I'm questioning my education...
El_Kabong
Posts: 4,141
http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.
Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.
How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.
Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.
In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."
By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:
"Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."
In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."
The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part:
"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual."
In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:
"The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"
While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."
In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.
This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:
I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.
Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.
How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.
Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.
In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."
By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:
"Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."
In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."
The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part:
"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual."
In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:
"The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"
While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."
In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.
This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:
I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm
The Makers of Modern Schooling
The real makers of modern schooling weren't at all who we think.
Not Cotton Mather or Horace Mann or John Dewey. The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:
Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron... John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil... Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty... and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...
Men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social efficiency" movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.
The Business of Schooling
If modern schooling has a “Fourth Purpose,” there must be an earlier three.
Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes:
To make good people
To make good citizens
And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum.
The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose.
The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management.
We should reveal the mechanism of mind control training, habits, and attitudes.
Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.
In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.
Children were literally trained in bad habits and bad attitudes!
Teachers and principals, “scientifically”certified in teachers college practices, were made unaware of the invisible curriculum they really taught.
The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.
Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.
In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.
These processes didn't advance evenly. Some localities resisted more than others, some decades were more propitious for the plan than others. Especially during and just after national emergencies like WWI, the Depression, WWII, and the Sputnik crisis, the scheme rocketed forward; in quieter moments it was becalmed or even forced to give up some ground.
But even in moments of greatest resistance, the institutions controlling the fourth purpose—great corporations, great universities, government bureaus with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate journalism—increasingly centralized in fewer and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, kept a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources to wear down and outwait the competition.
The prize was of inestimable value--control of the minds of the young.
School Becomes a Dangerous Place
After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called "The Workplace," even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.
the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.
This revolution in the composition of the American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since systematic forms of employment demand that employees specialize their efforts in one or another function of systematic production, then clear thinking warns us that incomplete people make the best corporate and government employees.
Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were well aware of this paradox, which our own time has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest tasks assigned to forced schooling.
Not only was the new form of institution spiritually dangerous as a matter of course, but school became a physically dangerous place as well.
What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!
Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best "police" to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.
School Becomes An Arena of Meaningless Pressure
As the twentieth century progressed, and particularly after WWII, schools evolved into behavioral training centers, laboratories of experimentation in the interests of corporations and the government. The original model for this development had been Prussian Germany, but few remembered.
School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent "standardized" exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.
For instance, take the case of Bill Bradley and George W Bush, two of the four finalists in the 2000 presidential race. Bradley had a horrifying 480 on the verbal part of his own SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a senator; Bush graduated from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States—with a mediocre 550.
If you can become governor, senator, and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?
Perhaps they sort out good scientists from bad? If so, how is it that both the scientists principally involved in the Human Genome Project have strange scholarly backgrounds to say the least!
Francis S. Collins, the head of the public portion, was homeschooled, never followed any type of formal curriculum, and is a born-again Christian.
Craig Venter was a very bad boy in high school, a surfing bum who nearly flunked out, and he didn't go to college after graduation, but into the U.S. Army as an enlisted man before being shipped off to Vietnam!
School As a Place of Bewilderment and Boredom
As you'll learn when you read The Underground History of American Education the new purpose of schooling—to serve business and government—could only be achieved efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another.
Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor.
The rationale, history, and dynamics of Fourth Purpose school procedure are carefully examined in The Underground History of American Education.
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Mihi cura futuri.
The elements they speak to me.
http://espn.go.com/espnradiostations/NewYork1050/gallery/35218855.html
so cute they are
- Ariel and Will Durant
all posts by ©gue_barium are protected under US copyright law and are not to be reproduced, exchanged or sold
except by express written permission of ©gue_barium, the author.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
And the posted article uses the example of US students' inability to point out a country on a map, and then cites outdated textbooks as a probable cause. However, it doesn't take the most updated classroom materials to know where to find the US.
We're just getting complacent, that's all. But's it's always fun to throw a conspiracy theory or two out there.
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825
and it instills in them the concept of competition, oneupmanship, the pack mentality, individualism is something to shun/embrace conformity...
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
we have one of the worst educational systems in the fucking world...how can the world's ONLY superpower, the richest nation, the most powerful nation, how can we be so far behind everyone else?
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
First off, it's not the educational system, it's the society that we are now living in.
Parents work more hours on average than they ever did before. They don't have time to spend making sure their children do their homework and are behaving in school. They don't have time to show up to PTA conferences and the like.
Another thing is the breakdown of structure in the school setting. Teachers are becoming progressively permissive of disobedient and noncompliant behavior. Children are being socially promoted while at the same not ever receiving the specialized attention that they need to get beyond the problem areas that are holding them back.
My parents worked 40 hr weeks. When I came home from school, they made sure I did my homework. When I brought home good grades, I got pats on the back. I can't say they ever disciplined me for bad grades because I never got bad grades. I never got bad grades because teachers and my parents constantly gave me pats on the back. I live for pats on the back.
