I'm against standardized education

Great Debates
1

Ok, so I’ve seen a lot of arguments about the seperation of church and state, and what this has led me to is what I see as the fundamental issue, state indoctrination. I do not believe we should have state indoctrination. We should not be going with the standards based system we’ve been working with for so long.

I wouldn’t remove Under God from the pledge, I’d remove compelled speech from my student’s curriculum. I don’t care whether or not it says anything about God on our money personally, and there is a lot more religious iconography on our money than just “In God we Trust”.

One of the issues I’ve had with seperation of church and state arguments is that it leaves out one of the fundamental aspects of religion, and that is the forming of consciousness. Any attempt at forming the consciousness by a centralized group authority is religious in nature, and should not be a state function. I think that this is the fundamental process of religion. I know a lot of people like to think of themselves as areligious, but everyone is indoctrinated into something, and makes attempts to indoctrinate others.

I believe that a seperation of church and state is a good thing. “IE not respecting one church over another.”, I think a seperation of religion and state is an oxymoron, and that Liberal Democracy and Secularism are the state religion in this country, it’s simply unavoidable. In a sufficiently powerful secular state the government becomes the religion, thus the essence of patriotism.

So, this one is a two parter I suppose, because I want to argue whether or not you believe that state indoctrination is religious in nature, and I also want to propose a scenario.

Scenario: We have completely eliminated state run education. How do we as a society educate our children. Remembering that at this point we DO have the internet.

Erek

2

With a large percentage of people not believing in evolution, I am deathly afraid of doing away with public education. I would be more in favor of doing away with private education. I am afraid of large segments of the population being educated in their religion and not in science.
Not that most private schools are bad, but maybe everyone should be taught a national curriculum.

Jim

3

I’m not 100% sure I understand what you’re trying to say; are you saying that we should try not to indoctrinate our children into being citizens of a liberal democracy?

I don’t have a problem with some kind of national standards in education. Even if it is indoctrinating, I would prefer kids in our public schools to be taught certain core American “values” (a word that sets off alarm bells, I know). To me those values would include being taught the values (and responsibilities) of democracy, tolerance, “life, libery, and the pursuit of happiness,” along with enough critical thinking skills that the “indoctrination” wouldn’t become brain-washing.

4

What the heck are you talking about? What element of education is “compelled speech” and how does this have anything to do with separation of church and state?

5

So far as I know the Feds don’t run the educational system in this country and even within our states the boards of education are controlled by the voters within the district.

Without some sort of cohesive thought that bonds people together you won’t have a state for very long.

So every ideology is a religion? You might want to define religion for us.

First, not everyone has access to the internet. Second, many students might require an actual instructor to assist them in learning. A qualified instructor.

Marc

6

You can’t force people to know things though. Evolution is a part of the consciousness, it’s a meme that infects pop culture, and is a major cultural influence right about now. Every other rave these days is called “Evolve”. I’m not worried about people learning evolution. It would probably be better if we abolished education, and didn’t give the people who don’t believe in evolution the chance to teach our kids. I am more concerned that the government didn’t teach me about the shredding that Lincoln gave the constitution, and don’t really want the schools to get ahold of my kids political educations. There are A LOT of things the schools don’t teach, I think evolution is one of the least important parts of this debate. It’s a solved issue as far as I am concerned, people will believe it or not, the fact that it is true speaks for itself and needs no proponents, as long as there is a wikipedia article about it, we’re golden.

Erek

7

So what horrible indoctrination is being done to our kids in publice school?

8

Education isn’t designed to teach patriotism. It is just memorization of facts, learning the three Rs (even though only one of those begins with an R), and learning a variety of facts about the world’s history and your countries history.

However if you totally kicked the state out of the situation you’d still need to teach people how to read, write, do math, type, and probably a bunch of other skills I take for granted today but learned in school as well as a variety of subjects they’d need in life like english and grammar. I don’t know if a person truly needs alot of what they learn in school. People seem like they’d be better off learning how to communicate and problem solve than learning the basics of history. But a nation w/o things like history or social studies wouldn’t be something I’d want either.

