In the pit I responded to a rant about how much college students annoy their teachers. While I was ranting about how much I hated my college teachers I decided to start a real debate.
Is the 5,000 year old idea of a teacher standing in front of a group of seated students and talking while writing various things with chalk (or other instrument) a hopelessly outmoded way to teach?
Would it be possible to use real human teachers only to teach children basic reading skills and then give them access to a computer with special teaching software and let them learn at their own pace? This special software would have to be very elaborate, but nothing compared to Windows. It would have to use text, still pictures, diagrams, and short video clips to convey every kind of information taught in schools. It would have to be interactive and test the student periodically to insure that they are learning the material and not merely skimming through. After completing the computer final exam for a given course the student can then be given a written exam (different from the one on the computer but on the same material) in front of a proctor (like the SAT’s) to insure that no cheating occured. The grade on this written final would be your grade for the course, if you fail or don’t like your low grade you should be able to go back to the computer program and take the class again with no penalty. Once you have passed the written exams for all the necessary courses you get your diploma.
Subjects like science which require lab instruction will still have labs. There is no substitute for hands on lab experience. In such courses the lecture period will be replaced by this interactive computer program and the student will only have a pre-set amount of time to reach certain points in the program to be able to perform and understand their lab work on time. Once they reach that point they will be able to print out their lab instructions and diagrams and go do the lab at the pre-set time and place.
Other courses which require the student to draw diagrams (such as my electrical engineering courses) will have to be handled specially. The student can draw a diagram on a computer and then e-mail that to a teacher and have him grade the diagram. Computer art courses could also be handled this way. Anything that requires you to draw will have to be graded by a real person. In this same vein, anything which requires you to speak or perform some physical task (like welding) can not be handled solely by computer. I would guess that 95% of all course work, up to and including a bachelor’s degree, could be done without any human teachers.
The computer teaching programs will require a tech-support staff (similar to Windows) to answer questions people have about how the program works. These people will get constant feedback from students and this can be used to correct errors in the program and to make it work better. Over time it should be perfected (it’s not like Civil War History or basic math are changing all that fast, once they get a particular course working right it should be done forever).
The factual data in the program will have to be proof-read better than any textbook I have ever seen to insure no mistakes are taught to children as facts. It will have to rise to the level of the Encyclopedia Britainica in the level of fact checking, but once it’s done, it’s done (most info taught to children doesn’t change much from year to year).
There will also have to be real teachers not only to write the factual data for the computer programs but to answer questions e-mailed to them by students who can’t figure something out on their own. I’m really not sure how many physics teachers per physics student would be required to answer the all the questions.
The advantages of such a system are numerous:
I have seen for myself and read on this message board about how annoying teaching can be, some kids just don’t want to learn and some teachers just plain suck. The savings in terms of human labor and frustration would be immeasurable.
The computer teaching programs can be customized for slow learners, the learning disabled, average learners, and geniuses. Thus, a genius can cruise through the entire course on basic arithmetic in one day, take the written test the next time its offered, and then move on to advanced math. A student can cheat through the computer course by using a hand calculator, the written test won’t allow calculators and will weed out these cheaters. The slow kids can take their time going through every computer tutorial on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division over a period of months and then take the written test a few times before passing it. Along the way no teachers will be driven insane by questions like, “Why is 2+7 equal to 9?, what is 2+8?, what was 2+7 again, I forgot?”.
Once a good way to explain a given concept is found and shown to be effective (by the test results and other feedback) it is done forever. As it stands now, every time a school buys new text books they don’t know if they are getting well written material or some crap an editor threw together over a weekend. I have seen some horrendous textbooks, so don’t tell me the current system doesn’t suck.
