“As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children (“as much as they can understand”), there are lies-to-bosses (“as much as they need to know”), lies-to-patients (“they won’t worry about what they don’t know”) and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves.”
–"The Science of discworld, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
I think Dogface’s remarks about D.A.R.E. and wine pretty much sum it all up.
There are thousands of schools. Because there are thousands of schools, there are thousands of administrators, and tens of thousands of teachers, yes?
Do YOU know of any filtering process which will screen out the well meaning incompetents, the boobs, the fools, and those who would promote an agenda at the expense of education?
Man, I’m a teacher, and even I can tell you that some of us simply shouldn’t be in the classroom. On the other hand, when we find and identify them, we get rid of them as best we can. What more can you ask of us?
Nowadays, American schoolkids are taught that the USA is the most wicked nation on the face of the earth and the more laudable aspects of our history are written off or glossed over.
I must respectfully disagree. I have no doubt that some teachers may well flog on this as part of their personal hobby horse, but if you feel this is part of a major trend in education, I suggest reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen. It addresses many of the issues brought up in this thread, and you won’t find a dull page in it.
And here we have the root of the problem. Not only do not enough people speak up, too many willingly just walk away instead of speaking up exactly when it would have been the most effective.
At which point during class instruction should he have shot the teacher down?
Well, it WAS the middle of her class, and I was just there to fix the wireless AP…it didn’t seem appropriate that I speak out and contridict the teacher during her class. Even leaving asside the business implications, it seemed rude to me. As I said, I did talk to her after class, and even pointed her out to the article Cecil did (as well as offering to do some further research to show that it was bullshit) but she wasn’t having any of it…as I said she basically said I was a US appologist, etc etc…don’t let the facts get in the way. As my child doesn’t even go to that school I’m not sure what more I CAN do to be honest. Even if I, say, took it to the principal, what over all good would it do? It seems that the system itself is to blame, not an individual teacher. So…what could we as citizens do? Seems the answer is basically ‘nothing’ from looking at this thread. According to David Simmons this is an ongoing question that has been around forever…and appearently one that never gets solved in any meaningful way.
-XT
I’m with you guys there. Programs like DARE (which finally got booted out of our schools) make a glass of wine functionally equivalent to heroin. If kids see that their parents drink wine with no ill effects, how are they going to resist the real drugs?
How do you do this from inside? We’ve had experience with some really, really bad teachers, borderline abusive, and it took an incredible amount of effort to do anything, even with the full support of the principal, and even being on the inside as it were. (My wife was on the JHS site council.) How the heck are less educated, less assertive parents going to do anything. I don’t know of any cases where a school ejected one of its own (someone with tenure, that is. A really bad new teacher did get the boot.) I am not anti teachers union by any means, but teachers unions in my experience have not been in the forefront of increasing quality.
I wonder if this film was a teacher initiated thing, or something that was an official part of the curriculum. Balance is not exactly something we can expect from each teacher, or anyone else. If there were resourrrces to vet this material, these problems could be picked up.
Tomndeb’s idea is awful, from the getgo. Textbook and curriculum development is not something you do while watching TV in the evening. Who selects the bibiliography? Who decides if it is fairl and balanced? Who checks the credentials of the authors? Who translates the work to the level the children at a certain grade level can understand? My wife has worked on a few textbooks, and it is hard work.
Yeah, if every junior high science or social studies teacher is a trained researcher, they can do it. (Just like in colleges - that’s why there is no national or state body setting detaile curriculum standards here.) To expect elementary and secondary teachers to do this is asking a lot.
I do have a pet (conspiracy?) theory about it. It might not apply fully to the US but probably does apply.
Imagine a poor brazilian bus driver who had a very good quality high school education. He earns the equivalent of US$ 150-250 a month only. Its a revolt waiting to happen. Poor people with high levels of education are either the beggining of a future economic boom or a revolt waiting to happen. This may sound patronizing and it is (too poor people).
In Brazil especially in the poor northeast I am quite sure politicians neglect education as a means of social and political control. (Dumb people are easier to convince than smart voters). Since many students will still be good students, you keep the Educated vs Badly Educated ratios currently in society. Thus avoiding having to face an educated voter mass or social change.
Another issue is that education is rarely an election topic. Even if educational standards are crap... the workforce with crappy education will only hit the job market many years later. So politically speaking you can ruin education and your electoral losses will be minimal.
Finally school is only one place where you learn... stupid parents hurt educational chances just as much as a bad school.hmm… while i won’t claim any particular knowledge about this, i would think parents would notice if a politician did this… While it may not be the biggest issue, i don’t think he would get away with any serious education cuts
question for experienced teachers: has the knowledge base, preparation and general quality of new teachers declined in recent years? there has been speculation that as teaching has become a less desirable career in recent years (low pay, classroom violence, better career options etc.), new teachers have been drawn from a less desirable applicant pool. what do you see on the front lines?
also, a key difference between public and private schools is parental involvement. in most private schools parents are encouraged/expected to do things as volunteers that in a public school would have to be paid for, or that just would not get done. but there is nothing to prevent parents from being involved in their kids’ public schools. i’m not a parent, but i could imagine the PTA (they still have that, right?) forming some kind of tutorial oversight committee that would take an interest in what’s actually being taught in the classrooms. just knowing that other grown-ups are paying attention might make teachers less likely to bring their political agendas to work with them.
There was a pit thread sometime back with complaints from an Education major about how stilted and narrowminded the thinking of the majority of his classmates was. Of course there were immediate protests that perhaps he was overgeneralizing and such, but he was backed up by others with experience in the Educational field.
So perhaps one contributing factor is the derth of creative and engaging teaching as opposed to the “one correct answer that you must memorize straight from my mouth” kind of teaching that seems to be prevailent today.