If you wanted some kind of outside of school situation where they taught more useful skills (interpersonal communication, problem solving, positive psychology, home economics, budgeting) I’d be all for that but I can see why someone would be wary of the state mandating that people learn those things. But at the end of the day its better to know them than not to know them.

9

I’m shocked by the level of standardization in the schools.
I assumed teachers had some latitude, but I’ve learned that every English teacher in the state teaches the exact same Shakespearean play for each specific year of high school.
Why on earth do something this severe? Are there really exactly 4 plays worthy of reading?

10

Entirely disagree. It’s a lot more than that. It’s about giving you the skills, concrete and less so, that you need to function as part of society. Rote learning of facts is perhaps the least important part. Learning doesn’t just take place in the classroom either - there’s a lot of important stuff about communications and human relations learnt in the playground.

Aren’t English, literature, foriegn language and many other subjects attempts to teach communication? Aren’t maths and science classes attempts to teach problem solving?

11

Have you been to countries where education is not free and manditory?

Lots of little kid waiters. Why learn if you are just going to work a trade all your life, right?

It’s an ugly scene.

12

I know. A society where kids are homeschooled and never socialize would be sucky. But the current situation which usually involves alot of bullying and desperate attempts to conform is pretty sad as well.

No, I mean how to communicate unpleasant truths, or how to communicate your true intentions, or how to communicate feelings by being assertive instead of being aggressive or a doormat. But schools teaching that would be kindof weird.

Math and science don’t really teach problem solving in my view. I would need to see evidence that learning math will help a person deal with real life setbacks. The two may be unrelated.

13

Can you expand on this? Preferrably defining what you consider religion, indoctrination and consciousness.

Did you take AP US History?

14

As you might have guessed, I always managed to work a little assertiveness training into my lesson plans for the year. My students loved it and then proceeded to use the broken record technique to my disadvantage! :smack:

15

Strongly disagree.

A brief look at my oldest child’s text book in Norwegian (primarily meant to teach reading) yields the story “Fatima and 17th May”, which is an obvious, blatant attempt at indoctrination. It’s clearly meant to teach appreciation of the freedoms that our constitution gives us (17th May is constitution day), understanding of the fact that some countries have far less freedom of (among other things) expression than we have here (with the clear subtext that freedom of expression is a Very Good Thing), as well as tolerance towards people from different cultures and understanding of the fact that some who come here from other countries do so to escape oppression.

Clear indoctrination without religion, unless you use a very non-standard definition of religion.

Strongly disagree here too. As Rodgers01 said, it’s a good thing when children are taught core values of a society. For instance the values given in my example above.

Now I, as a parent, may not agree with all those core values. It is, of course, my right to teach my children my view of Life, the Universe and Everything. But IMO this right does not extend to a right to prevent the children from also being exposed to other views. Parents’ rights here do not trump society’s legitimate interest that all citizens are at the very least exposed to its core values. Neither do parents’ rights trump the children’s right to learn about a broad set of views.

16

I’m a little sad that no one stretched their imagination to tackle the second part of the debate, and I hope some people would try and weigh in on some creative solutions to a nation without standardized education.

I don’t think saying “Not everyone has the internet” is a valid concern. It would be really easy to get internet access to every person in this nation within a decade. PCs are going to be sub-100 dollars and there are non-profits that rebuild computers and give them to the poor. New Orleans is setting up a free WiFi system over the whole city that is 512k now, but will be scaled to 128k so as not to compete with corporate systems. So when everyone is running on 30mbit fiber to the premises, I believe the government could be setting up these less robust free connections and make them available to everyone. This is why I don’t think the “Not everyone has the internet” argument is valid, as we just left the first stage of internet development, and in about ten years internet saturation is nearly ubiquitous.

See there is a bit of cognitive dissonance on religion here in our secular democracy. People who are pro-secularism don’t understand why religious people want to affect secular institutions, and that’s because the religious do not seperate religion from every aspect of their lives, and there is kind of a secular attitude that people should adopt some schizophrenic philosophy where religion is in one part of people’s lives but not in another. Religion doesn’t work that way. At the core, religion is designed to affect the patterning of a person’s consciousness, indoctrination being a fundamental part of religion. So secularism might not be a religion in the traditional sense, but as it comes into conflict with religion, it replaces many of the roles that religion was previously providing, therefore becomes largely indistinguishable from religion. Basically if a secular institution replaces the function of a religious one then it begins to fulfill the function of a religion, and for all intents and purposes becomes one. The state asks for the same devotion as does a centralized church.

