

It is no wonder that right wingers and elitist libertarians who value a ‘me first and the hell with you’ philosophy try so hard to diminish its value, and to end its existence. If you truly loved your nation and not your bank account you would speak to reforming and revitalizing that system, but, sadly, you dont.

Paolo:

The clearly stated objective of my public High School in Amsterdam (Holland)was to prepare me and my co-students for continued education.

Ergo: My high School was prima facie proof that such public schools can exist and function very well.

Today my High School happens to be by far the largest in Amsterdam. Do you really believe that Dutch parents would send their kids to a school which trains them to be dumb?

You may be right that most of our current public schools are in the dismal category that you describe but is that a reason for disbanding public schools instead of turning them into the kind of public school that I loved to go to? I believe that you are terribly wrong.

One commenter has stated that since public schools get support via the sacred VOTE, therefore they are doing a good job.

Wow.

I got it. So, since the war in Iraq and Afghanistan come to us via the VOTE, they are also right and just. Oh yes—and the torture of enemy combatants (aka “resisters to invasion”). Polls show a majority of folks support torture, also. Certainly, they voted the torturers in, didn’t they?

That makes it right! 

Folks—get a clue. The vote, as George Carlin wisely said, is just another way to keep you happy in your little bubble. All the while thinking you have some say in the matter.

Public schools do a great job at what they are designed to do: keep people happy in their little bubbles, willing to do the bidding of those in power, including launching wars on the far side of the globe. Including sending their own children to die on the far side of the globe for the ego-trips of those in power.

Great job, public schools!

If you have any doubt about the role of public schools in this mind-muck, consider that most of them serve as recruiting centers for the military. This is especially true of two areas: inner city minority neighborhoods, and red-state rural areas. You probably don’t see a lot of recruiters at public schools in upper-class suburban areas. And certainly, none at Sidwell Friends.

Public schools are doing a great job at what they were designed to do.

The real miracle is that some people manage to get an education as they are processed by the current school system or lack thereof. To many parents only expect free day care from the system.

watch LaborBeat video: http://blip.tv/file/2428857

Synopsis: “Before President Obama appointed Arne Duncan Secretary of Education, Duncan was the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. Under his control there, Chicago Public Schools endured a relentless wave of privatization, school closings, militarization, union busting and blaming teachers for the problems of urban schools. Now, the war on public education pursued during the Bush administration will only continue and intensify under the new Secretary of Education Duncan. His Chicago Plan, as former teacher and editor of Substance News George Schmidt explains, is the template for a national strategy to dismantle public education. Through revealing footage and comments from Chicago teachers, this video shows the resistance that has been growing among teachers and community organizations.Here is a national alert for everyone who cares about the future of public schools, threatened now by Arne Duncan and his corporate vision for the nation’s school systems. 28 minutes. Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is a non-profit 501(c)(3) member of IBEW 1220. Views are those of the producer Labor Beat. For info: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), http://www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For other Labor Beat videos, visit Google Video, YouTube, or blip.tv and search “Labor Beat”.

Anarcissie:

You missed the point.  By “reality on the ground” I mean to describe an apparent disconnect between teachers and students in the actual local classroom circumstance and the graduate school cultivated corporate environment in which people who write the test questions operate. 

My contention is that if there was less of a disconnect, at the very least, there might be a better fit towards achieving some sort of goal that everyone theoretically ascribes to. 

This is a real situation and every state spends millions on it, and the necessary build up of professional capacity to serve this is huge.  If you have a chance to look up conference agendas at which Masters level and PhD level sociometricians and other educational professionals who work with schools, school districts and corporate vendors discuss issues like this, there are hundreds of participants. 

I venture to say that a lot of people who argue over school issues do not themselves have the patience to read through even abstracts of the various papers submitted at such conferences or take seriously what an entire field of intelligent and hard working people are trying to do. Every year, more people are graduated from professional education programs with advanced degrees.

That is the level of the argument.  One has to find a way to gain an understanding of what is basically going on there.  What defines the middle class at this time is a complex grasp of professional issues, no matter which way you look.  That is why education is in fact important to the future of a viable middle class.  Without it, you can’t understand the world you live in.