Having touble with the search function, so I can’t locate the thread but maybe that will ring a bell with someone.
As opposed to the well-reasoned approach we have today where (in history) a few virulent and well-financed know-nothings dictate nonsense to a few key states and the rest of the country follows sheeplike to ignorance or where a few anti-scientific people get their co-religionists to fund them into state school boards where they can gut the curriculum?
Where did you get the idea that the texts should be selected while watching TV? I would generally expect that genuine effort be put into the selection of original texts–certainly more effort than goes into the creation of pap that we currently see.
I already noted that the bibliographic solution is probably not workable, but I see no evidence that the current system works. (Try reading Stephen J. Gould’s series of essays in over 20 years of Science in which he lays out error after error in the presentation of the history of science, then pick up any widely used history textbook, read it, and weep.)
I retired on a disability fourteen years ago. In the high schools that I observed, public education had become impossible. Examples:
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Our “comprehensive” high school had six goals. Do you know why we had six goals? We had six planning periods and each group of teachers assigned to a certain planning period was told to come up with a goal. If we needed seven goals, tough. In fact, creative thinking was voted down as a goal and the goal of decreasing tardiness was substituted!
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A student teacher in history was asked to take the same test that she was giving to her students. She failed it. She even indicated that the Soviet Union was with the Axis Powers during World War II. Her supervising teacher gave her a D in student teaching. Her college supervisor changed it to a B. She became a history teacher.
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I have known one teacher so desperate for time to teach her class uninterrupted that she gave the school $200 with the understanding that she would not have to sell candy for the school during class time that year.
I could literally list hundreds of examples like this. I do not believe that public education in its present classroom form can endure much longer. I admit that my view may be terribly biased by what I have seen. I say scrap it and start over.
What would happen if we had larger classrooms with more teachers and more non-teaching personnel involved in each classroom?
a. Pay someone to do clerical duties for each classroom: forms, lunch money, immunizations, attendance, hall passes, authorizations, etc. (Why pay someone with a college degree to do this?)
b. Have a trained and paid disciplinarian – someone who knows how to prevent problems.
c. Have a core group of teachers responsible for planning, presenting, conducting, monitoring, testing, accessing, individualizing, reteaching when needed, etc. Vary the tasks or have a “Master Teacher” and “Assistant Teachers” with varying pay scales.
d. Local building administrators must be interviewed and selected by a panel of teachers from that school.
e. All teachers must pass a national standard of proficiency. (This idea has support from the NEA.)
f. All teachers must be paid a minimum of the standard babysitting rate per student, per hour.
g. Abolish the Department of Education and put the money in the hands of those in a position to know what is most needed (and who will be held accountable).
It’s Friday, almost 6 a.m. and I am so grateful for another day of not having to try to do right by the students. Fourteen years and I still had two school nightmares this week.
xtisme, call the teacher, find out the name of the film and whether or not it is supplied by the school or comes from an outside vendor. Write a formal letter of protest to that teacher and her principal. If you do not have a satisfactory response, write a letter to the editor of the newspaper and to the local board of education. Make noise. Move up the ladder.
And please be sure to share the name of the film with us. This I have to see.
David Simmons, you are right on the money about education from your days and mine. (I started school in 1949.) Remember when they taught us that Columbus discovered America? What a hoot!
Do you remember when American literature books began with something from William Bradford or Anne Bradstreet?
Let’s see, how many basic food groups were there when you were in school – seven? Eat lots of red meat, eggs, cheese, and milk. (I hear it’s all coming back!) Was bread good or bad?
Did you hear mumblings about a strange “new math” that came and went sometime long after we graduated?
Were you told that an atom was the smallest thing that could ever be?
Remember Gregg’s Shorthand? Did only the girls have that book?
And some of those teachers were right out of high school too. That was education enough.
That sounds great, but I’m a recent public high school graduate (2000), and despite the amount of dunderheaded teachers it was supposed to be among the best districts in NY. None of the above applied. We didn’t watch movies in history classes and hardly used computers at all. If computers and technology are changing things, they’re probably just magnifying pre-existing problems. The lack of critical thinking is the big one to me.
Since when have teachers ever cited anything? Even the best teachers I had didn’t do that, I guess because it was way far afield from what they were supposed to be doing. Maybe now we’re dealing with really deep problems like models of education. Citing things indicates that counter-arguments could be made with different material, and nobody wants to teach things in a manner that’s that complicated. Sometimes the smart students know a teacher is wrong, but you don’t get anything by arguing with them anyway; your job as a student is mostly to sit and listen. Critical thinking tends to detract from your goal of getting the answers right on the test. Writing papers with cites meant more work and no one wanted to do them. All told, I’ve learned more about supporting arguments from this message board than I did in school, and I look harder for cites for debates here than I did on papers. 
In the ninth grade, I had a social studies teacher/history teacher who made a point to try and instill some critical thinking skills in us. He presented the first chapter of our book, made us take a test, and then began to examine all of the things wrong with the theories presented in that book. His point was that you should never read anything without examining it critically.
It was a great shock. Up until that point, I had considered school books as unequivically true, simply out of ignorance that they might not be.
I have always thought that this sort of approach could be used in many other areas. I had a physics professor once point out the absurdity of some of the physics labs we were doing. I also remember a history professor who asked a single question on his final. “Point out the problems with the thesis of American History presented in the classroom this semester.” We had no warning that such a question would be asked.
The possibility of teaching errors has always intrigued me ever since. (not errors in teaching, but teaching things which are known false).
What I mean is (specifically related to physics labs, but it could be adapted to any subject) that one lesson be constructed which is false. It should be constructed and taught as if it were not false. It should be presented with enough opportnity for the students to discover the falsity of it. And of course, the falsity should be pointed out explicitly after the students have had the opportunity to explore it on their own.