I think another problem with public schools is the way they are set up to let kids socially marinate in their childishness rather that get them focused on becoming actual adults. I am so sick about hearing crap about "making learning fun!" Learning should be a reward of its own. Let play be play and school be school.
I think another problem with public schools is the way they are set up to let kids socially marinate in their childishness rather that get them focused on becoming actual adults. I am so sick about hearing crap about "making learning fun!" Learning should be a reward of its own. Let play be play and school be school.
My third grader spent this year playing computer games and watching videos on a regular basis as a class "reward" for bare minimum behavior. Most of the "books" they read in class were simple novelizations of Disney movies and Nickelodeon shows (because its "relevant" to the children!) My daughter still doesn't know her multiplication tables.
This is at an otherwise decent parish Catholic school in an upper middle class Fairfield County, Connecticut town.
I contrast this with my neighbor growing up, who went to his parish school in Hamtramak when it was a working class Polish ghetto. The nuns might not have been "Kind", and the parents were mostly factory workers. But in third grade he was learning Latin and Greek and reading Homer; once when talking about his childhood education at a neighborhood bonfire he closed his eyes, almost in a rapture, leaned back in his lawn chair, and sang O Salutaris and Tantum Ergo from memory.
It was sublime.
Don't tell me that the crap they call "education" today is an improvement on that.
High School especially is a mess. It's just a vector for "Youth Culture" - a culture characterized by hostility to adults, immaturity, decadence, irresponsibility, and the worship of the some of the most grotesque and useless members of society AKA celebrities. The actual "learning" seems to be considered by most students as either a hoop to jump through to college with little meaningful content of its own, or a waste of time to be passively endured while hanging with friends until "graduating" into a life of... more hanging out.
Why are we OK with this as a society? We now have a massive population of 20 and 30 year olds who don't know how to grow up. But that is because we never taught them to grow up! We literally raise our young people to be culturally barbaric hedonists and then wonder why they don't get married, don't have babies, don't learn how to do real jobs, and then take out 100k in college loans to Follow Their Dreamz without learning to contribute anything of actual worth to the common good.
It's time to demolish high school.
This is what education should look like:
Local, reasonably sized (200-300 kids max) grade schools that are K-8. These schools would cover all the academic basics. They would also give older kids opportunities to be mentors for younger kids and would foster friendships between different ages (this is one of the most beautiful aspects of our parish Catholic school.)
When kids graduate 8th grade, they would be able to choose a vocational or college track. The vocational track would train them with every skill they need to have a productive job at graduation at 18. There would be opportunities to learn and be certified in a trade as well. It would involve a lot of mentoring by adults and tradesmen who teach young people with the goal of making them into ADULTS and giving them an adult, civic minded mindset.
The college track would focus on building the academic skills to succeed in college and choose a profession.
Colleges would jettison about 2/3 of their administrations and useless majors (we all know what they are) and focus primarily on passing on *valuable* cultural patrimony through a less niche and more generalized liberal arts and legitimate professional training.
All athletics and "activities" should be separated from school and should be run by an mix of public and private community organizations and clubs. School should be focused on school.
The goal should be that students on the Voc Ed path are prepared for marriage, family life, and full financial adulthood by 18 and students on the college path are prepared for the same by 22.
This makes my heart ache. When I think of the education I got in my working class neighborhood in the 50’s and 60’s, I want to scream. My grandchildren, in the same city school district I grew up in may as well be attending on another planet. Or not at all. And I saw it begin with my own children, when the priority became, yes, Make Learning Fun. Which rules out phonics, grammar, multiplication tables, recitation and repetition, memorization of any kind (yes, I can still sing Tantum Ergum”, thanks to the mean nuns in my catechism class). But those things worked and I became literate.
Did I say I want to scream? I tell everyone who will listen, the schools can teach all the social nonsense they want, just as soon as ALL the kids have mastered the basics. No worries that THAT is going to happen.
Your ideas and suggestions are sound and once worked. Why do we always think we need to reinvent the wheel??
I think the need to constantly reinvent the wheel comes from all the incentives we have created to do so - there are entire "consulting" and "professional development" industries that exist off of remaking the wheel - not to mention the restless egos of school administrators who are always looking to justify their existence. (Even though they have no shortage of real things to do!)
Change employs the people who facilitate the change.
Also, I think the whole "make education fun" is an extension of our collective cultural idealization of "youth" and "coolness", which leads to a refusal to grow up, and therefore a desire to constantly please and appeal to children and adolescents in order to remain "cool."
"Pop culture" / "youth culture" is a cancerous infestation in our society. Being soaked in it as a young person leads to an inability to ever really grow up, which is why we have so many teachers and parents who agonize over appealing to the sensitivities of kids and being liked by them and therefore fail to ever really educate or guide them into adulthood.
