**So in other words, nothing should be taught unless there’s an obvious monetary compensation at the other end?
**
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Just about all information taught to students until about high school will be “useless” to them, at the time.
Let me tell you a story. My youngest little brother is a genius. I mean, seriously intelligent. He is so smart, he scares me. One little story: we were playing a video game where you go back in time and re-create some historic event. I accidentally put in like 200 million B.C. or something. My brother, SIX YEARS OLD at the time, says, ‘Oh, nice move, now we have to sit and watch the continents drift apart for the next four hours…’. Blew me away.
So by the time he got to 2nd and 3rd grade, he was literally bored to tears. He knew everything that was going on. He stopped paying attention, stopped caring about school, because the teachers had to teach according to the speed of the slowest person in the class - What do you mean, my little Johnny needs to go to a special class? He’s not slow, you are doing a crummy job of teaching him! So these little kids - ironically enough, often the ones most interested in learning - slow the class down. And there was no ‘advanced math’ class for fourth graders.
By the time he got to junior high school, he wasn’t interested in school at all. He got caught up in drugs, alcohol, petty crimes the whole thing. Looking back on it now, he says, ‘hey, it wasn’t a total waste of time, I got a great education on our judiciary system’. It wasn’t until a high school student turned him on to computers that he suddenly realized that he had ‘found’ his calling. And now he right back on track.
You see, had he had a bit more breadth of teaching early on (his school didn’t offer any computer courses until junior high), he might have found his calling early on. I think the idea behind a ‘broad’ education is that it exposes our children to the incredibly vast, rich world out there just waiting to be explored and learned. My sister loved biology and science; she is pre-med now. My other little brother loved shop and woodworking; he runs a maintenance office for a massive aparatment complex. I loved history, math, and economics - so I went into finance.
We want to our kids to be fascinated, challenged, excited about learning. By giving the a basic understanding of a variety and wealth of subjects, we increase the possibility that they will find things to be excited about, in turn making them want to learn more. Isn’t that how it is with books? You read a great book, and you keep reading other books, hoping to find another ‘great’ one.
One interesting side note - some schools (private, mostly) specifically ask parents NOT to teach kids at home before they enter the school system. I am still working out my opinions on this, my knee-jerk reaction aside.
I think we need to pay teachers more - for the job they do, and the responsibility we dump on them (is there ANY more important task in the world today than educating our future???), we pay teachers SHIT. We need to pay more, not necessarily to get good teachers, because I honestly believe we already have a lot of good people, but to encourage them to STAY. We also need MORE teachers, because I think we have to work at tailoring class speeds - not for the slower kids in class, but for the faster kids. They are the ones that end up losing out in these days of ‘no kid left behind’.
OK, a lot of this is off the seat of my pants, so no flames please. But if this stimulates some debate, great. More teachers, better paid teachers - yep, this costs money. And schools are already under-budgeted, it seems. I don’t have any easy answers.
I have long felt that schools should kick out kids distrupting classes. For many parents, schools are public baby-sitters. Kicking out kids who obviously have no intention of being students would help turn schools back into actual places of learning, not detention centers for juviniles - at my brother’s school, they do random checks of school lockers. :mad:
I am quite familiar with the Japanese education system. It used to be incredibly draconian. The schools had unbelievable powers; the parents had zero say in what went on. A student caught smoking would beg his parents not to tell the school. The teachers would decide what universities the kids should try for. But put another way, this means that the schools had the total, full support of the parents, who worked at making sure the kids did their school work, got the tutors, put them in to after-class prep courses, etc.
The result? Well, by and large kids were taught well. The stereotypical image is of kids memorizing text books with no free thought. That is complete bullshit. More accurate would be to say that they didn’t have many places to express their free thoughts. But they were taught a fairly diverse range of thinking on any number of issues (even if they were taught what was supposed to be the “correct” answer on entrance exams).
