Free mandatory universal education is self-defeating

Great Debates
41

Yep. And that’s exactly the point: 80% of the dropouts would go to work at Walmart/McD’s for a week, a month or a year, and suddenly find motivation to learn a useful skill.

So you have some schools for the kids who are willing/able to do real academic work, and others for kids just trying to do the minimum they can to get a decent job. Heck, we can have Ruminator’s IDWTBIS schools, too, as well as a dozen other kinds, depending on what local needs/preferences are. Of course, the vast majority of parents wouldn’t let their kids drop out; but the responsibility for junior being in school has to be primarily on mom, not on the teacher.

And we stop trying to pretend that kids are all the same, and feeding them all through the same system at the same time as if they were widgets. We stop using educators as prison guards and babysitters.

For all of human history, teenagers have been expected to begin making adult choices. Some of them choose badly, but I know plenty of 40-year-olds who make horrible life choices. I don’t see the advantages of perpetual adolescence.

42

How about adolescence being adolescence though? You know, just for the length of adolescence. Which is not usually quite over at 14.

43

The OP brings up some good points, and all are debateable.

Should illegal immigrants get education? On the surface this is easy. No, you don’t reward people for illegal behaviour. BUT how can you deny to a child something that isn’t his fault. Almost all children who are illegal immigrants are here with their parents or relatives. A child can’t say “OK Daddy, you go to the USA, I’ll stay in Mexico 'cause I don’t want to do wrong.”

So why should the child suffer 'cause the parents are doing something wrong? So there is the first debate.

On the question of supplies, this really should focus on, do you need all this fancy stuff to teach a solid education. The answer is no. I got a great education, graduated from one of the best universities in the nation. I never even used a calculator till college.

Children who don’t have a grasp of math and can’t read or write well enough to fill out a job application, are not going to be helped by computers and other material items.

In my day supplies were not given, they were issued. For instance, in kindergarten and 1st grade, we had pencil monitors. They were given 20 and passed them out. Then collected them when the exercise was done. (This also helped up learn to count).

So a give and take policy for supplies would help this. It wouldn’t end it but it would make it alot easier to hold students abusing supplies to be held accountable.

The other issue is allowing kids to leave school early. I agree a HS diploma is meaningless. As most of you know I’ve been looking for work and I’ve participated in a lot of state programs that are supposed to help you look for work or find it.

I can’t tell you the number of people who can’t read or write well enough to fill out a job application. And they GRADUATED high school. They don’t understand what words on a job application mean. How is it possible for you to get through high school and not be able to do this?

If high school is supposed to prepare you for life and you can’t fill in a simple job applications from McDonalds, you have no hope.

I agree some kids who don’t want to be in school, shouldn’t be, but it doesn’t mean to abandon them. A 13 or 14 year old who doesn’t want to finish school and is doing everything in his/her power to stay away, shouldn’t be allowed to quit. A child that young isn’t mature enough to decide that.

Instead there should be vocational training. OK you don’t want to go to school, fine then train him for a job. Bring back the old apprenticeship. I’m not saying the student won’t need skills, but a general high school course may be too broad and discouraging or uninteresting to a child. A focused career path may help him more.

44

Sorry, nitpick: that “best university” forgot to teach you that alot is not a word. You can have a cup of something, or a gallon, or a lot…but not alot.

45

When did you start using those fancy printing-press-printed books, or those highfalutin ball-point pens, or even those snazzy newfangled pencils with the lead embedded right into the wood? Five hundred years ago the best minds int he world got a great education without any of those things.

But the thing is, the world changes. And the needs of students change along with the world. When practically everyone carries a calculator in their pockets (in the form of a phone app), it’d be disgraceful for me not to teach kids how to use it. Back when you were in school, calculators might have been spendy, fancy instruments. They are no longer spendy, nor are they fancy. They’re a tool, just like a printed book is a tool, or a pencil is a tool.

We need to teach kids to use the tools of their world.

46

Let’s look at this from a global perspective. How can America stay competitive on the global market?

I can promise you, it’s not by letting our kids drop out of school. It’s rare for me to praise China’s education system, but one thing you can say is they certainly aren’t encouraging people to drop out! Indeed, we are seeing that countries like India can transform their economy pretty much through education alone.

There may be problems, and there is room for a lot of change, but the solution you are proposing just isn’t the answer. It’s a step backwards, not a step forward.

47

Maybe not encouraging, but it is only compulsory to age 15. Only a few are able to get into the High Schools, more go to vocational school, and some don’t continue with education. Getting into college is very competitive and only for a very select few.

48

You’re taking a particular observation and confusing it as the cause. China and India’s culture intrinsically values scholarship and the education system you see is a byproduct of that. The well-meaning folks here in the USA mistakenly think you can retrofit a mandatory education system and get the same effect. It doesn’t work like that. Why do we continue to think in a backwards manner?

How and where do we generate this cultural respect for education? I don’t really know. Maybe if a summer blockbuster movie is released showing the superhero using trigonometry to save the world instead of biceps and kung fu. Maybe if we saw the President of the USA diffuse a missile crises with Shakespeare quotes. Seriously, I don’t know exactly what interesting scenario would trigger deep respect for education; I do know it won’t happen inside the school. That’s the wrong place to look.

We can think of more creative ways of “educating” the kids. Just because kids pull out of a traditional high school curriculum doesn’t mean they would instantly stop learning. We could have apprenticeships, or trades. They could join some volunteer organization. They could go work with their parents. The Ultimate Answer doesn’t have to be limited to the confines of high school. If we’re “graduating” kids that can’t read and write at a functional level, then why keep fooling ourselves? Just stick the damn HS diploma in his diaper when he’s born and be done with it. Instead, we stretch out the charade until he’s 18 years old.