A kid’s parents and school administrators can get accurate daily feedback from the computer on what information the student has read through that day and how he did on the tests he was given along the way. If a kid starts to “slack off” the computer can detect this by noting the time it takes the student to get through a given set of material and pass the computer tests compared to other students in his IQ bracket*. Once the students has fallen behind his peers by a pre-determined threshold an e-mail can be sent to the parents and school administrators to warn them that this kid is falling behind and might fail the impending written tests at the end of the semester.
This system makes home-schooling very easy. The computer that is running the teaching program can be anywhere: at home, in a public library, in a detention center, on a lap top, absolutely anywhere. Disgruntled students can avoid contact with their classmates and perhaps avoid another shooting incident. Kids who are constantly teased can easily avoid school altogether except for the written tests. There will still have to be physical school buildings under this new system, just not as many. 10,000 students could potentially all take the same course at the same time at one small school, it would take weeks to give them all the written test but so what.
*IQ bracket should become obvious after the first couple of programs the student runs through. It doesn’t take a genious to figure out if a kid is slow, average, or brilliant. Also note that computer savvy kids could tamper with the computer system to cheat their way through any course, this cheating will cost them dearly on the written tests. The written tests are all that counts towards a person’s final grade since only these tests are watched by an actual person to prevent cheating. I have no problem with someone taking the written tests several times (like my driving test) before passing.
So, what do you think of this idea? Is any company out there doing this right now for the home-schooler crowd? Do you think it could work for everyone? Would it be better and/or cheaper than the current system?
Before you tear this idea to shreds please note that I am moving soon, and with the impending message board shut down I may not be able to post to this thread again for quite some time, please be patient, I’m not ignoring you.
I’m glad to see that your plan still maintains hands-on labs for science classes. There’s no way a computer could replace most of these.
But what about subjects such as English, history, sociology, etc…? A student gets just as much, if not more so, out of class discussion than text learning.
I can remember several courses as a student where the resulting class discussion was essential to a deeper understanding. This is especially true when there is no “correct” answer, such as when debating symbolism in “Heart of Darkness,” theme in “A Doll’s House,” or the concept of reality in “The Metamorphosis.”
There are some things a computer will never be able to replace. In addition to the above, there are the intangibles. Learning how to oversome shyness in order to participate in class discussion, for example.
Besides, where better but the classroom for a college student to troll for dates?
You are correct that group discussion can be fascinating and informative but it also can’t be tested. If there is no “correct” answer then there can be no fair way to test a person’s knowledge of a subject matter. I would leave the group discussions to the online chat rooms and bulletin boards (like we’re doing right now) and use the computer teaching system for handing out diplomas and certifications. I would also like to point out that English courses that require you to write essays would also have to be graded by a person. Computers can only grade multiple choice type exams.
Saruman: In terms of helping to form a young mind, teach connective thinking, and stir the soul and passion for learning and ideas, nothing, but nothing, can replace the complexities of essays and discussions. You cannot train someone to live in a complex society without getting complex. Complexity is not to be feared; it is to be embraced. It is necessary and it promotes each person’s humanity. A diploma is worthless if all it means is that you memorized factual answers long enough to regurgitate them on a blob-the-dot test, if it doesn’t mean that you can form a coherent thought and express it.
You are right that computers cannot grade essays. That is what we have teachers for. And part of being a good teacher (and I’ve had many good teachers) is being able to grade an essay fairly.
Well, that’s just it. You can test what a person has memorized through multiple choice (and how would you control cheating?), but you can’t test most other things without writing, discussion.
The point of the English class is not to find the answer, but to teach you how to dissect the subject matter, to analyze and interpret. The computer can’t teach that.
The point of the Social Studies discussion is not about finding the correct answer, but teaching understanding of human nature, and learning about the repercussion of actions on a wide scale, about trying to interpret human interactions. The computer can’t teach that.
The computer could teach basic math, and basic science, but once it gets complicated the student HAS to be able to ask questions. Our computers can’t handle questions. Even the best have limits. How will they respond to a student asking WHY water is bent? What about why we solve liner systems of equations this way? Why not THIS way? Even if the question were programmed in, the student would have to ask it the right way, but would they?
