Educational Philosophy

[Balugon]

What if our school systems were radically different? What if you didn't have to sit in chairs for long hours each day? What if little pieces of paper didn't determine whether you were competent at your prospective job position/educational background? There is a movement going on amidst the educational field that not everyone knows about, and it challenges a lot of the typical practices of public schools. Here is a video of Alfie Kohn, a leading education critic (who has scientific research to back up his claims), which brings up a lot of the important points people should consider when thinking about how we do school.

Alfie Kohn - The (Alternative) Schools Our Kids Deserve - 2011 MAAP Conference - YouTube

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Can you summarise the points so I don't have to watch the video?

 

[juvenissun]

What if our school systems were radically different? What if you didn't have to sit in chairs for long hours each day? What if little pieces of paper didn't determine whether you were competent at your prospective job position/educational background? There is a movement going on amidst the educational field that not everyone knows about, and it challenges a lot of the typical practices of public schools. Here is a video of Alfie Kohn, a leading education critic (who has scientific research to back up his claims), which brings up a lot of the important points people should consider when thinking about how we do school.

Alfie Kohn - The (Alternative) Schools Our Kids Deserve - 2011 MAAP Conference - YouTube

The problem is: there are too many students.

The source of that problem, in turn, is: the world has too many people.

What Alfie said would be true if each class has fewer than 10 students. And there will be no such thing called: standardized test.

This is not only an education problem, it is the problem of the whole society. Unless we bring everything back to 18th Century, what he said would only be a good old memory.

 

[AlexBP]

I think that nearly every reasonable person would agree that the public education system in the United States is badly broken. I think we'd all agree that something needs to be done to fix it. Everybody has some plan for radically changing our public schools.

However, in the last fifty years, every serious effort at school reform has failed, and only the most minor changes have been made. The reason for this is not hard to find. Whenever any reform effort is on the table, regardless of what it is, the teachers unions oppose it, and so does a certain political party which I won't name here. The unions and their political allies are powerful enough to win every time. Consequently there has been no school reform, and there will be none from the highest level until the current political system is radically changed.

The good news is that charter schools are growing in certain cities and counties, even though the unions have successfully resisted them at the higher levels. In fact, somewhere around 3 million students now attend charter schools. This is the first large movement away from old-fashioned public schooling in several generations. Regardless of whether you personally support charters, you have to see it as a good thing because, as people see the benefits of abandoning public schools, they may be more open to other alternatives.

 

[Balugon]

Can you summarise the points so I don't have to watch the video?

Point 1: One of the most fundamental principles that public schools are based on- that we have decided and will attempt to force students to learn a truckload of ideas that we have pre-determined beforehand for them to learn- is flawed and wrong. It violates a key feature of human nature, which is that humans have an innate need to feel that they have some control over their own lives. They need to be able to make choices about what they do and what they will pursue. Forcing them to sit and do what we want for a good portion of each day damages them. Humans make bad robots. As a solution to this, we need to work with students to help them learn things when they are ready to learn them, if they want to learn them. Some things taught in schools aren't worth learning to begin with.

Point 2: Standardized testing is bad. It does a poor job of actually telling what a child can do. It caters to privileged white middle-class children, and especially to those with better reading skills. It gets teachers focusing on teaching the test instead of helping students learn.

Point 3: Rewards and Punishments are bad. Rewards are bad because they take away from a person's sense of self-satisfaction, which actually makes it less likely that they will do the "good deed" again unless another reward is involved. Punishment is bad because it helps to destroy the open relationship that two people have, which is the most important pathway for people to be able to work through problems together and communicate. Punishment is especially bad in schools because much of the time it is blind, and doesn't bother to take into account what the child is going through.

Point 4: Education should be about learning, but public schools aren't. Public schools are about memorizing facts and formulas long enough to get a little piece of paper that says you survived through 12th grade. Making lifelong learners is the important focus that we should be having with education, because then students would be pursuing their own learning opportunities, which would help them solve the problems of tomorrow.