We are reaping the consequences at a massive scale right now in our society.
I think another problem with public schools is the way they are set up to let kids socially marinate in their childishness rather that get them focused on becoming actual adults. I am so sick about hearing crap about "making learning fun!" Learning should be a reward of its own. Let play be play and school be school.
My third grader spent this year playing computer games and watching videos on a regular basis as a class "reward" for bare minimum behavior. Most of the "books" they read in class were simple novelizations of Disney movies and Nickelodeon shows (because its "relevant" to the children!) My daughter still doesn't know her multiplication tables.
This is at an otherwise decent parish Catholic school in an upper middle class Fairfield County, Connecticut town.
I contrast this with my neighbor growing up, who went to his parish school in Hamtramak when it was a working class Polish ghetto. The nuns might not have been "Kind", and the parents were mostly factory workers. But in third grade he was learning Latin and Greek and reading Homer; once when talking about his childhood education at a neighborhood bonfire he closed his eyes, almost in a rapture, leaned back in his lawn chair, and sang O Salutaris and Tantum Ergo from memory.
It was sublime.
Don't tell me that the crap they call "education" today is an improvement on that.
High School especially is a mess. It's just a vector for "Youth Culture" - a culture characterized by hostility to adults, immaturity, decadence, irresponsibility, and the worship of the some of the most grotesque and useless members of society AKA celebrities. The actual "learning" seems to be considered by most students as either a hoop to jump through to college with little meaningful content of its own, or a waste of time to be passively endured while hanging with friends until "graduating" into a life of... more hanging out.
Why are we OK with this as a society? We now have a massive population of 20 and 30 year olds who don't know how to grow up. But that is because we never taught them to grow up! We literally raise our young people to be culturally barbaric hedonists and then wonder why they don't get married, don't have babies, don't learn how to do real jobs, and then take out 100k in college loans to Follow Their Dreamz without learning to contribute anything of actual worth to the common good.
It's time to demolish high school.
This is what education should look like:
Local, reasonably sized (200-300 kids max) grade schools that are K-8. These schools would cover all the academic basics. They would also give older kids opportunities to be mentors for younger kids and would foster friendships between different ages (this is one of the most beautiful aspects of our parish Catholic school.)
When kids graduate 8th grade, they would be able to choose a vocational or college track. The vocational track would train them with every skill they need to have a productive job at graduation at 18. There would be opportunities to learn and be certified in a trade as well. It would involve a lot of mentoring by adults and tradesmen who teach young people with the goal of making them into ADULTS and giving them an adult, civic minded mindset.
The college track would focus on building the academic skills to succeed in college and choose a profession.
Colleges would jettison about 2/3 of their administrations and useless majors (we all know what they are) and focus primarily on passing on *valuable* cultural patrimony through a less niche and more generalized liberal arts and legitimate professional training.
All athletics and "activities" should be separated from school and should be run by an mix of public and private community organizations and clubs. School should be focused on school.
The goal should be that students on the Voc Ed path are prepared for marriage, family life, and full financial adulthood by 18 and students on the college path are prepared for the same by 22.
This makes my heart ache. When I think of the education I got in my working class neighborhood in the 50’s and 60’s, I want to scream. My grandchildren, in the same city school district I grew up in may as well be attending on another planet. Or not at all. And I saw it begin with my own children, when the priority became, yes, Make Learning Fun. Which rules out phonics, grammar, multiplication tables, recitation and repetition, memorization of any kind (yes, I can still sing Tantum Ergum”, thanks to the mean nuns in my catechism class). But those things worked and I became literate.
Did I say I want to scream? I tell everyone who will listen, the schools can teach all the social nonsense they want, just as soon as ALL the kids have mastered the basics. No worries that THAT is going to happen.
Your ideas and suggestions are sound and once worked. Why do we always think we need to reinvent the wheel??
I think the need to constantly reinvent the wheel comes from all the incentives we have created to do so - there are entire "consulting" and "professional development" industries that exist off of remaking the wheel - not to mention the restless egos of school administrators who are always looking to justify their existence. (Even though they have no shortage of real things to do!)
Change employs the people who facilitate the change.
Also, I think the whole "make education fun" is an extension of our collective cultural idealization of "youth" and "coolness", which leads to a refusal to grow up, and therefore a desire to constantly please and appeal to children and adolescents in order to remain "cool."
"Pop culture" / "youth culture" is a cancerous infestation in our society. Being soaked in it as a young person leads to an inability to ever really grow up, which is why we have so many teachers and parents who agonize over appealing to the sensitivities of kids and being liked by them and therefore fail to ever really educate or guide them into adulthood.
We are reaping the consequences at a massive scale right now in our society.