Paolo: I was educated in public Montessori Schools, including high school. My schools and teachers were neither stodgy, nor unimaginative, nor bureaucratic, nor inefficient. They were absolutely wonderful. I loved going to school every day. I eventually did become a professor of Geology and Chemistry at a first rate university in Texas.

Sorry, I forgot to mention. My schools were in Amsterdam The Netherlands

For most people, “reality on the ground” is a meaningless job, so if the schools desire to train students for this reality, they will avoid relevance and engagement.

Gordy:

“If education was real and relevant to kids instead of this arbitrary ordeal forced on them by adults they might be more willing participants and perform a lot better.”

Boy howdy.  The high school work I just recently read indicated to me that one of the problems was that the source of the questions being asked was a sensibility quite removed from reality on the ground.  I think if the philosophy at the center of it was guided by your statement above, things would improve markedly.  I think part of the problem is that when you have a statistical framework such as that imposed by NCLB, you empower sociometricians with $400,000 a year salaries (really the ballpark,) not students and not teachers.

StuartH, I cannot speak for or against the accuracy of your view, but I was not talking about just the learning experience in the average US school over the last 30 years - there may be a clear downward trend there like you say, for all I know - I was rather making a point about education all over the world, and going waaay back to the ancient Greeks and even before that, to education’s beginnings, when it was something delivered mostly by parents, peers and through tribal custom. 

It has always been tweaked and fought over and you don’t have to look even 100 years back to a time when, in most of the Western world, only boys got a serious education, not girls, and the pedagogy was (I gather - I could be wrong about this) boot-camp style and astonishingly brutal and uncreative.  It ought not to surprise anyone if the liberal, child-centred trend in education, arguably for the most part a brainchild of the 1960s, turns out to be a blip in education’s history.  Surely education will always be coloured by the temperament and demands of the society providing it.  An authoritarian society provides an authoritarian education. 

Apart from these social pressures we have two other learning drives: pure curiosity/self-growth and problem-solving.  Even without social pressure we voluntarily and spontaneously learn because it feels good and truth is a natural (if mixed and beleaguered) human aspiration.  Even without social pressure we voluntarily and spontaneously learn because we want stuff and want to figure out how to get it. 

These drives are wholesome; they should provide the principle drive and reason to learn - we can only take so much social pressure; someone who represses his pure curiosity and his own personal desires and opinions, and allows himself to be dictated to by social pressure is an ant, not a man.  If education was real and relevant to kids instead of this arbitrary ordeal forced on them by adults they might be more willing participants and perform a lot better. 

Or you could just chase results by pummeling them into submission.  I’m sure that bites us in the arse somehow though… 

I was really posting just to amplify the point TAO Walker made; I’ve had similar opinions since I was a schoolboy myself, and later on the other side of the desk.

Education throughout history has been a systematic exercise in child abuse.  This physical, emotional and intellectual abuse is intended to prevent the young from thinking ideologically deviant thoughts.  Every school topic can be discussed within resticted limits as long as in the end the child comes up with the Correct Answers on the examination. 

These answers, which are usually true, give a totally false impression of the whole.  The specialized truth, which is largely true, is intermixed with the ideological truth, which largely isn’t, legitimatingp power delusions that justify the power system.  Including the economic system.

This ideological restriction prevents the ‘connectivity’ of the school with the community.  You cannot train workers to work effectively in factories, as Anarcissie discribes, unless they are trained ideologically to conform to what is demanded by authority.  This restricts the natural spontinaity and joy of learning.

Did you know that every year tens of millions of children learn to speak and understand Chinese WITHOUT GOING TO SCHOOL!  It’s a fact!  Not the kind of fact taught in the schools of course.

Paolo:
’... But public school advocates say outright that such a choice would destroy the public schools virtually overnight, as parents would direct their educational dollars elsewhere. In other words, they admit that very few people would VOLUNTARILY give their money to public schools.’

In that case, the abolition of public schools would be popular among the electorate, politicians would adopt the position, and before long, the public schools would be defunded and disappear.