Point 5: Grades are bad. They mix the importance of learning with the concept of performance, which helps to kill learning because then you start to focus simply on trying to perform instead of on trying to learn- have to get that A; have to please the teacher; have to pass the class.

Point 6: Homework, as it is typically given, is bad. Kids put in a ton of hours into school each week, they should be able to have time to themselves and for their families when they get home. Homework kills that family time and self time. Also, if a student doesn't know how to do the homework before going home (like math problems), then they might actually get worse at doing the learning task instead of doing better, because it is getting reinforced the more they do it wrong. If I remember correctly, the scientific research available hasn't shown any significant learning gains obtained from homework as a whole, and so that's just another reason to get rid of it.

The video doesn't go that in-depth on each topic I mentioned, but those general points are able to be picked up on in the video. And I might have missed some stuff too, but that's what i can remember atm.

 

[Beechwell]

Can you summarise the points so I don't have to watch the video?

What I remember from watching it yesterday:

Schools focus too much on what students ought to do, and not enought on what kids need or want to do. Kohn's idea is to make the students interested in the topics themselves, and not coerce them into learning by reward and punishment systems.
Sounds good in theory, but I fear fails too often in practice.

He identifies three main things that students desire/need:
- A sense of community, or belonging
- Autonomy, being able to make their own decisions (including what they want to learn)
- A sense of competence, the feeling that they are actually good at something (to which artificial rewards are supposedly contraproductive, which may acually make sense)

Also he insists (and here I also think he has a point) that while schools do introduce some good things, they also always keep the old, bad things (like standardized grading, or artificial competition between students) around, negating the positive effect of the new ideas.

And of course he also says we need smaller classes, less lectures, more student participation, etc. What we have known for decades but still don't manage to really implement.

 

[sandwiches]

What if our school systems were radically different? What if you didn't have to sit in chairs for long hours each day? What if little pieces of paper didn't determine whether you were competent at your prospective job position/educational background? There is a movement going on amidst the educational field that not everyone knows about, and it challenges a lot of the typical practices of public schools. Here is a video of Alfie Kohn, a leading education critic (who has scientific research to back up his claims), which brings up a lot of the important points people should consider when thinking about how we do school.

Alfie Kohn - The (Alternative) Schools Our Kids Deserve - 2011 MAAP Conference - YouTube

I have several problems with his ideas:

1) How do we introduce kids into new ideas and concepts that they might think they would never like or be interested in without forcing them?

2) How do we teach kids valuable life-long skills like critical thinking, reading, writing, counting, etc if they simply do not feel like it because they're rather be playing or just lazying around? (I was one of those kids)

3) How do we measure progress or whether the teaching system is being successful?

4) Without performance markers, how do we explain and introduce kids into the idea that there are in fact, better and worse ways of doing things?

I simply do not think the ideas of creativity, structure, logical thinking, self-fulfillment are mutually exclusive. This seems to me like the extreme end of the learning spectrum. The opposite extreme being a rigid education where kids are taught that only one specific way of learning and doing things is acceptable and where your grades are the ultimate and only meaningful measure of your success.

 

[Balugon]

I forgot Point 7: Competition is bad. If you want to make a community where people care about and regularly think of others, competition (pitting people against each other) is a quick way to destroy that. Competition says that you have to lose (or a whole group of people has to lose) in order for me to win/feel good about myself.

I have several problems with his ideas:

1) How do we introduce kids into new ideas and concepts that they might think they would never like or be interested in without forcing them?

2) How do we teach kids valuable life-long skills like critical thinking, reading, writing, counting, etc if they simply do not feel like it because they're rather be playing or just lazying around? (I was one of those kids)

3) How do we measure progress or whether the teaching system is being successful?

4) Without performance markers, how do we explain and introduce kids into the idea that there are in fact, better and worse ways of doing things?