You need people to teach complex things, because they can interact with the students. They can handle things that weren’t thought of when the course was originally set up. our best programs can’t do that.
I doubt even the efficacy of a program teaching middle school math. Once things move beyond the level of “Do this to get this” and into the conceptual region, it breaks down.
Teachers may be driven insane by questions like “WHY is 2 + 7 equal to 9?”, but those questions are essential to the child’s learning process, to the deeper understanding of what addition really is. With computers you might churn out people able to add, but with no concept of what addition is.
I’m wondering if the people who are attacking this idea have ever actually taught a class. I have never been paid to teach but I have tutored friends and believe me it is no picnic. Something that seems so obvious to me is so difficult for somebody else. After a while it gets monotonous trying to explain the same thing over and over again. I honestly can’t imagine teaching the same material to class after class of public school students (i.e. the law is forcing the kids to be there whether they like it or not) all day long for years on end. The monotony must be mind ripping. Friends of mine who have taught in a public school tell me that it can be a nightmare. They sometimes spend half of their lecture time just “controlling bodies”. That is, instead of teaching the subject material they are shouting things like, “Bobby, SIT DOWN NOW!, Alright who threw that?, Will the two of you stop TALKING while I’m talking!, Alright what’s so funny, why is everyone laughing? Do you all want detention, 'cause I’ll do it!” This is called “maintaining control of the class” and it can test your patience and make you wonder why you ever became a teacher in the first place.
I also think you may have a romanticized recollection of what public school was like (assuming you went to public school). What sort of people do you work with at your job? I would assume they are a bunch of folks just like you, same education, roughly the same income bracket, the same social background. If you’re an engineer you don’t work around minimum wage losers all day, you work around other engineers. Does anyone on this message board work with rapists, murderers, Nazi skin heads, out of control drug addicts, drug dealers, gang members, or violent bullies who want to beat you senseless just for the pleasure of it? If you do then I would assume you either work for the prison system or the public school system. Think for a moment, there are 2 million people currently incarcerated in the USA, where were these people 10 or 20 years ago? You guessed it they were still in public school (they had to go to school somewhere at some time or other, at least until they dropped out). The people who went on to become vicious criminals were still mixed in with everyone else back in grade school. Society didn’t have the time or the provocation to weed these people out yet. Thus, the kid that sits behind your 9 year old son in math class may someday become a serial rapist. The kid that sits beside your son in English class may become a brain-dead Nazi skin-head.
Do any of you remember what school was really like, day to day? Maybe I had a worse time of it than some, but it sucked. I was bullied constantly until the 9th grade (I got bigger and started working out). Do you remember when you had to read aloud in English class from a book? If you did it poorly the teacher would stop you and you felt like a moron. If you did it well then when you stopped the drug addict loser that sat behind you would whisper, “you are such a fag”, and everyone that heard it would giggle and nod in agreement. School sucks ass big time. Why do you think that any aspect of the public school system is actually conducive to learning anything except survival skills? I carried a knife all through high school, I wasn’t going to be pushed around again like in grade school. I have nothing against my teachers only against the dip-shits that attend public school and ruin it for everybody. If you think public schools are worth saving then why don’t you become a public school teacher and see how you like it? Or even better, why don’t you ask a public school student if he likes it, if he appreciates the thought provoking interaction of the classroom setting?
Good teaching - which, you’re right, is as much about the attitude of those being taught as it is about the teacher - is invaluable. It sounds like your experience leads you to believe that computer-led teaching is the way to go. My experience was the opposite - I feel I came out of school more confident in myself and my abilities precisely because of teacher-led classroom teaching. Sure, some schools or classes could probably benefit from different teaching methods, but to suggest that that invalidates teacher-led classroom teaching as a whole is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Education should also involve the development of interpersonal skills, learning to criticise, analyse, debate and interpret without “right” or “wrong” answers. For an awful lot of people, jobs arent based around practical skills: diplomatic, political, negotiation skills become very important.