One reason that public schools are so popular is that the management of many big corporations, and other members of the ruling class, firmly and enthusiastically support them, not because they want to send their own children to them, but because they want a workforce that can read, write, and handle elementary technology, and they have no plans to fool around with the issue.  That is why public schools, which used to look like prisons, now look like factories.  These corporations, and of course the academic system in general and particularly the corporate media, ensure that the public hear whatever it needs to hear to keep supporting public schools.  They’re not about to abolish them.  Although I suppose if you could think of some corporate way to semi-educate the working class en masse on the public tab, the ruling class might go for it.

Gordy:

“...it doesn’t wash to talk in the usual way of ‘declining standards’ (the standard refrain of the media)...”

It does.  Between us, my wife and I have quite a bit of experience in several regions of the US covering this question from a personal, anecdotal perspective, sharing observations with co-workers and friends who also have observations. We are critical evaluators of media coverage to a high degree. 

The quality of student work, especially when seen as incoming freshman work in university or junior college settings, can fairly be said to have been declining over the past 30 years.  College level testing has had to be adjusted to accomodate these realities in many places.  It may be that the more expensive and competitive elite institutions still maintain higher standards, but it would not be surprising to learn that this was also being affected. 

Standardized testing (especially at the high school level) is affected, in that the answers student give, even with the most garbled and illiterate lack of skill, are deciphered by people who look for all the world by those in the 2000 Florida election recount, studying chads.  What is acceptable, it seems to me,  has to be interpreted with x-ray vision right up to the point of quessing what the intent was. The line is a fine line, picking meaning out of mush. Everyone compares this with their own high school experience, usually some 20-40 years in the past. 

My impression is that the need is for the system to be able to put forward some sort of not-too-horrible statistics so that at least some students can pass.  A lowering of the bar overall so that the system can look better than it really should because there is huge pressure from all sides to do so.

What is needed is a realization that stupid citizens will elect stupid leaders and create conditions that make it impossible to properly evaluate complex issues and adopt long term appropriate solutions.  Dumbing society down is a terrible response to our problems.  They will get worse and worse and our ability to create progress will be increasingly out of reach.

This problem has to be taken seriously.

Paulo:
“Government schooling is a lot like other government attempts at running businesses”
  I guess this means you were home-schooled and your kids are/were too. And I guess you also want to abolish the Armed Forces, the police departments, the fire departments and emergency responders, the VA, all the public libraries, the national park system, and all state and local agencies. 
  Get real!!  Some things are done well by “big gov” and others are not.  When YOU personally can come up an alternative .... maybe with the cash to teach ALL the people in private schools, give us all a jingle - that includes all the kids whose parents don’t give a darn and all the kids with IQs in the single digits. 
  Libertarian ideas work great .... in total isolation from all other humans.

to Paulo:

“Public schools should be abolished, not because education is unimportant, but precisely because it is so crucially important”

Yes, and all of America should HOME SCHOOL their children like Paulo here because as we ALL know, the Parents, educated, intelligent parents just like Paulo here, are REALLY the key to a child’s education, not those idiotic public school teachers.

These smart, educated parents should take over our school districts and in no time, they will be turning out geniuses, just like their own super-bright children.

(yeah, right!)

TAO Walker, I pretty much agree with you. 

I want to add that it doesn’t wash to talk in the usual way of ‘declining standards’ (the standard refrain of the media) because history contains more than a few hair-raising accounts of old pedagogic methods and philosophies, as well as some relatively attractive ones.  Education has always been tweaked and fought over, but beneath all the superficial good and bad changes, to the degree that education becomes institutionalized and no longer guided by natural human inclinations, to that degree it immediately becomes a dehumanizing endeavour. 

Godistwaddle, I appreciate the realism you’re bringing there, but let me ask you: does an animal need to be coerced to perform the ‘jobs’ that are necessary to its wellbeing?  I don’t want to overstretch this point or promulgate a dogma of ‘naturalness’.  But I feel that education like wider society owes less to person-centred compassion than to the ‘human resources’ mentality of the workplace. 