So, I walked away with an education, and I don't think it took updated textbooks to get there. I think a person can get a solid education with books that are 20 or even 30 years old. Most parents these days work 60 hr weeks. They don't have time to pat their kids on the back for good grades.
So, the problem is that parents either don't care or don't have the time to care, and school systems are just being overrun by overcrowding and aggressive teachers' unions.
Meanwhile, our government is too busy waging wars and fighting homosexual marriage. It's just complacency.
The only people who can do anything about this problem are the politicians. Politicians have money. People who have money put their kids in private school.
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
How? For ALL the reasons quoted in the original article. According to that, the US gained it's status through manipulating the masses. How else could they achieve it?
Copout. If you care about your kids, you get involved .
That last sentence is the No Child Left Behind Act. It entails standarded testing that students must pass to move on. Teachers must spend so much time teaching specificallywhat's on these tests and not in anything else (simply because there's not enough time) because their schools will get dropped in funding by the gov't if they don't have a certain percentage of students passing the grade. You don't hear of kids failing a grade and forced to repeat a year anymore; it's "push them on...regardless". And this day and age, teachers have lost the right to reprimand students and students aren't taught to respect their teachers overall. Therefore there's no discipline in schools anymore.
Bush has made things worse than ever. Until the NCLB act is thrown out, teachers will continue to be frustrated (or resign), kids will graduate not knowing anything, and they are the future leaders. Frightening, isn't it? I have a whole other issue to tackle; my child has special needs. I have a hell of a fight to look forward to when she gets out of preschool.
Teachers unions are corrupt piles of apathetic shit. That's our problem. We need some more union busters like we had in the thirtys.
all posts by ©gue_barium are protected under US copyright law and are not to be reproduced, exchanged or sold
except by express written permission of ©gue_barium, the author.
The problem is that people think that's the govt. or the schools job. Its the parents job to teach their child how to process and use what the schools teach them. Schooling is only a tool. A good parent will raise a child and teach them HOW to think, evaluate, relate, and comprehend. Why count on someone else to do what you should be doing for your children yourself?
www.myspace.com/jensvad
Obviously parents play a huge role in the education and development of their children. But it is absurd for them to have to undo all the damage public schooling has done. These schools are useless and mind numbing for children yet we continously keep paying money year after year into a failing system.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
I agree with you on the part of the parents in the child's education. But if your view is that a school is just a building where they get a bunch of knowledge, that schooling is just a tool... That, to me, expresses that the system is indeed a failure.
Why count on someone else to do what you should be doing? Because, in my opinion, that's the whole idea of a school. You go out working to provide for your family. There are other people who learn how to teach and guide children. I expect teachers to be more than just a fact book, more than just a tool.
And when the child gets home I think it's the parent's job to elaborate on the information they got, listen to the child's ideas, teach them more about something, putting things in perspective...
naděje umírá poslední
Are you questioning your education or the education of some Americans? Can you point to the US on a map and do you know who Abraham Lincoln was?
The article above refers to the education system from the 1800's and early 1900's. Education has definitely changed over the years and continues to do so. Many subjects that were taught in high school are now being taught at the elementary school levels. At a much earlier age kids read better, learn algebra and geometry as well as computers and the internet. When I was in high school regents classes were for the smarter students but now regents classes are mandatory for all students.
Originally many many years ago the education system was geared to prepare students to enter directly into the workforce right after high school. People got married and started a family right away. Now high school prepares more and more students to go to college to get a higher education. There are many more college students today than 20-30 years ago. However the students living in a lower income family or in poverty still find it very difficult to get an equal education and to go to college, as they need better teachers and more funding.
There is no doubt that the education levels in the US are affected by the communities that the students reside. For instance you cannot compare education levels from the upper and middle class communities with the lower and poverish communities. It is much harder for someone living in poverty to get a higher education and do something great with his or her life than someone from a middle class or upper class community.
Although education is better than 50 years ago, we need more funding, better teachers and higher standards. As education improves in the US, it more certainly does in every industrialized nation as well.
I cannot compare my education with the education of every industrialized nation but in my experience, I had some terrible teachers, teachers that were so-so and some really great teachers. In college it was pretty much the same with the professors, some terrible, some so-so and some great. Many of my professors in college were from other countries teaching here in the US. To be honest they fall in the same categories, some terrible, some so-so and some great.
Although I have never taken a semester abroad, I do have a few friends and relatives that have. I have asked them about their classes abroad and they all pretty much said they were no different from the classes in the US.
Too many 'absent' parents....too many bad teachers that can't be gotten rid of...and too many terrific teachers that are not compensated based upon their performance.
Like most things in life, you get out of it what you are willing to put into it...and not refering to money. Money can help and is needed, however it's the lack of effort that really leads to uneducated kids.