Saruman: That is an excellent argument in favour of better human teachers. How is a computer supposed to keep any kind of control of students?
For your information, I went to public and private schools, and suffered the same way you did (I was a complete sissy nerd, then I grew up and became a sissy gay pagan activist nerd.)
If the whole time we had just been abandoned in front of computers, how would it have been any better?
Why not go with a combination of the computer and human instruction?
Basic, straight-forward instruction could be automated (with a human attendant to help any child get over a block), and more complex thinking (or non-quantifiable subjects) could be taught by highly trained teachers.
Not only would this allow children to work at their own pace on the fundamentals, it would allow for different types of teachers. The computer learning attendants would be kind, patient parental types who could explain multiplication 12 times a day without frustration. However, once a child graduated from the computer classes, he would be challenged by more highly trained teachers who would expect a higher level of independent thinking.
The further a student progressed, the more intense the requirements would be until he reached his max. Anytime he desired to pursue a new line of study, he could begin in that area with the computer classes and then progress to more advanced study. There could still be human-taught electives (intro courses on various topics), and all of the human teachers would be expected to lead students to new and different areas as well as further into their current studies.
Thus, an average high schooler’s day might look like this:[ul]
[li]Geometry (computer)[/li][li]The Roman Empire (human elective)[/li][li]U.S. History (computer)[/li][li]French 1 (computer)[/li][li]Advanced Spanish (human)[/li][li]Physical Education (human)[/li][li]Physics Lab (mixed human/computer)[/li][li]Introductory Composition (human)[/ul][/li]
A below-average student might look like:[ul]
[li]Algebra (computer)[/li][li]Physical Science (computer)[/li][li]Grammar (computer)[/li][li]Basic Writing (human)[/li][li]Graphic Design (human elective)[/li][li]Open Tutoring (human)[/li][li]U.S. History (computer)[/li][li]Conversational French (human elective) [/ul][/li]
An above-average student might have:[ul]
[li]Calculus (computer)[/li][li]Introductory Programming (computer)[/li][li]Early Modern Europe (human elective)[/li][li]Linear Algebra (computer)[/li][li]Computational Theory (human)[/li][li]Creative Writing (human)[/li][li]Graphic Design (human elective)[/li][li]Conversational Italian (human elective)[/li][li]Electromagnetism (human/computer)[/ul][/li]
This would work best in a system of 1-month blocks where, for example, a student who has just finished the computer-aided biology instruction can begin human-aided critical thinking instruction in Genetics shortly thereafter. The student who has fallen below some minimum level can be assigned an hour each day of one-on-one tutoring for a month, etc. There should be extra hours each day where children can choose to stay later and take more classes (much like college).
Not only would this improve the quality of instruction, it would help overcome the boredom many gifted children face in normal schools, and would provide a better transition to higher education.
I attended a mainstream public high school (so mainstream that it was featured in “Seventeen” magazine) for most of my freshman year. I hated it. The classes were boring and the other students were horrid. Had I read this thread way back then, I might have thought that computer teaching was a grand idea, even though I liked most of my teachers. Towards the end of my freshman year I transferred to the alternative program across town and was very happy there. It was not, I stress, a gifted program. In fact, my teachers and counselors at my old high school claimed that a gifted student like me would be wasted at a school that had a reputation as a dumping ground for teen mothers, junkies, and homosexuals. That reputation was partially deserved, but it was a very good if non-traditional school. It was also in many ways the opposite of the OP’s computer instructed school. Many of the English and Social Studies classes consisted entirely of classroom discussions, out-of-class reading, and a final paper (I appreciated the practice once I got to college). There was also a lot of student-teacher interaction. It was a relaxed atmosphere and we all called our teachers by their first names. I won’t pretend that there weren’t problems, but it seemed to me that most students developed close relationships with at least one or two favorite teachers. And I know that we learned a lot from the teachers and each other that wasn’t in the curriculum. A computer might have been able to teach me as much about pre-calculus as Steve the math teacher, but it couldn’t have taught me about Bob Dylan, birdwatching, and current events at the same time. it certainly couldn’t have taught me how to carry on with a serious illness or after dealing with a personal tragedy the way some of my teachers did by example.