As a child I was exceptionally precocious and had many interests; after a few years of school I was bored into a stupor.  Most adults forget most of what they learned at school.  What they retain, I think, tends to be the stuff that they had an actual everyday use (or affinity) for.  When we have an everyday use for a certain skill or body of knowledge we have a natural inclination to learn it.  Then the dichotomy of ‘work’ and ‘play’ breaks down somewhat; sport and sex involve great exertion but we do not resent it.  School need not be this painful authoritarian struggle between the will of the student and the will of the institution.

Paolo, August 13 at 9:46 pm #

My libertarian views will not be popular on this thread, but—oh, well.

Nor elsewhere I gratefully note

Public schools should be abolished, not because education is unimportant, but precisely because it is so crucially important.

Government schooling is a lot like other government attempts at running businesses: it is stodgy, unimaginative, bureaucratic, and inefficient. Much like its brother operations like the Post Office and Amtrak.

If there is a problem with public education, and I concede that there is, the solution does not lie in throwing it away. Right wingers ( and libertarians) can only thrive when folks are under educated and separated, partially at least by ignorance. The current happenings at those Town Hall meetings are an excellent example of sincere folks dreadfully misinformed.

Our public education system serves several purposes, essential to the continuation of our democratic institutions. Those who pander to the Charter School or Home school rages, work, knowingly or not, against our democratic republic.

The real proof of this is easy to demonstrate. If there is one thing public school advocates will NOT consider, it is allowing parents to direct their education tax dollars to a private school of their choice, or to home schooling costs. This would give parents a CHOICE—something alleged “liberals” insist they are in favor of.

Ah yes, welfare for the rich. Of course a libertarian would promote such as privileged people who are perfectly capable of paying for private schooling for the children insisting that we pay for it instead.

Of course this also craps on those poor and disadvantaged who simply cannot afford the additional expenses entailed in sending junior off to some school that is unrestrained in its aim to teach dark ages history and new testament science and puts profit margins over education.

But public school advocates say outright that such a choice would destroy the public schools virtually overnight, as parents would direct their educational dollars elsewhere. In other words, they admit that very few people would VOLUNTARILY give their money to public schools.

With all the attending publicity, as one charter school after the next is exposed for using out of date texts, teaching creationism INSTEAD of evolution, and placing making money over educating the children in their charge, Paolo conveniently throws in some right wing mantra about choice. There are folks who resent all taxes in fact, does this place them in the right?  Most , I am happy to note, say no.

Look folks, Libertarian politics is one of those things that sounds fine on the surface yet, when one digs into it , one finds it a home for mostly white, selfish and greedy folks who believe that pie in the sky nonsense about free choice bringing utopia to the fore. These people think everyone else will pay for what our society needs, exempting them from the payouts.

Democracy requires participation, most folks outgrow Libertarianism when they learn socialization skills as children…Some , sadly, do not.

My libertarian views will not be popular on this thread, but—oh, well.

Public schools should be abolished, not because education is unimportant, but precisely because it is so crucially important.

Government schooling is a lot like other government attempts at running businesses: it is stodgy, unimaginative, bureaucratic, and inefficient. Much like its brother operations like the Post Office and Amtrak.

The real proof of this is easy to demonstrate. If there is one thing public school advocates will NOT consider, it is allowing parents to direct their education tax dollars to a private school of their choice, or to home schooling costs. This would give parents a CHOICE—something alleged “liberals” insist they are in favor of.

But public school advocates say outright that such a choice would destroy the public schools virtually overnight, as parents would direct their educational dollars elsewhere. In other words, they admit that very few people would VOLUNTARILY give their money to public schools.

ONE of the worse things to happen for the children was both parents going to work because 1 wage earner could not provide from 1 job for the family and/or an illusionary life style brought to everyonb by another worse thing, tv(and maybe radio).

As mentioned by Tao Walker there is pretty much nothing in education that connects with nature anymore so whats the use for kids understanding the world we live in even if the artificial ideas of technology are teaching kids to ‘turn on a computer’, and technology isn’t really about brilliance, it is mostly about convenience.

There in lies a big part in kids being ‘stamped’ out of schools as ‘educated’, some are and some aren’t but with NO parents at home to try to prod or coach kids in learning anything of value, I rather say more are less educated than need be because even education became a baby-sitter.