I think the USA does a fairly decent job for the elementary school curriculum. Basic arithmetic, reading & writing. We seem to have mastered the art of getting young children to write in cursive letters, add 2+2, and repeat “see Spot run.” The high school curriculum on the other hand, is near worthless for the students that don’t proceed to college. The age of 13 or 14 (roughly the start of high school) seems to be the threshold where you can work with kids that are not motivated. High school is also the period where the aggregate of subjects being taught surpass the knowledge of the typical teacher. It’s a ludicrous hypocrisy when the teachers themselves can’t pass the basic skills tests the students are expected to know.

49

They are building schools like it’s going out of style, and doing a surprisingly decent job of reaching people despite the extreme poverty and remoteness that persists in China. I had a student that lived in a dirt-poor pigs-in-the-living-room mud-floored-bedroom village a four hour walk from the nearest road across mountainous land that even a bicycle couldn’t handle. But there she was- in a relatively modern university.

China’s investment in education is huge. Even remote schools often have much better facilities than their American counterparts. University is so popular that there are millions of college graduates that cannot get scarce university-level jobs…but people are going anyway. Masters degrees are the new rage- I have nothing good to say about the quality of Chinese post-graduate degrees, but a whole lot of of people are getting them.

All of this in a country with a GDP per Capita of around $3,500 compared to the US’s $50,000. They can do what they do with their education despite still being very poor.

Trust me, I’m the last one to be an apologist for the Chinese education system, but I can say their commitment is clear. They recognize that education is essential for economic development.

50

This is so completely, provably wrong. Just tossing technology at students isn’t the solution, but when you incorporate it into your curriculum, you make your lessons relevant to your students. Just hop on google scholar and search for technology and reading and math scores.

51

I agree with most of the points. Coercing people to attend school is not effective. American HS policy seems to center around having students behave like perpetual children-there is no expectation that these kids wil ever grow up.
I would like to see expulsion used more often-the troublemakers will get the message. It is simply not worth keeping these people inschool-they disrupt the learning process and ruin the environment for those who want to learn.

52

I’ve taught the super-rich (as in, one day, a reality show was being filmed on campus centered around one of our students, due to his celebrity) and I’ve taught the super-poor (as in, many, many of my students are homeless, and many, many of them are convicts in halfway houses.)

It’s the super-rich who are much more likely to say “someone should give me ___”. The super-poor are simply amazed that anyone would give them the time of day. The super-rich think they own the world.

53

The system I prefer is one we have in OZ. All students pay for text books, most stationary, excursions etc etc. But if you earn under a certain amount the parents get a tax refund on a certain amount, now I get no such break but for poor kids it is a good system. Also includes uniforms.

Whilst I wich I did not pay as much taxes as I do, it is for the kids’ benefit.

54

Just a comment on the issue of “technology” (meaning computers, laptops, Ipads, etc…) in schools.

The idea that if we don’t expose young children to these tools, they will somehow fall behind forever is nonsense. I never touched a computer until college (1st time around when I was in my early 20s) and I picked it up just fine.

And given the way in which young children learn, sitting in front of computers as opposed to interacting with people and objects and events in the “real world” is, imo, counterproductive.

It’s sort of like arguing that unless we start kids out driving in kindergarten, they will never be able to learn to drive.

My current pet peeve is that my daughter’s elementary school is raising money and allocating other funds to purchase IPads (I believe that’s what the gadget is) for all the classrooms.

I wouldn’t mind except that this year, due to “funding cuts”, P.E. has been eliminated (along with the job of a very popular teacher), field trips have been scaled way back and 8 furlow days have been subtracted from the school year.

WHY, exactly, do we need these gadgets? :dubious:

55

I think eventually we have to admit there is a limit to what we can expect teachers to overcome.

Students who have been abused or have mental disorders which cause them to be overwhelmingly disruptive need help that teachers in a large classroom setting cannot be expected to provide.

When you have a subset of students pushing over desks, screaming, destroying supplies, and harming other students, they need to be elsewhere so that the rest of the students can learn.

But schools are often simply not equipped to send them elsewhere. There is nowhere else. There is no money to pay for somewhere else.

They aren’t even allowed to diagnose obvious problems, because they don’t have the money to deal with them.

56

Not at all. Rather, it’s like arguing that students should be exposed to another popular technology, books, from a young age, and should be steeped in their conventions and use so that they can have these skills as second-nature when they’re older and can use them as tools rather than having to learn their conventions then.

That said, I agree that iPads are far less important than PE.

57

Well road safety lessons start at kinder here. So whilst driving is a few years away you can lay the groundwork for future educational outcomes.

58

I agree with the spirit of what you say, but I wonder if the real effect of the OP’s proposals would be to reduce dropouts, overall. A lot of those 14-year-olds who give life outside school a shot might well return to education with a whole new perspective and a work ethic like you wouldn’t believe. Any school would have a scattering of “returnees” who used to be the cool kids, the bad kids, the PITA kids, and they would spread horror stories about the world outside.

59

I think it take a particularly middle class kid to think that life on the outside on the bottom is all that rosy.

When you’ve grown up knowing that you will probably run out of food and might lose power a couple days before payday, you realize how tough it is out there from a damn young age. Broke families have none of this “Now, you kids don’t worry about money” business. They see their parents not making it every day. I’d venture that more actual poor kids who are dropping out are dropping out to help support their own family, which they know darn well is suffering trying to make ends meet.

60

I would suggest that more poor kids are dropping out because their classes were ruined by disturbed students in need of professional psychiatric attention.

If there was a way to get those students out of the class, the dropout rate could plummet among the rest of the students.