I simply do not think the ideas of creativity, structure, logical thinking, self-fulfillment are mutually exclusive. This seems to me like the extreme end of the learning spectrum. The opposite extreme being a rigid education where kids are taught that only one specific way of learning and doing things is acceptable and where your grades are the ultimate and only meaningful measure of your success.

Here are my answers to some of your questions (again, these are just my general answers):

1) How do you get a kid to eat broccoli? You either find a way to make the broccoli tasty to the kid, or find a better tasting vegetable (or simply not make him eat it). The child might realize the importance of broccoli when he gets older and so pursue eating it anyway. But if you try to force the kid, he may learn to despise you and the broccoli to a new level, and may never eat broccoli again in his life. Similar principles could apply to learning things.

2) Become a better teacher. The best teachers can find ways to make learning interesting and fun. Also, not everything needs to be learned right away. School is so obsessed with a set schedule for learning, and yet whole societies have survived for hundreds (if not thousands) of years without written language. Another concept to think about is that eventually children will realize their need for reading and math as they face the world (and as long as krutches are not provided for them), and this will give them the necessary natural drive to want to learn those things. Kids also are naturally curious, and so it is a matter of working with that natural curiousity to help get them questioning different topics.

3) Look at the economic impact the students who graduate from the school are making? Be involved in the school and judge for ourselves whether or not we believe the teaching is effective? Right now, schools focus on academics to the detriment of the physical and emotional well-being of students. Schools also offer little in helping students have better relationships with other people. How much negative economic impact does each unplanned pregnancy have? Probably a ton, but schools don't bother to factor that in, because college degrees are what makes successful individuals to them. A lot of educators and educational theorists love to throw around "research-backed" strategies. Unfortunately, what they fail to mention is that the research they talk about fails to take into account the other 90% of important factors in worthwhile learning. I can whip people into doing things and have tasks get done faster, but it doesn't mean it's the best way. Many of the strageties they use simply focus on getting students to perform better. And I know, because I just got out of college to be an educator.

Also, invest in the schools you believe in. A lot of communities have school taxes that help to keep the school going. If we focused our funding into smaller communities supporting their schools based on how much they believed in them, then the schools society didn't agree with would sink under. This would mean that people would have to actually read up on their schools and be engaged with them instead of assuming that a little paper with test scores on it means that the school is actually doing something worthwhile. As it is now, or at least how it was before the recession hit, we had been pumping more and more money into schools, and not really getting more positive results.

4) One can simply show students better ways to do things. Most people are fairly interested in being smart about their energy usage. People don't want to waste a bunch of time if there is a simpler way out there. As well, it doesn't mean we can't say that a student's answer is wrong. People are often interested in wanting to have the truth in life as well, and so one can work with students to help show them why certain things are right and certain things are wrong. People want life to make sense. Showing them why certain things wouldn't make sense helps them to get a clearer picture, and depending on what you were talking about, they can be thankful that you helped clear up the confusion/miscalculation in the topic that they were dealing with.

 

[sandwiches]

I forgot Point 7: Competition is bad. If you want to make a community where people care about and regularly think of others, competition (pitting people against each other) is a quick way to destroy that. Competition says that you have to lose (or a whole group of people has to lose) in order for me to win/feel good about myself.

Competition doesn't say anything. Competition is when you try to be better than someone else at a given goal. That it makes people feel better to be better than someone else is not a bad thing. What is bad is to make people competitive without making them sympathetic or empathetic, as well. That you feel that your neighbor having a better looking lawn means that you "lost," is your problem and not his. What we need to teach people is to take competition as ways to strive to make oneself better in every way (including in beneficial actions, after all, do we consider people who strive to outdo one another in a child-saving competition bad?)

Here are my answers to some of your questions (again, these are just my general answers):

1) How do you get a kid to eat broccoli? You either find a way to make the broccoli tasty to the kid, or find a better tasting vegetable (or simply not make him eat it). The child might realize the importance of broccoli when he gets older and so pursue eating it anyway. But if you try to force the kid, he may learn to despise you and the broccoli to a new level, and may never eat broccoli again in his life. Similar principles could apply to learning things.