Computers are useful, and they have their place in schools, but I don’t think they’ll ever be able to teach the way a human being can.
OK, I had to respond to this one. Computer teaching of history is good if all you want is trivia. That’s a shallow and almost entirely useless form of history as a way of understanding anything. (It can be valuable cultural literacy, though.) For history to be at all relevant, it must be connected, analyzed, thought about, discussed. It does me no good to know that the Patriotes rebelled in 1837 unless I know why they rebelled, against whom, what were the factors which caused the rebellion, and (especially) what the long term historical significance was for Canada, and what lessons can be derived from that rebellion today. (Interestingly, those lessons are in my opinion completely opposite to the usual ideological stance used by those who mention the 1837 rebellion. But I won’t go into that.)
A computerized or computerlike approach to teaching history is of vanishingly little value.
The whole point is to teach “the facts” and trivia via computer and then move the student into more meaningful human instruction. I agree that a computer cannot substitute for a live teacher beyond the basics. However, I believe that a live teacher’s time is wasted droning over the basic “people, places, etc.”. Why not use the computers to teach the fundamentals and then the live teacher to help the kids find meaning to it all?
In the system I described above, the kids would work through the basic timeline, etc. on the computer and then use that as a basis for more complex human classes. Basically, it takes away the hours spent on pop quizzes, reading aloud from textbooks, etc. and lets the teachers focus on critical thinking skills.
In the end, you free the teachers from the drill and give kids the freedom to pick up the basics at their own pace and even to explore areas for which no human teacher is available. Instead of spending weeks with their brains turned off while other kids catch up, the gifted kids speed right through the computer course and dive into live discussion of the material.
[Just to be clear – the computer introduces a subject and when the student is ready, a human teacher takes them to the next level.]
sigh - If you don’t know the facts of the matter as recorded by history your opinion is meaningless. For example, I am an American, I had not heard of the rebellions in Canada in 1837 until you mentioned them, but I think they were too little too late :). I am not going to discuss with a group of people (i.e. the straight dopers) that group discussions are of no value. I just think that 95% of all the information a person needs to discuss any given topic (be it particle physics or art history) can be conveyed entirely by computer. You obviously like to give your opinions so why don’t you find a group of graduate students discussing their field of study and offer them your opinions on it (or just ask a question). They will subtly mock you to your face by making repeated references to books you haven’t read and other stuff you don’t know until you finally go away. If you don’t have all the facts on a subject then you shouldn’t partake in a discussion of it (straight dopers should know this all too well). I am not suggesting that I know all the facts about anything, only that a computer based teaching system would be a great way to teach kids and working adults about almost anything. If you still insist that it is of great educational (not recreational or social) value for a bunch of school kids to sit around discussing stuff that they know almost nothing about with their frustrated teacher then what can I say… Group discussions as an educational tool (not a recreational one like we’re doing now) should be reserved for graduate students and not for kids who know squat.
If you’re repeating the same thing to a student over and over again, and he isn’t understanding, then what you’re repeating over and over is the wrong thing. A computer couldn’t innovate to grant a student understanding. In all likelihood the computer couldn’t even grasp that the student wasn’t understanding.
Teach people trivia and facts until they’re 25, then thrust them into debate sessions? They wouldn’t know what to do!