There needs to be more practical learning earlier on...so even kids will see the benefits of education.
doesn't NCLB also include learning disability kids as well? NCLB is a horrible idea and has been a tremendous flop. The Federal Government should not ever be involved with public education. Well ok other than to maybe equate some funding to smaller rural schools but that should probably come down through state governments anyway.
The only thing I can see that NCLB is doing is forcing teachers to teach to standardized tests and that goes back to the thoughts of the original article in this post. People who perform well might be good test takers but horrible multi taskers or what have you, not to mention the lotto inspired grade inflation due to free scholarships for everyone who maintains a B average or what have you.
People are not standardized, therefore education cannot be either.
Our public (and a lot of private schools too lets not kid ourselves) are underacheving massively, but when you consider a teacher who has 50 bucks a year for all thier supplies; dicipline problems that disrupt class but they can't even deal with because of lawsuits and 31 screaming kids to deal with all the while doing almost as much work out of the classroom to plan or keep up their skills; people are expecting far to much out of the education system for what is put in.
Nothing is expected of students, we are far more concerned with self esteem than any real learning other than that required for standardised tests nevermind that some who score poorly simply cry through them or are having a bad day or what have you. Teaching difficult math; science and language earlier is doable and it's necessary. Sports show us that it's possible to become proficient at skills early on yet our education system waits until they are 14 in some cases to first present them with difficult concepts.
We have to get Parents more involved at home and at school finding out what they can do to help their child improve. We also have to diversify how all this gets done. We can't put all the stock in grades or tests even though those are levels of measurement. A big part of education comes outside of the classroom too. If the input is poor, the results will be poor.
This is what happens when you allow a vast central government to control the purse strings of your state educational systems. The federal government has no constitutional right to pass No Child Left Behind legislation, for example. As we can see, it shouldn't have that right for reasons like the original poster's article. Absolute power corrupts absolutely; therefore, when you allow the federal government too much power and don't disperse that power within the states, you cause it to express its own corrupt interests - like forcing a more "docile" electorate.
-Enoch Powell
A Republican majority in House, Republican majority in the Senate and a Republican President, passed the No Child Left Behind legislation.
This wasn't a liberal policy; it was Bush's baby, which is failing by the way.
It is a teacher's job to teach your children. It is YOUR job to raise them. If you think your job as a parent ends at going to work and bringing home a paycheck, i'm sorry, but you are sorrowfully mistaken. It is not the function of the school to raise your children, teach them values and provide them with opinions. It is the schools job to teach them to read, write, function mathematically and provide them with other basic skills. It is YOUR job to raise them. i'll tell you right now from experience, the children that excel in school are the ones whose parents are actively involved in the child's development. Children with parents who go to work to provide for the family, and leave everything else up to the school, struggle... big time.
School is the place you go to acquire information,. give you framework on how to prepare for processing the information and then presenting info. The how to process information has to come from the parents as this is really where values and morals are taught and learned. I will not trust my son's values and morals to teachers, who for the most part are strangers who have no vested interest in my child.
I'll never be willing to relinquish the how to think responsibility to teachers. They didn't unionize (and sometimes go on strike) to look out for my and your kid's best interests. I'm not willing to throw my kid to the propoganda machine that wants schools to teach kids how to think just because so many parents don't take their responsibility seriously.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
Honestly, what is absurd, is for the public school teacher to be expected to undo, in 6 1/2 to 7 hours a day to undo all the damage done to 25-30 kids in their fucked up homelife. It is absurd that they be expected to raise children. It is absurd to charge a teacher with 25 - 30 kids a year, many of who come to school hungry, dirty, abused, passed around from foster home to foster home because their parents either don't want them or are seriously unequipped to parent them, and then blame that teacher when all of those children don't perform well and say the public school system sucks.
The public school system isn't without its flaws, but an artist can only do so much with the media their given. You can't give Michelangelo a box of freakin' crayolas and expect the sistene chappel.
A school teacher shouldn't be expected to do raise anyone and they do a good enough job at not doing anything meaningful in the lives of the students they teach unless they are really rare and break the mold. So why send kids there?
Here's a piece I agree with. Read it with an open mind, not an already made up one.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm
also:
http://www.nhen.org/dads/default.asp?id=383
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
NCLF is idiotic as many have said. There are school districts placing kids who may lower the test scores on standardized tests into learning support classrooms even though they are classified as true learning support children. They do not have a disability as defined by the state. This is done to ensure the school receives the funding.
Once those children are in the learning support classrooms they tend to fall further and further behind their classmates.
There are many parents who care about their children deeply and fight daily for their children to receive the education they deserve and the IEP's to simply be followed. It is a never ending battle because the administration at most school districts view the schools as a business. Things will never change when people are more concerned with the bottom line than our children.
SMILE Eddie Vedder Cleveland 06.....