Huh? Secularism is the principle that religion and religious values shouldn’t dictate the actions of government or other social institutions. The point is to not influence thought structures etc by imposing a religious set of values on all.
Are you perhaps thinking of something like atheism or agnosticism?
See that’s the fundamental misunderstanding. It’s impossible to NOT influence someone’s thought structures when you teach them. It’s why fundamentalists are so against secularism, they see it as being in opposition to their religion, which makes it a religious structure in and of itself whether or not it is a religion. Look at the way we teach people obedience to the state, unthinking obedience in a lot of cases. Critical thinking skills are put after rote learning of certain facts, and the Pledge of Allegiance violates the first amendment, but we treat children as though they have no constitutional protections, so it does not matter. That is indoctrination into a particular thought pattern, which violates some of the tenets of people’s religions, and thus supports one structure of ethics over another, which in the end is what a religion is, it’s a structure of ethics and dogma.
Voyager I am against a state mandated curricula. I am taking a strict extremist view, and this is an internet message board, not a policy making body, so using my statements as an extreme point explain how you think schools should be revamped starting from a zero point of a lack of state mandated curricula. You can include state participation if you like as part of the whole operation.
If I were going to go with the state indoctrination approach, I’d make certain that High School students were given an opportunity to know their local elected officials, like who represents their district in congress, and who their sheriff is, bring the mayor in to talk to the students at least once every quarter in a smaller town, I realize that in a city like New York that’s a prohibitive action, but I’d engage them much more than we engage them now.
Look at how many people are convinced that the bipartisan system is a good thing. I am fairly convinced it’s not a good thing, but the indoctrination people have received has shown them ‘the system works this way, it works no other way.’ and I think there’s a lot that could be done to change it. We’ve got a too centralized approach, and need a more community oriented approach.
I wasn’t advocating giving someone the internet and saying “Go learn in a vacuum”. I think it is possible to teach students without the state, it was done that way for thousands of years, we’ve only had state education for 150 years in this country roughly. The internet can replace text books which are expensive and ineffective. Sure we need pedagogy, I’m not denying that, but I am looking for alternatives.
What I am looking for is a ground up look at education. How would you design education if there were no education system in place, not how you would change the one we currently have.
Erek
Thanks for making that clear. Now, would you want to eliminate all curricula, including stuff like math, or only the stuff like social studies which could be viewed as indoctrination. Let’s not worry about whether indoctrination is good or not. How about science and English? In other words, is it reasonable to require that all kids who get a diploma have at least some degree of common knowledge?
That sounds like a great idea, and if I were an elected official I would want to speak in school assemblies at the very least.
Do you mean two party system? Bipartisan doesn’t mean that. If so, I agree that social studies classes should cover political systems throughout the world, including multi-party systems, Parliamentary systems, and even how dictatorships work. Today I don’t think they do a very good job even on ours. Someone graduating should know the plusses and minuses of all these systems, including ours.
I didn’t think you were. CAI systems have lesson plans and the whole works, and certainly don’t put a kid in front of a computer and tell him to learn. Of course we need to teach internet search skills, in the same way that I learned how to look things up in an encyclopedia and in the NY Times Index when I was in school.
By replacing text books, do you mean delivering them in a different form, like on a CD to save money? That is going to happen, I’m sure. But a lot of the cost of a textbook is the planning, writing, and editing of it. (My wife is writing part of a biology text). I suppose you can automate the delivery of the text in some way, but it is not clear how effective that would be. In 7th grade I had a programmed learning grammar book called English 2600, which could have been trivially computerized. It was a disaster - I don’t think any of us (and we were the SP class) learned much grammar. I would have been much better off with a traditional text. Many problems with texts are political, or stem from dumbing down. A lot of the history texts my kids used were miserable, just presenting lumps of facts without a coherent narrative. My older daughter got a good comprensive non-textbook history, read it, and did great on the AP test. My AP history text wasn’t really a text in the traditional sense, and all of us who read it did fine. It was a book I would read for pleasure, but I’m in awe of Samuel Eliot Morrison.
Anyhow, it is useful to separate the curricula and the means for delivering it. Since there are so many independent school districts now, the means of delivery is not standardized.
Now that’s a good question!
I would implement a tutor system. Have enough room in schools so kids can study by themselves when necessary, and with others at times. Have the tutor meet with the kids, alone, at least once a day. The tutor should make sure that the kid learns what needs to be learned, but let the kid do it at his own pace and in whatever order works best. keep it in a school setting so there is socialization and access to labs and libraries.