My education was pretty haphazzard, I stumbled through high school and college with little direction but I did learn enough to teach myself what I felt I wanted to know and do and with that there is ‘going back to school’ even though I wish I knew way back when what I really wanted.

ONE last thing, now adays, too many things are made of lies and it does take some real research to filter through that.

ardee: ’... This is not about what is best for our children, this is not about the truth of our public system of education even. No,. it is about the killing off of govt in its every guise. ...’

I see no sign whatever that anyone is killing off any government.  I think you can rest assured that you will not have to do without politicians, bureaucrats, and cops, cops, cops—all you want, and then some.

As for education, it’s been a favorite whipping boy ever since I can remember.  It is surprising it has not been beaten entirely to death by now and become a proverbial dead horse (for further beating).  My impression as a child was that school was intended to keep the young from learning things, which would come all too readily to them on the streets.  Instead of learning what was going on, you learned the multiplication table and the names of the continents, building up your strength for the hard stuff, diabolical problems that no human being can ever solve, like filling out a tax form correctly.

Since in my experience whatever everyone agrees on is wrong, I can’t help but think that the schools and the teachers are actually doing a pretty good job, especially considering the American social context and culture in which learning, knowledge and intelligence are generally treated with derision and contempt, if not outright hostility.  It’s sort of heroic, actually.

I live in Houston, Texas. The woman with whom I live is a recently retired high school teacher. From her I learned that the so-called Texas Miracle was the envy of Army Drill Sergeants because it was achieved by drill, drill, and then some more drill. In her school the results were dismal.

Many years ago the President of the University of Chicago who was a well-known educator wrote roughly the following: “Between birth and the age of three to four the overwhelming majority of children master a number of remarkable feats almost totally by themselves with minor assistance from grownups. When they arrive in kindergarten they are assumed to be moronic idiots who cannot learn anything without teacher putting a funnel into their mouths through which teacher pours his/her infinite knowledge and wisdom”.

I totally agree with this analysis. I totally agree that this nonsense lies at the base of the failures of our educational systems which are killing the innate abilities and curiosities of most children at the very first step of our so-called schooling.

Really, in this country we give so much lip service to “our children”, but the reality is education in this country is no longer about teaching our children to think critically, analyze effectively, and be confident in one’s knowledge of any subject matter!  Not to mention that there isn’t a “standard curricula” across the nation for the minimum that children should know.  “Standardized testing” isn’t really standardized as it depends on the state/district of where the schools are, and please don’t start comparing curricula by national region.

“Privatizing” the school system is not the answer either, elevating expectations, ensuring that all schools are technologically competent, elevating the standards, and ensuring qualified teachers are teaching and reaching our children should be the goal that we are moving too.  Teaching is hard work, but it requires dedication and commitment on the part of those in the profession.  And much like the fireman, and the policeman should be compensated accordingly.

I’m amazed that our public (and most private) schools are still organized and run the way they were over 30 years ago. Consider the changes society and culture have undergone, and then look at your local high school.

Education remains primarily a means to limit the work force, and the disconnect between academe and public life (profit and not-for-profit) is startling.

Why can a citizen graduate without knowing how to fill out tax forms? How to read a simple contract? Were parenting and relationship skills taught at public school, we would have far fewer abortions, divorces, domestic batteries and abused children. The public school system has failed the American people.

The article makes a valid point: stars (miracle workers) are nice and all but at the end of the day, it’s the people who do the best job they can who have the greatest impact on the student body. Your ordinary, competent teacher, who is abused, neglected, and profoundly disrespected by the communities in which they serve.

An Ivy Leaguer, I spent 30 years teaching in a public school system.  (I thought I’d move on in a couple of years, but I loved the job.)  No magic bullets.  Education is hard, grinding work for teachers and students.  It involves reading, thinking, writing, thinking and thinking some more. (I taught English.)  The job of children is to learn; they must be held accountable for doing their jobs.  The job of teachers is to teach.  Some do it very well; some not so well; but all must do their JOBS.  Like any other jobs, learning and teaching are hard work. No secret, really, and no magic bullet.