What Matt was saying about history was that knowing a shitload of facts is useless unless you are given some way to look at those facts, analyze them, understand how they relate to each other, to human behavior, to all sorts of things. A computer couldn’t do that, because a computer couldn’t take the student from step 1: incohate idea to step final: fully formed understanding, because the computer isn’t broad enough to grasp what the student is trying to say.
I understand about public schools. i attended them. Recently. I know that in many classes the students are unruly, or the teachers incompetent. This is not to say that ALL teachers are incompetent and stuck inclassrooms full of noisy assholes.
A computer might be able to teach the very basics. If that. I doubt a computer could do even that because at every level the student is being challenged to understand new concepts. I think it would take a human’s ability to understand the confusion and work around it.
My argument is that if you don’t know the facts there can be no understanding, i.e. there is nothing to understand or discuss. For example, the facts of the American Revolution should be known to all high school graduates. The commonly held beliefs amongst scholars of American history as to why the revolution occured should be known to all high school grad’s. Discussing your own theories as to why the revolution took place should come later.
BTW the average first year grad. student is around 21 not 25. Furthermore, I suspect that if everyone were not herded into this paradigm of 13 years of study from age 5 'til age 18 for a high school degree then many more kids would finish their high school degrees sooner and move on to college and post-graduate study.
Also note that other developed nations (such as Japan) have embraced rote memorization of facts as the best way to teach children (though they still use classrooms which are more rigidly disciplined than ours). Perhaps this emphasis on getting the facts straight is why their kids can locate America on a map and some American kids can’t.
My reading of the above is that the Japanese value student/teacher interaction and the social side of education rather than pure “fact”-based learning. It also seems to suggest that many of the problems are grounded in a lack of quality interaction and whole-class teaching - not a surfeit of it.
Not to be cynical about it, but has anyone ever actually USED computers in school in elementary and high school and seen how kids use them? An educational system based on compuer usage will teach a lot of Advanced Quake, SimCity Composition and Diablo Arts, and damned little in the way of English, Mathematics, and Geography.
Computers can convey facts; that’s an indisputable truth. But televisions can convey facts, too. Radios can convey facts. Tape recorders. Books. Nobody would seriously consider abandoning classwork for a course of instruction via television - but a TV’s cheaper than a computer, and a tape recorder would be cheaper still. And as to learning entirely from home book study, the failure rate for correspondence courses is incredibly high.
For the most part, education without teachers DOESN’T WORK. That’s not a guess, it’s a fact established with oodles of experience. What would give a program of computer study any more legitimacy or effectiveness than a correspondence course?
You can plug facts into a computer, but the ugly truth is that absent hand-on instruction, most students will not learn them. There are exceptions, but in practice the great majority of students lack the self-discipline to learn independently of immediate instruction.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that we replace teachers with the current educational software available. However, imagine if we took the textbooks currently used and created fun, interactive computer versions. I’d imagine kids would be more likely to actually learn the “facts” inside and be prepared to discuss them with a live teacher afterwards.
In my example, at least half of every student’s day was human taught. A month or more of learning U.S. History Basics would be followed by a month or more discussing it with a live teacher. But there’s no point in using the live teacher to drill students in basic facts. Which is not to say you wouldn’t ever have introductory-level electives. There might be an excellent story-teller teacher who could take a completely uninformed student and inspire him to learn more – that’s where human electives would come in.
a) we’re not talking about current widely-available educational software. Obviously great effort would have to be made to create comprehensive online courses. (Stanford has actually already done this, I believe, for talented K-12 kids).
b) you would have human attendants in these computer labs – they would just be more skilled in patient one-on-one tutoring than in engaging day-after-day discussion
c) the student might actually have better access to alternative teaching methods through the computer than through the average teacher. If he didn’t understand a concept, he could ask the computer to present it another way (presumably we would build more and more options into this software over time) without having to stop a human teacher and deal with the embarrassment of holding up the class. If the computer couldn’t help him, he could ask a human attendant for individual attention (which should still be less intimidating than raising his hand in a class of 30).
