I just look at the morons they let teach. I can’t believe the things that I have heard come out of teachers mouths. I’d be surprised if 1 out of 2 teachers could explain why we have seasons, two tides a day, or the difference between absence of gravity and being in free fall.
I know one teacher who can’t spell simple words like “finish”, “cocoa”, and “menus” and another who thinks that there is a physical difference that prevents Japanese kids from pronouncing "R"s.
For the most part, the larger the political entity the better things are run. Compare the Federal highway system with local roads, or the FBI to local police forces, or national Parks with State parks.
It’s the states and local governments that are pushing creationism on kids.
There’s at least two ways in which the American education system has completely screwed up the teaching of handwriting:
by instituting the D’Nealian script, which is just about the worst conceivable script as a matter of practicality as well as aesthetics. It’s difficult for children to master and it’s ucking fugly.
by diving up the idea of handwriting into “printing” and “cursive.” As the Europeans in this thread have testified, the way to do this is simply to teach “handwriting,” period. Best a simple and attractive italic script. Studies have shown that the “ball-and-stick” style printing taught in the United States itself makes learning difficult. Go straight to ovals and slanted lines.
The professional writers I have heard who advocate writing by hand say that slowing you down is a feature, not a bug, of good writing.
The studies I know of contrast writing by hand with typing and find that learning, memory, etc., is much better with the former.
I listen to NPR practically every waking moment of my life.
Actually, the failure of the United States to nationalize educational standards has handicapped us economically, competitively, educationally, etc. The idea of setting standards for education at the easily corruptible and nearly always ignorant local level is idiotic.
You’d have a hard time supporting this myth with anything other than, “they say.” Standards is not the problem. Otherwise, how did we rise to the top of the heap in the absence of them? If there’s a problem in schools, it’s not curriculum. It’s a matter of instruction and that’s primarily related to your other point: schools no longer hire the best college grads. First of all, women - the college grads who used to be the main component of the teaching workforce - can get much higher paying jobs almost anywhere else. Of course, the same is true for men, and now, if a man wants to become a teacher, he’s also burdened with the assumption that he’s some sort of pedophile.
And schools of education do a terrible job of screening candidates for the profession. Applicants can get into many colleges of ed if they own matching socks. And once they’re in, they rarely get counseled out if they’re not good teaching material. So you have many poorly educated people getting jobs they’re not suited for, and many of them do it poorly. Add to that the ridiculous and oppressive mandates that take any initiative, creativity, and personal motivation out of the hands of teachers, (and who would even want to be a teacher under today’s circumstances of lack of regard and lack of respect?) and you have a system that works fairly well in communities where there’s substantial wealth, but in the rest of the country it sucks.
Your first point is what I think the major problem is, and the latter is the final nail in the coffin. Those people who are motivated enough to teach despite the mediocre pay are driven out by the mind numbing “system”.
I don’t think that having standards, national or otherwise, precludes creativity and initiative, but there is something about our current educational system that removes any sort of judgement. The stupid zero-tolerance rules are a great example. A teenage girl giving her friend a Midol is not the same as selling dope in the hallway.
Too me, a good standard for 4th grade might be something like knowing what the solar system is, that the sun is just another star, that the planets range in size, density and composition, that the furthest planet is much, much closer than the nearest star, the moon orbits earth (no nitpicking please), what causes tides, and what causes seasons.
Instead we probably expect kids to memorize all the names of the planets, their closeness to the sun, and their size from smallest to biggest. But that is not the important stuff that lets one “understand” how things work.