This misses the opportunity of early learning and early immersion in potential fields of interest. I started eating eggs by the time I was around 26. I love eggs now. I started liking computers by the time I was around 9, if I hadn't gone to school and been forced into the crappy BASIC class when I was younger, I may have learned I liked computers too late for me to have taken advantage of that knowledge and interest. The truth is that kids will many times work against their own best interests, even more often than adults do. That's why we do parenting because we (hopefully) have more knowledge, experience, and developed thinking skills than children and we understand what will benefit them best in the long run. Just like we don't let our kids pick out their all foods, drinks, or how much candy they can eat, we should not allow our kids how much and what they can learn, all the time. Like on everything else, I think there's a happy medium but your and his suggestions aren't it. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. I think opening up the curricula to allow for children to pick some matters they want to learn is good but we must be careful not to trust the inexperience and partially ignorant choices of a young mind.

2) Become a better teacher. The best teachers can find ways to make learning interesting and fun. Also, not everything needs to be learned right away. School is so obsessed with a set schedule for learning, and yet whole societies have survived for hundreds (if not thousands) of years without written language. Another concept to think about is that eventually children will realize their need for reading and math as they face the world (and as long as krutches are not provided for them), and this will give them the necessary natural drive to want to learn those things. Kids also are naturally curious, and so it is a matter of working with that natural curiousity to help get them questioning different topics.

Read up on the relationships between CURRENT illiteracy rates, poverty, disease, birth rates, and other hardships associated with lack of proper education. Now, I am by no means saying our education system is the best, but being able to read, write, and do math, currently, provides many more advantages than not. Now, to the point of the being a better teacher is that the child must either go to the teacher or if he's unwilling to go and you're not willing to make him, then the teacher must be brought to the student and the teacher must provide specifically tailored teaching to each child. And even bringing this teacher to the child is no guarantee that the kid will want to listen or be taught. Then what?

3) Look at the economic impact the students who graduate from the school are making?

So, we switch from grades to money to measure educational success?
And we wait until AFTER the child has become an adult and moved on from school??

Be involved in the school and judge for ourselves whether or not we believe the teaching is effective?

So, parents should be the judges of education success? How do we make sure that the parents are fit to make the decision? And no... just because they are the parents does NOT mean they always know what's best for their child despite this untouchable myth of parenthood.

Right now, schools focus on academics to the detriment of the physical and emotional well-being of students. Schools also offer little in helping students have better relationships with other people.

How much of that is a teacher's job and how much is a parent's job?

How much negative economic impact does each unplanned pregnancy have? Probably a ton, but schools don't bother to factor that in, because college degrees are what makes successful individuals to them.

Factor a pregnancy into education?? I don't see how that is even remotely to what I said about how to measure a successful education. Besides, teenage pregnancy is absolutely linked to lack of proper education and low economic status, which is also related to lack of education.

A lot of educators and educational theorists love to throw around "research-backed" strategies. Unfortunately, what they fail to mention is that the research they talk about fails to take into account the other 90% of important factors in worthwhile learning.

Well, I don't know about any of that but it seems to me that if educational theorists are missing 90% of the picture, you ought to go in and teach them a thing or two. Or perhaps do your own studies, research, and write a few papers on the matter.

I can whip people into doing things and have tasks get done faster, but it doesn't mean it's the best way. Many of the strageties they use simply focus on getting students to perform better. And I know, because I just got out of college to be an educator.

I'm not sure what you're saying, to be honest.

Also, invest in the schools you believe in. A lot of communities have school taxes that help to keep the school going. If we focused our funding into smaller communities supporting their schools based on how much they believed in them, then the schools society didn't agree with would sink under. This would mean that people would have to actually read up on their schools and be engaged with them instead of assuming that a little paper with test scores on it means that the school is actually doing something worthwhile. As it is now, or at least how it was before the recession hit, we had been pumping more and more money into schools, and not really getting more positive results.