Basically this would make primary and secondary education a lot like college, but kinder. College professors specify a textbook and expect students to absorb long chapters before showing up for class. Students in this system would be allowed to do that at their own pace during school hours via the interactive computer textbooks. Then, once they had absorbed the basics, they would be led in discussion and analysis by live teachers.
I’ve seen not a shred of evidence that there is anything you can do with software that will make it an adequate replaement for books and blackboards. Of COURSE there’s a place of computers in the classroom, but there’s a place for educational TV, too. I don’t at all mind the idea of kids watching Bill Nye The Science Guy every now and then, nor do I mind the idea of them using some software now and then. The center of the classroom, however, should still remain teachers and books in a dynamic, energetic setting.
Anything that gets kids reading books LESS is Not A Good Thing. I cannot imagine anything that is both more effective and cost-efficient for a kid’s education that making them read as much as possible.
Computers are a colossal investment, especially for school boards that frankly don’t have a huge amount fo money to burn. Outfitting a 25-student classroom with computers and software would be much more expensive than you think, and the damned things are out of date in three years. Books are comparatively cheap and more flexible.
And when the kids are working on art or music or something that doesn’t involve computers, where are you going to put them? Don’t the kids need desk space? You’ll have to get bigger desks or bigger classrooms - and if this sounds like nitpicking, it’s a SERIOUS issue. We’re talking about children; if they’re working with Elmer’s glue at their desks, they’ll get some in the keyboard. They need desks, not workstations. And how do they take work home with them? Gonna buy laptops? Prepare to replace half of them every six months. Gonna buy desktops? Now you have portability issues.
4. Kids are not easy to teach. “Teaching” is far more than imparting facts and understanding. A teacher is basically a babysitter for seven or eight hours a day AND is charged with teaching a curriculum. Controlling 25 nine-year-olds is a challenging task, and if it isn’t done exactly right your precious software tools are out the window. Maybe literally. Even if you have a teacher present in your computer setting, controlling 25 children who aren’t doing the same thing (e.g. participating in the same lesson) would be a Herculean task. It’s hard to control the little monsters when there AREN’T monitors hiding their faces.
And doesn’t it seem kind of silly to go to this level of effort? If the teacher’s there in the class, and the kids are there, why do you want to spend a Godawful fortune on computers and software rather than just having the teacher take a chalk to the blackboard? What evidence is there that they’ll do better learning from computers?
And let’s be perfectly honest about human nature; a computer-based classroom will encurage teachers to stop teaching and kids to play Doom.
The method of teaching 30 or so kids by standing up in front of them is,IMHO, industrial teaching.
Children are processed through the educational system in order to acquire the basic knowledge that will allow them to function but at the lowest cost to the state.
Think, why do the wealthy pay to send their children to fee-paying schools ?(I have to be careful with terminology here because public schools are a completely differant thing over here)
One reason, I would suggest, is that these schools consistantly achieve higher grades than state schools.
The pupil/teacher ratios are dramatically differant, usually in the order of 10 or so to one with even smaller class sizes in certain subjects.
This is not possible in state schools because of the direct cost but the total life cost in crime and unreached potential is huge which passes on through generations of abysmal parenting.
Some of our universities such as Oxford and Cambridge rely extensively on one to one teaching, better described as mentoring.These institutions are considered to be among the finest in the world.
The greatest challenge to the Western world may well be to educate our populations properly rather than the more glamorous world of scientific achievement.
BTW I work in a jail attempting to instill some working skills into the unwilling and what is striking is how many inmates accept that parental violence is normal.You can imagine how their chidren will grow up.
The vast majority of them ceased attending school early on and their cases were not chased down by the authorities.
Many of them were simply left behind in schoolwork and when it was not noticed they got bored and disruptive and left.
Maybe parents need more support and education too.
The decline of the extended, or even nuclear, family means that the experience of grandparents and elders is no longer available.