In addition to what has been pointed out upthread, not every kid learns in the same manner or at the same rate. I was a pretty bright elementary student who got some special attention to learn things that I didn’t catch onto right off.
Another thing that group learning teaches is time management. In my current position, I have some dealings with entry level working class young people. The ones who were home schooled are a cinch to pick out by their work habits. Time management and following set process tend to be the issues. Where teachers didn’t cut much slack with either, Mom/Dad would in their world.
We should change the model. A lot of the group instruction can be done with technology at an individualized pace leaving teachers more time for one on one or small group instruction. It’s just going to take time to get past the tradition of school room education that is based on nothing but practical considerations that no longer are constraints.
I’m a big technology nerd, but grew up in the days before desktop computers and then handheld computers were common and tend to think that education is best done the old-fashioned way, with very little technology.
Why? I don’t think it should be all computers, but why can’t interactive technology be used, along with non-interactive presentations just like the movies and film strips I saw at school in the 60s? Why does a class of students all born in the same year have to learn everything all at the same time? Why shouldn’t teachers concentrate on the activities that can’t be replaced with technology and allowing their time to be more suited to individual students instead of a large class?
You’re leaping to the conclusion that education itself is a desirable thing.
Universal public schooling was created in America for the purposes of indoctrinating children with the party line, to make sure they all grow up to blindly subscribe to the political, economic and social paradigms that would continue to favor those in power.
Aside from basic linguistic and mathematical literacy, many (if not most) pupils don’t really learn anything relevant in school. There were kids in my high school that did not take a single class that I took (besides English), so there is absolutely nothing that we both learned. Yet, the total ignorance of each other’s taught-knowledge base does not diminish in the least our ability to share the fruits of our community tree of life with dignity and respect for each other.
We did, both, by trial and error, learn socialization skills, and spending hours each day in a shared environment contributed to that, so attending school does have that value. which would not arise in home-schooling. So there’s that.
That’s akin to saying that kids can easily be distracted by books. A lot of what we grew up studying from books is now studied from an electronic screen. Did some of us get distracted by books that weren’t part of the assigned curriculam? I did. Were books shut off because of that? Not.
At my son’s school, some of the classes do use computer programs for a portion of the schoolwork. Children use them to work at their level for some of the material. Some children are at very different levels in reading, or math, for example, and the self-directed programs allow them to work that way. Group time brings them all back together to work on other things.
Using computers also lets children learn skills they will need in today’s world - how to use computers, keyboarding, word processing, presentation software, and so on. I think computers as an adjunct to teaching offers many benefits.
That said, I think the premise of the OP is highly unrealistic. Teachers are trained to teach. Socialization is not the only thing taught in schools, jtur88’s experience notwithstanding. Math, writing, reading, history, analytical thinking and science are all useful skills that most people make at least some use of during their lifetimes.
Expecting parents to become trained teachers and to give up one income is unrealistic at best.
Shrug, for me the only “bad” thing about specifically the years that more or less match middle school is that classwork stopped mostly doing itself. It still wasn’t a particularly bad period. Had a couple bad teachers but those would have been bad at any age.
The Nephew has already reached those years without a hitch: he’s been a class leader since preschool and still is. At the beginning of this school year he noticed one of his classmates was acting up a lot and asked the teacher to move that student into his table*: after consultation with other teachers, it was so. That student is now back to normalish (he still isn’t happy about his parents separating and the accompanying mess, but who would).
The Niece is starting to experience problems, but it’s due to bad parenting (telling your daughter constantly how perfect and lovely she is is almost as bad as constantly reminding your son that he can never be perfect), which again I count as a reason to get the kids in the care of a different set of adults than those biology gave them. For the first time since leaving preschool, she now has a couple of teachers who don’t melt down instantly in her presence and is having trouble with the concept of “I must work in order to please teacher, and I must work on what she tells me to not on what I want to, and even when I do, she won’t tell me I’m lovely and perfect, all she’ll say is ‘good job’”.
They’re still in groups of four. It feels funny to me, but hey, my own years of “every student in a desk” were after my parents’ of “two students per desk”…
Yeah VR Schooling could work very well. What i think is important to improve is the whole testing process, it just creates unnecessary competitive vibe and makes kids label themselves as “not good at math, history, etc” which just limits their growth.
“Socialization” is so last century. Today’s children get most of their socialization online or through smart phone apps. Online schooling will help them prepare to enter tomorrow’s workforce where they will spend most of their time working from home (typically a studio or 1BR apartment in an urban center), staring into screens or other digital interfaces and interacting via whatever collaboration tools are popular at the time.
I’ve always thought that home schooling could be raised a notch and have neighborhood schooling. A group of parents get together, get a standard home school curriculum and take turns rotating the teaching. And if one of them happens to work in the field of the subject (such as math or chemistry), so much the better.
Clothahump, there are two things a teacher must know: The material to be taught, and how to teach it. And those are two completely different skill sets. If you’re going to be teaching, you want someone doing it who knows how to teach, at which point your model turns into “a group of parents get together and find someone who’s good at teaching, and have that person teach their kids”. Which is what we have now.
To the OP, there is a trend now towards what’s called “flipped classrooms”. The idea is that you give the kids the lecture portion of schooling online, so they can watch them at home, and then have them spend their in-class time doing what would previously have been the homework. It’s a great idea: The kids can pause the lecture or scan back to see something again if they missed it the first time, or even skip over portions that they already know, and then when they’re doing the work there’s someone present who can give them help if they need it. It’s good for the teachers, too, because the lectures only have to be recorded once and can then be shown repeatedly, and if you find any mistakes, you can edit them out before the students ever see it. Since the teacher’s time is driven by students’ questions, the instruction is naturally more individualized. And it’s not just theoretical, either: Actual studies have shown that it does, in fact, result in better performance.
And it still doesn’t work. Not all students, especially in poorer districts, have devices at home that they can watch the lectures on. You can fix that simply by having the school issue cheap computers like Chromebooks to all of the students… but the school districts who can afford that are precisely the ones where most of the students already have access to technology at home. You want to make a real difference in education, change the funding structure for schools so that the districts that most need funding for effective teaching techniques can afford them.
Most kids go through a larval stage in middle school. They want to be grown ups, but they want to be kids. Kids can get very mean to each other, and the politics of negotiating middle school can be a minefield. Puberty hormones are in the air.
It tends to be the stage at which the homework load increases, but the attention span of your kid decreases - and they tend to start questioning authority.
And how will that work if both parents work outside the home, or it’s a single parent working outside the home? Do I get to drop my kid off with my neighbours and have them educate the Cub and I never have to take a turn myself?
In the animated episode “The Practical Joker” a holodeck called “the Recreation Room” is shown on the original Enterprise (no bloody “A,” “B,” “C” or “D”).