Are you saying that parents should donate or invest money into the schools they believe in and stop taxing people for schools?? Are you serious?? This would just make the educational divide between poorer areas and richer areas that much greater!

4) One can simply show students better ways to do things.

As opposed to what? Isn't that what teachers do?

Most people are fairly interested in being smart about their energy usage. People don't want to waste a bunch of time if there is a simpler way out there. As well, it doesn't mean we can't say that a student's answer is wrong. People are often interested in wanting to have the truth in life as well, and so one can work with students to help show them why certain things are right and certain things are wrong. People want life to make sense. Showing them why certain things wouldn't make sense helps them to get a clearer picture, and depending on what you were talking about, they can be thankful that you helped clear up the confusion/miscalculation in the topic that they were dealing with.

Are you saying we don't grade their tests? Or maybe we don't even give them tests to see if they understand what they've been taught?

I'll be honest, I'm really confused as to how a school like this would even operate. It seems your thoughts are a bit scattered and I don't see concrete ideas about how any of this would be implemented. It smells more like idealistic thinking about children and learning. And don't take this the wrong way but I think this may have something to do that you're an educator fresh out of school with idealistic hopes and dreams about what education can be and while I hope you never strive to make education better, I think you might be a bit naive as to the reality of schools. Personally, I remember when I was younger, given the option, I would've never woken up early, gone to school, taken tests, done papers, or any homework. I'm not sure how you imagine kids to be.

 

[Balugon]

1) This misses the opportunity of early learning and early immersion in potential fields of interest. I started eating eggs by the time I was around 26. I love eggs now. I started liking computers by the time I was around 9, if I hadn't gone to school and been forced into the crappy BASIC class when I was younger, I may have learned I liked computers too late for me to have taken advantage of that knowledge and interest. The truth is that kids will many times work against their own best interests, even more often than adults do. That's why we do parenting because we (hopefully) have more knowledge, experience, and developed thinking skills than children and we understand what will benefit them best in the long run. Just like we don't let our kids pick out their all foods, drinks, or how much candy they can eat, we should not allow our kids how much and what they can learn, all the time. Like on everything else, I think there's a happy medium but your and his suggestions aren't it. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. I think opening up the curricula to allow for children to pick some matters they want to learn is good but we must be careful not to trust the inexperience and partially ignorant choices of a young mind.


2) Read up on the relationships between CURRENT illiteracy rates, poverty, disease, birth rates, and other hardships associated with lack of proper education. Now, I am by no means saying our education system is the best, but being able to read, write, and do math, currently, provides many more advantages than not. Now, to the point of the being a better teacher is that the child must either go to the teacher or if he's unwilling to go and you're not willing to make him, then the teacher must be brought to the student and the teacher must provide specifically tailored teaching to each child. And even bringing this teacher to the child is no guarantee that the kid will want to listen or be taught. Then what?


3) So, we switch from grades to money to measure educational success?
And we wait until AFTER the child has become an adult and moved on from school??


4) So, parents should be the judges of education success? How do we make sure that the parents are fit to make the decision? And no... just because they are the parents does NOT mean they always know what's best for their child despite this untouchable myth of parenthood.


5) How much of that is a teacher's job and how much is a parent's job?


6) Factor a pregnancy into education?? I don't see how that is even remotely to what I said about how to measure a successful education. Besides, teenage pregnancy is absolutely linked to lack of proper education and low economic status, which is also related to lack of education.


7) Well, I don't know about any of that but it seems to me that if educational theorists are missing 90% of the picture, you ought to go in and teach them a thing or two. Or perhaps do your own studies, research, and write a few papers on the matter. // I'm not sure what you're saying, to be honest.