The educational theory in my district is that the teacher should structure the classroom so that kids don’t get stuck doing busywork that they know already, for instance for spelling, give a test, and let the kids who know all the words off the hook for the drill and practice spelling homework. It doesn’t happen all that often, but that’s the theory. Tutoring is the ultimate expression of this.
No district will ever have the resources to implement it, though. Mass production is cheaper, though the product is of lower quality.
Religion is merely a part of that process and I would wager that for the majority of people it is a small part of the equation. It seems as though that the 167 hours a week that most people spend out of church have a greater impact than the hour they spend on Sundays. The values of a persons parents, relatives and close friends shape their thinking much more than their percieved relationship with some supreme being. On top of that probably the most important thing that shapes their thought structure is the experiences that a person accumulates throughout their life. A Tutsi that witnessed the genocide in Rwanda is going to hate Hutu’s no matter what some sacred text says about loving their neighbor.
Certainly religion has a great influence on certain people, the Pope for instances. However, for the majority of people its not what shapes their thought structure. Even for an atheist its not really accurate to say that secular influences replace religion in their forming of thought structure. For one its simply impossible to escape some sort of religion in the world. Besides that fact religion is merely one facet of the formation of an individual and the weight for the various facets differ from person to person.
Religion didn’t replace secularism in the formation of the Pope’s thought process it merely had a much greater affect. Similarily secularism didn’t replace religion in an atheist. They merely have different weights for different individual. Saying something replaced another thing implies that the first thing is there by default or necessary. This is not true in regards to religion forming thought. There is no reason why religion must be involved in forming of a thought process. Our ancestors probably did it for thousands of years and they were able to develop a thought process just fine.
This is factually incorrect. Children have constitutional protections for speech, against cruel and unusual punishment, the right to a trial and many, many other protections.
I have been an educator for over twenty years, in a variety of settings, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is no “pure” education apart from politics. Simply doesn’t exist. You can posit that “every child needs to be instructed in basic arithmetic”, which seems innocuous enough, but I guarantee you there are those who would argue against a specific implementation of such a plan.
Should a representative democracy teach that non-constitutional despotic monarchy is an equally valid choice, and let each generation decide for itself? Education involves a certain amount of indoctrination to a certain viewpoint, especially for the very young. A 5-year-old can’t research citations.
Now, as far as designing a system from the ground up:
Based on my experience, the ideal maximum class size is 8 students. The absolute maximum to ensure that the ratio of time spent actually teaching to the time spent purely on crowd control remains comfortably high is about 12. Higher than that and you’re just trying to keep a lid on things most of the time. Not that there’s a district on earth that would pay for that many teachers (education and politics joined at the hip, as I said), but you can squeeze an astounding amount of curriculum into a limited space of time with a class size like that.
Now let’s suppose there’s no standardized curriculum, at least not beyond the most local level possible. Well, even if you think my class-size esimates are unrealistically low, you need a fairly large number of teachers. And all of these teachers need to be familiar with the community standards of education. So we must have standardized education for the local teachers.
So the town of Springfield, let’s say, sets up a teacher’s college to teach the teachers the educational standards of the town of Springfield. Then one year, there are too many students for too few teachers. Meanwhile, over in Shelbyville, they have the opposite problem. Too many trained teachers for too few students. So Springfield hires a bunch of Shelbyville teachers. Of course the educational standards of the two towns don’t match up exactly, and some standards are antithetical to each other, so Springfield, in order to maintain its own local standards, must pony up the money to send these new teachers to Springfield teacher’s college to get them properly retrained. A few years later, the situations have reversed, and Shelbyville must take the hit.
A few decades of this and the two towns finally decide they’ll both save a lot of money if they just combine teacher colleges and create a compromise set of standards so that teachers can be moved where needed when the need arises. A few more towns find themselves in the same boat, and a broad basic set of standards is created so that there is a pool of teachers who can work in any town in, lets say, the county.
Now the folks a the county seat aren’t happy. Businesses are setting up shop in other counties, and one of the main reasons stated is that they businesses feel the workers in those counties are better educated, so they need to spend less money on training them. So there is pressure to match the standards across counties. That gets expensive, so the poorer counties contact their state reps in Capital City to ask for funding. The reps, realizing that having the standards be high in each county, then businesses will more likely set up shop in this state rather than some other. And so it goes.
Education simply doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Governments have vested interests, financial and otherwise, in the education of their populace, and when they are asked to foot the bill, they will quite reasonably demand some say in what they are paying for.