Other results of this system, of course, is the ‘exam’ hell for unis. And after 12 years of that torture, kids basically go to uni in Japan to screw around (literally and figuratively) for four years before hitting the corporate world. Japanese universities, quite frankly, are a joke. There are exceptions, and some departments at some universities are world-class. But in general, kids don’t go to uni to learn. They go to uni to relax. I know of NO kid in Japan who paid his own college tuition. Zero, zilch none. And that’s after 20 years in and out of Japan. Parents pay their kid’s tuition in return for getting 12 years of hard work.
One other aspect of Japan’s education system. Because it is so intensive, so drilled, and so regimented, kids have almost no choice in what classes they take. Very few electives. So they don’t really know what they are interested in. Their major at college? Depends on what college department they enter - see, they don’t take an entrance exam at a uni then decide their major 2-3 years in - they take an entrance exam for a particular department of a university. Doesn’t really matter, because a) they don’t really learn anything at uni anyway, and b) the company they join, and job they end up doing, will have almost zero correlation with what their ‘major’ was. I know econ majors doing computer sales, computer majors working in accounting, etc.
And one other aspect - by and large, people don’t really like their jobs. They don’t necessarily dislike their jobs, either - jobs are just - jobs. Not careers. It is what they have to do every day. “getting ahead” isn’t ‘doing a better job’. It is ‘not screwing up so I can get promoted’. Anyway, this is turning into a different rant, so I will head it off here.
There are lots of upside to Japan’s system as well, of course. The entire nation is very literate - I think literacy rates are close to 99%. Kids with parents actively interested in their education (and not just getting them into a ‘good college’ will get a great education in their areas of interest, because they have an excellent grasp of the fundamentals. They will have a better idea of what they want to do, and can look at their uni options with a more learned eye.
Japan has churned out two generations of highly skilled engineers and scientists, largely thanks to the fact that the kids receive a very thorough education in the basic fundamentals. Can’t put a price tag on that. I find lots of issues with the implementation of these resources, but I can’t find fault with the basic result.
I say ‘used to be draconian’, because over the past few years, Japan has been seriously dumbing down their schools. No school Saturdays anymore (used to be half-days on Sat). Massive reduction in classroom time. Subjects are easier. One brilliant policy change last year - I heard that it passed, but don’t know the exact details: Pi is to be rounded to 3. To make calculations easier. Not 22/7. Not 3.14, even. ** 3 **. I don’t think they should have dumbed things down; I was hoping they would simply work at letting kids have more choices in what they learned.
My point? I guess I would want the ‘best of both worlds’ - a good, basic understanding of the world around us, but the flexibility to go deeper in areas of interest. Would I want my kid to go to a school that would ‘hit the books’ fairly hard? Or would I want him to go to a place that would let him explore where his interests lie?
The problem with the ‘hard-core’ book studies is that it risks pushing away kids who don’t want to be ‘pushed’, or maybe can’t keep up sometimes.
The problem with the ‘go at your own pace’ method is that, let’s face it, kids, like adults, have times when they are simply unmotivated, and they would be able to flaunt the system - teachers I have met from these types of schools have looked shocked when I ask them how the prod kids to get back to their work - ‘oh, we respect the children’s rights, and we don’t want to risk upsetting them by pushing them’.
But some kids flourish under a ‘hard-core’ book studies method. I was one.
Some kids flourish under a ‘study want you want’ method. My youngest little brother was one.
So ultimately, it comes down to the PARENTS understanding what works best for their kid, then supporting the school/teachers with what they are trying to do. Vouchers for less-advantaged kids works for me. I have seen more than enough disruptive kids from wealthy homes, so I resent the implication that ‘poor’ kids are ‘disruptive’ (although maybe I misread that wrong; I certainly hope so). Vouchers or no vouchers, kids not interested in being students simply don’t belong in school.
Kinda comes back to the ‘children’s rights’ thing. We are so scared of ‘emotionally scarring’ our kids, that we have given them far too much leeway, and - let’s face it - kids know it, they are taking complete advantage of it, and they are laughing at the grownups. Yes, kids have rights, but let’s not mix them up with responsibilities. We are giving way too much of one, and not demanding enough of the other.