8) Are you saying that parents should donate or invest money into the schools they believe in and stop taxing people for schools?? Are you serious?? This would just make the educational divide between poorer areas and richer areas that much greater!


9) Are you saying we don't grade their tests? Or maybe we don't even give them tests to see if they understand what they've been taught?

1) "This misses the opportunity of early learning and early immersion in potential fields of interest. I started eating eggs by the time I was around 26. I love eggs now." - Public schools miss a million possibilities for early learning and early immersion in potential fields of interest. If you're always doing the same exact learning activities and tasks as everyone else, year after year, how are you supposed to find your niche? Not only that, even if a child did find something he liked, in public schools they rush through topics so quickly the teachers don't have time to stop and indulge in any given topic. This severely limits how much children can grow. Some children could be famous artists or poets or dancers before hitting their mid-teen years, but that never happens because they are busy following the formula of school.

2) "Read up on the relationships between CURRENT illiteracy rates, poverty, disease, birth rates, and other hardships associated with lack of proper education." Yes, but correlation doesn't equal causation. A lot of those people are living in ghettos to begin with, which means they don't have safe home lives, they don't have a supportive family, and they may not even be getting adequate nutrition. Not to mention ghetto culture affects those people and often encourages sexual promiscuity anyway. Look at the drop-out rates of typical inner-city schools. School is there, but obviously it isn't fixing the problem. Again, if children are in a school/learning environment for years, one more like the one I'm talking about, they have room to become literate before they graduate and teachers would be able to help encourage that literacy. Also, most people pick up on math needed for life from doing basic life tasks anyway. This means that assuming illiteracy would become a problem is a moot point. Though it merely brings up the detail of adult learning centers. Even if someone was a total dope who chose not to learn to read because he was as blind as a bat to his need to it, if there were adult learning classes in place, this would help take care of the straggling few who chose to come in at the end of things.

3) I thought you were measuring the successfulness of teaching methods? Imo, economic impact is going to be a better indicator than a little sheet of paper that says yes while the national economy is $15 trillion in debt. Paper doesn't mean much if it isn't putting out worthwhile results. The same teaching methods might be in the same school for decades (to some degree), and so that gives time to be able to judge them.

4) It is worth mentioning that we live in a democracy. We should have significant say in how education goes. Clearly the education specialists haven't been getting it right for the past 100 years or so since public schooling has been mandatory across the boards, so why put so much blind faith in people who you have never met? Are we assuming the majority of parents are morons who don't understand the basics of what needs to be learned in order for kids to survive in the world? I doubt most parents want their kids sticking around the house when the kid is over 30 years old. I'm not saying having intellectual advice is bad, but at the same time, these specialists specialize in "doing school." Some of them may have been in school (as a student and/or teacher) for 30 years. If we want significant change, do you really think the people who have their whole lives wrapped up in a framework are really going to be the ones who will be interested in shaking the same framework that they stand on? I'm not saying all their advice would be bad, but we need to keep in mind where they come from.

Also, right now educational success isn't defined by whether children learned worthwhile information. It is determined by what % children retained the random facts that we felt like making them learn. We could force children to learn to dig holes for posts and test them on it and call it "educational success" and it would only be a matter of different information that we were teaching them. I had to try to teach a basic middle school class how to multiply and divide in scientific notation; worthless info. I know that at least in Ohio, if not nationally, kids have to learn about different minerals- information that should be completely optional because it isn't necessary for basic life. And I'm not sure if the "5 paragraph essay" format is still used for certain grades, but again, a horrible setup. How often do people simply sit down and set themselves to write 5 paragraphs, no more, no less? A lot of information could probably be yanked from the national curriculum and society still have 100% successful adults, but our current curriculum is what our "educational success" is based on. This comes from our "educational specialists." Obviously, they aren't as intelligent as they appear to be. A Ph.D. doesn't necessarily make one useful.