To this old Indian the most ‘telling’ observation Mike Rose made here seemed almost an afterthought….at least in the context it was offered.  It had to do with getting more ‘connectivity’ between schools and their “communities.”  This illustrates the fatal flaw in “civilization” not only as it affects “education,” but every other societal process, as well….“healthcare” being the big headline grabber at-the-moment.

For one thing, in the self-styled “(over?)-developed world” particularly, the undeniable effect of institutionalizing virtually every organic social function has been the utter destruction of actual Living Human Communities and replacing them with various random collections of “individuals” self- or other-selected on the basis of mostly make-believe criteria rarely having any foundation at-all in the actual Living Arrangement of our Mother Earth.  So without even ‘begging’ the question of how schools became more-or-less alienated from their “communities” in the first place, the stark fact is there are no real ones to re-connect with here in these latter days, anyhow.

Every other species here, including us surviving free wild Human Beings, prepares its young for the Life of their Kind as a simple matter of course.  Only the subspecies homo domesticus has gotten into the terrible ‘position’ of separating “education” (well, lets face it, and everything else they do, too) from Nature, setting-up artifactual systems instead, and finally discovering to their sorrow (and more-and-more nowadays their horror) that the cheap imitation ‘plastic’ substitutes not only fail to deliver the expected and promised results, the results they do deliver prove increasingly toxic and destructive to both subjects and operators.

Even granting the ‘good intentions’ widely believed to be at-work in the establishment of schools and other institutional arrangements, it has never been any secret where all roads ‘paved’ with such things inevitably end-up.  To anyone wondering whether they’re “there yet,” just turn on your TV anytime, and get the ‘benefits’ of having the din of inequity (in this den of iniquity called “civilization”)) piped directly into your nervous system 24/7. 

There is no “fixing” the schools.  They were doomed to futile sterility from their beginnings.  Now their culture-destroying ‘downside’ is feeding-back into the rest of the societal cesspool with a vengeance….and their ‘victim’/perpetrators are stuck with ‘em.

This old Savage learned that under the ‘tender’ tutelage of the BIA, a long time ago.

HokaHey!

Recently I was one of those people hired by the hundreds to score standardized tests.  These included 10th grade essays, and 11th grade short essay answers to social studies or science subject questions at a variety of grade levels. 

I came away with some mixed feelings.  One the one hand, the essays seemed to work as a standardized score problem.  One could get the hang of judging on a 4 point scale according to relative effectiveness of the writing, regardless of the content. Or, pretty close.  The way accuracy was assessed was through agreement among at least two scorers, and if there was disagreement, with more.  The teachers themselves created standards by agreeing on what they were looking for at each score point level.  This was pretty well developed and I could see that bringing up the poorer school districts probably was going to require imposing a grading system of some sort that went beyond one district’s resources.

On the other hand, when scoring social studies, which you would think was more cut and dried, you found that students would surprise everyone with answers that could be correct or not - depending on how you interpreted what they said as well as how they said it.  Some caused a lot of conversation as scorers and supervisors worked out a response to the answers when they came up again.  Sometimes there was a difference between a local circumstance, and the one in which the question writer worked, that made it difficult.  Most of the scorers were white and urban, and where the students were non-white and rural, there could be a difference of opinion on what reality was.

I think the standardized system has a lot of problems, not the least of which is that students who think out of the box are not included in any rubric and may be left out of the equation. 

I think this whole area needs a lot more public scrutiny. 

On the other hand, the work itself showed an alarming decline, to me, in the quality of student writing, critical thinking skill, knowledge and ability to respond with confidence in one’s own mind.  I thought I picked up on an awful lot of information influenced by talk radio rather than by teachers.  Too many times, I felt that high school work really looked more like 3rd grade work. 

My greatest alarm was that these people were going to be voters soon. 

Are the voters of the future going to be concerned that elected officials be intellectually prepared for the complexities of our time, or are they going to be more likely to vote for people who pander to baser instincts because they still think like high schoolers?

The quality of our educational systems will make the difference. This is a crucially important issue.