I do not believe that the state educational system is teaching people as well as a lot of people here seem to believe. The quality of education depends upon the class that one is from. My friends who grew up in Westchester New York got a far better education than I did growing up in Los Lunas New Mexico. I think the education system is more hopelessly obsolete than people realize. There are kids who are growing up with the internet who are learning at such a rapid pace that I find people over 35 don’t understand quite often.

In growing up I have found that the state curricula is not even accurate, I’ve found that I was mislead by the government institution that is supposed to be teaching me. This is partly because of the political will that goes into the creation of those standards and partially because of unqualified teachers, but from what I can tell it’s only getting worse, not better. I do not believe standardized education is good for children as children have their own unique learning process that is completely swept under the rug and forgotten about.

We hear constant stories of administrations overturning the disciplinary actions of coaches who discipline student athletes for not meeting academic requirements. Schools have turned into basically prisons to house youth in the poorer areas. My school had multiple fights every day, a kid in one of my classes got shot in the parking lot, and another kid a few grades up from me got kicked to death over a girl by his best friend. I was encouraged not to take the SAT because schools in New Mexico didn’t require the SAT, only the ACT. I didn’t end up going to college, but this was the advice I got.

Regardless, I won’t be sending my kids to public school, and home schooling isn’t the singular only option otherwise. So if you have some creative solutions to education outside of a state indoctrinating system, I’d love to hear them.

What about setting up foundations to pay teachers to teach like they did in the old days? Also, what about a radical way to revamp schools? I am against standardized methods across the board, but I am not necessarily against tax money funding educational initiatives.

Erek

17

What are the core values that we want people to be taught? I don’t think that the state is doing a very good job of teaching kids about constitutional law. I’d consider that a pretty core value.

So I’m going to assert that the state is failing on teaching kids the core values. Do you believe that the state is succeeding? I believe the state is pumping out workers, not citizens. If the school system helped introduce kids to the political process then I’d most definitely, and how they can interface with it, beyond voting, then perhaps I’d agree that it was teaching core values, but it doesn’t accomplish that. So what core values is it accomplishing in teaching other than obedience to the state(church).

Also compelled speech is making kids say the pledge of allegiance. Under God is irrelevant, they shouldn’t take out under god from the pledge, they should remove the pledge entirely.

Erek

18

What roles does secularism fill instead of religion?

19

The formation of an individual’s thought structure.

Erek

20

What exactly do you want to use the internet for? Computer Assisted Instruction is nothing new - I was a user of the PLATO system for CAI 30 years ago, which had many of the features the net does today (instant messaging, email, news groups, shared lessons, everything but spam.) Yet it never caught on. There are colleges that support classes by video. Good for those who can’t get to a class (mostly people who are working) but people who have taken them don’t find them very satisfactory. MIT is putting its entire course data on the web, but I assure you reading it is not substitute for going there. No matter how good our bandwidth is today, it is no match for direct teacher-student interaction. Maybe when we get perfect virtualization… I have been in many video conferences, and they are no match for face-to-face meetings.

Are you talking about individual, home instruction of private schools? All the nasty stuff that goes on in public schools goes on in private schools also. When you get 20 or 30 kids together, you get cliques. I think it is part of our evolutionary heritage. I went to one of the best high schools in New York, and we had fights and a shooting also. I still got a great education there, but that was when there was enough money.

One of the strengths of the US has been the integration of immigrants from throughout the world. I think my grandparents from Russia who got here at the end of the 19th century did much better being “indoctrinated” into becoming Americans by going to public school. History books today are a lot more open about our past failings than they were in my day, at least until I got into AP History in high school where we read Morrison and Commager. Alan Steele Commager was not exactly an apologist for America’s sins! We don’t want to neglect the good stuff America has done, though.

I assume this discussion is not about how schools can do better, but whether public schools are good at all, right?

Finally, by standardized do you mean government run schools or government mandated curricula? Even private and home schooled kids have to demonstrate mastery of a set of information. I hope you don’t object to that.