5) Emotional and relational skills are used everyday. Chemistry and talking about the Civil War are not. Therefore, if we are going to have worthwhile education, we should at least be training kids in the most worthwhile abilities. Seeing as how school insists on taking up almost all of a child's day, it should be the job of teachers to teach emotional and relational skills (I'm not implying taking parents out of the picture.) And not out of context, I might add, because school loves to put things in boxes; as if those "Don't hurt other people's feelings" posters ever did any good.

Also, I believe in whole child education. People don't function in "it's math time now; it's lunch time now; it's caring time now" fashion. We are whole individuals- our emotions, thought life and interests, and physical needs all affect the rest of our being, and are often going all at the same time. It shouldn't be "how do we divide this up?" It should be "how do we share responsibility for the child in our care without stepping on each other's toes inappropriately?"

6) I was linking pregnancy to a successful education because it can destroy the usefulness of a lot of that sucessful education, therefore making it a waste. Also, an unwanted pregnancy could hinder further education, which causes more problems as well.

And you assume that the setup of school, as dull and monotonous as it is, isn't contributing to pregnancy rates at all? Kids have to find pleasure somehow. If school sucks, sex looks all the more enticing.

7) There are already people working on it. And as for what I was talking about, I was saying that the "research-backed" teaching methods that a lot of teachers use are only focused on getting better test scores and grades. Their research doesn't bother to study the impact their methods are having on the rest of the child (beyond mental comprehension of the data).

8) You assume that no people with money would help out the schools. While stopping taxing for education right now would be a horrible idea, because alternative (and better) schools aren't in existence enough to handle the student load that would come in, it doesn't mean community schools wouldn't work. Like I said, schools that know what they are doing would have methods to raise funds to help keep the school going, and sometimes generous donors would come along.

Don't forget that right now you pay people to estentially be school politicians. District superintendants, assistant principals, the other random extra people that may not always be contributing much of anything to a school. On top of that, you also pay for all those tenured teachers who could give a rat's butt less about the students. You pay for standardized test makers and textbook producers. As if the money being sucked out of your wallet now is being used wisely.

Don't assume a system couldn't work just because you haven't seen it in action yet.

Not to mention that the rich already send their kids to special schools and the poor are stuck in ghetto schools anyway.

9) I'm not saying we can't help a student see where they went wrong and went right, but grading a test, putting a letter grade on it as part of a system of determining who the losers are and who the supposedly smart people are, is damaging to students. Tests can make great learning tools, but some teachers don't even bother to go back and go over the material after the test is done and the results of what the students missed comes in. Tests should be made and used to help students learn. Tests shouldn't be the end goal of learning (academically), because academic knowledge is supposed to help students become better thinkers. Making tests the end goal of learning simply gets students focused on performance, as if knowing the date George Washington did some feat is of any significant importance, which it isn't. So tests can be useful in the right contexts, but throwing letter grades on there, using them as "final says" in determining what a child knows, or using them in high stakes testing can be damaging and not useful.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

My educational philosophy is study, say clever things. Hopefully then I wont make so many dumb mistakes.

 

[Daniel25]

The issues with public school:

1. need a way for teachers to progress in their career other than becoming administers. Otherwise you end up with middle schools with 3 vice-principals, 2 deans, a IT director, etc.

2. Where there is a systematic failure of mathematics/reading in public schools, its mostly in areas with a lot of "diversity". Like in inner city schools, when 90% of the students or more are "diverse". And I seriously doubt whatever hippie tosh this guy is hawking is gonna roll very well against diversity.

3. The endemic failure of all public schools is in inculcating a consistant and virituous moral outlook.

 

[acropolis]

Educational reform is tricky, since it's difficult to agree on the correct means when the desired outcome is still so contentious.

My personal experience with 'alternative' schools during my early teens pretty clearly illustrated to me that on some level it is necessary to compel students to learn certain topics or else they'll simply remain ignorant. Not every kid is going to want to learn that which is true and useful. They may prefer whatever comforting and simple lie they already know, or to remain ignorant.