In contrast to Ardee, I AM a conspiracy theorist, concieving a power structure as, among other things, a kind of conspiracy.  The homicidal conspiracies in the US- the Kennedy assassination, 9/11-antrax, Israeli ethnic cleansing, etc, can only be legitiamated by denegrating neo-conspiracy truthers.

The schools, universities and other learned bureaucracies are a crucial way a power struture deludes the young to accept the power conspiracy.  The Education system is as corrupt as the mass media, the learned media indocrinating the young to accept the irrtionality of the mainstream truth when they are adults.

What is almost never stated on progressive sites is that Education is a form of indoctrination.  What the young are indoctrinated in is a combination of what the learned say and don’t say.  The most effective indoctrination is excluding from the respectable truth the elephant in the room, allowing it the implicit legitimation of acceptability.

Such a value, for example,  is the common American value of homicidal racism, a basis of the American worldview.  It is disguised not only by the emphasise on capitalist Democracy, largely a fraud, but also by the Western worldview as well, disguising the homicidal imperialism of the Whtie Man.

Since not only American imperialism but all of Wesstern imperialism is disapperaring down the historical crapper, the young indoctrinated with it cannot function politically in the world that is coming into being.  They are Educationally fixated at an ealier age, when Aerican capitalism was a progrssive force.

It is difficult to know how to gain the Educational skills necessary to survive in a developed economy while avoiding the ideological delusions intermixed with them.  This is a real question of Education, which will not be solved by Education specialists.

(I’m talking about Mike Rose)

oh NO!

Get this “public education reformist” Yuppie off of TD!!

(they are rarely up to any good)

Apparently civics classes (required when I was a child) are no longer part of school curriculum.  We learned that we citizens ARE the government.  People who don’t vote or participate in governing themselves must clam up and accept the consequences. 
  Public schools are REQUIRED to teach EVERYBODY .... not just handpicked kids whose parents make them wear uniforms and follow strict discipline (i.e. military schools).  The most vocal disruptive demanding parents these days are the ones who do the least for their kids - they refuse to read to their kids or feed or clothe them properly or help with homework or insist on meager discipline - they literally sue schools and teachers who apply limits or rules of any kind. 
  And, as we have seen from the recent town halls, it only takes a few disruptive types to overwhelm a productive learning process - and the rights of others.

Any claim suggesting that something is a miracle is implying the divinity of those responsible. Is it just me or is this presumptuous?
While miracle is usually assumed to be a positive event an occurrence like Katina is also covered by the term.

Mike Rose has this topic nailed !! 
Every new superintendent or principal or education secretary comes in with a new pet “magic bullet”. Business types want schools to be run like Six Sigma corporations; ex-military want to run schools like boot camps.  And all the wing nuts want to run schools on the cheap.  Each attempt to reduce education to some new-fangled simplistic less expensive process is doomed to solve fewer problems than arise. 
Hard-working highly experienced teachers are the major source of progress because they use multi-dimensional approaches - but they are neither inexpensive or quick to acquire.  Even the ways of evaluating actual teacher performance are totally lacking (achievement tests can measure students, not teachers). 
Mr. Rose’s emphasis on multi-dimensional thinking is crucial for future progress.

The author doesn’t discuss the expansion of military high schools across this country, which, when the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who had been CEO of the Chicago Public School system, championed in his former position.

According to my research, Chicago now has six military high school academies: 3, Army; 1, Navy; 1, Marines; and 1, Air Force.

When someone asked CEO Duncan about his Quaker roots, and didn’t his roots conflict with the idea of institutionalizing the military at the high school level, Arne Duncan answered, “I come from a Quaker family, and I’ve always been against war. But I’m going to put the Naval Academy in there, because it will give people in the community more choices.”

Quite honestly, I haven’t yet done research to discover the differences in curriculum or teaching, but these military high schools do seem to be a way to indoctrinate young people at an even younger age.

Ansolutely correct, ardee.

I believe, and I hasten to add I believe I am far from a conspiracy theorist, that the attack on public education is hand in glove with the right wing extremist attacks on all govt in general.

This is not about what is best for our children, this is not about the truth of our public system of education even. No,. it is about the killing off of govt in its every guise. Never mind the welfare of children, they are merely pawns in a game.