In Mistress America, Greta Gerwig’s character brags that she taught herself what “autodidact” means.
Ah, but if they think the girl will flunk calculus (or whatever) because girl cooties, they have target-related reasons to advise her not to take it…
My daughter was also advised not to take AP CS as a freshman for the same target-related reason that the guidance counselor didn’t think she’d do very well, although not for sexist reasons; in that case the “freshman” part was more relevant than the “girl” part. (In any case, the counselor was wrong.)
Good point.
But I suspect that ~15% of the populace has a deep inbuilt curiosity, another ~15% can have their weak curiousity embers fanned by good schooling (if it’s not being actively quenched by their parents), and the remaining 65% of humanity desires to use their brain not at all. For that latter group, thinking is like carrying a heavy weight around: a labor best avoided wherever / whenever / however possible.
Eat, sleep, work, veg, and emote is soooo much easier than thinking or, gasp, learning.
A famous quote by W.C. Fields (?) applies:
Whenever I get the urge to exercise I lie down for a nap until it passes.
Just change “exercise” to “think” and that’s how most people operate their mind.
So ~30 percent might wonder where that other 5% went?
Oops. They would wonder in vain. But I think those 5% are probably part of the 65-shoulda-been-70 percent.
Advising a freshman not to take AP classes is perfectly reasonable, even if there are occasional exceptions where it works out well. Especially since, for freshmen, the counselors haven’t yet gotten a chance to know the students well enough to know who the exceptions are.
I might say that the counselor was mistaken, but not that they were wrong.
“Advising” is a bit misleading. At least in the school my daughter attended, “advising not to” means “not allowed to”.
Many schools with “high achieving” student populations have many students graduating with 15 or more AP and DE classes (nominally up to 60 college credits).
The key is why. If, as in the case of my daughter, the reason is her lack of testicles, that’s very bad indeed. If anyone is not allowed to take a course, the counselor or principal should be able to articulate academic reasons for it. Certainly in the case of my daughter, they did not even try. Because they knew those reasons were equally valid for other students who were allowed to take the classes.
That’s still dumb, but at least it makes some sense. As for the not wanting girls to go to engineering college, is this some rich-person thing I don’t get because I went to a mediocre comprehensive? In the UK you have to go to a private school to get that kind of privilege; it’s a very different environment.
Ah, that might be my private-school bias speaking, there. At my school, we recommend certain students for certain classes, but ultimately, if the parents insist, well, they’re paying big bucks to be here, and so they have the final word. Which does sometimes include things like students who should be in the remedial sections taking the honors sections. Which in turn usually leads to the student and parents realizing just why we recommended the remedial sections. But it’s their choice.
Yes. The US education system is different from the UK. There are school districts and school catchment areas that are wildly wealthier than others (and also culturally different than others, Silicon Valley rich is very different from Greenwich/Rye rich).
I know families in a certain fairly affluent part of UK who all live within 500m of each other but their kids went to five different government funded schools in year 6-10. In the same years. This does not happen in the US, except in the largest, most densely populated cities (like New York).
Some public schools (i.e. government funded, open to all, no admission exams) are like affluent Independent schools in the UK in terms of socioeconomic status and culture. Though the Independent schools in the UK are usually more ethnically diverse than many of the very wealthy public school districts in the US. Until 20 years ago the two “best” schools in our area were over 99% white. They are now 95/97% white (3-5% Asian) and this is enough to freak people out. Because you know, next thing you know, you have girls who want to be engineers.
yet the same parents want to home-school their kids; in fact, how many parents have skills/knowledge (science, algebra, history, et al) to properly educate their kids?
And if they do, are they going to be willing to give up the money they can get using those skills in the workplace?
My wife and I could have handled it, but it was much better to use our time to enrich our kids education and help with any subject they were having difficulty with. (Not many, as it turned out.)
I’d like to see schools have a significant focus on social skills. Learning how to interact with others is useful in all areas of life. It will help with work, relationships, friendships, self-esteem, and overall happiness. Most of what is taught instead is comparatively worthless. I’ve always been supportive of the 3 R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic), but sadly even those are getting less important. I know so many people that cannot do the most basic math, but they always have a phone so really don’t need to know how to do it. And sadly, I see more and more young people using programs to read their homework to them rather than reading themselves (but I still think everyone should be taught to read and write in school if at all possible).
As for everything else, it is mostly in one ear and out the other. Even people that are absolute masters of a subject matter at the end of a school year are likely to remember almost none of it 10 years later if it doesn’t regularly come up in their lives (I see this happen with History all the time, where they are very knowledgeable of what happened in the world in the past when in high school and college and remember virtually nothing at the age of 30).
Social skills are at least something that come up often, so time spent learning them is less likely to be wasted as people will probably use it enough to remember it.
I’m a pretty smart person, aced all my high school classes, etc but I have a much smarter kid and when he asks me questions, I am routinely stumped by things I no doubt knew long ago. Really basic things I’m not confessing to here. Because it’s been so damned long. I could relearn all this stuff to try to teach him but it would be incredibly time intensive for me to say, relearn anything beyond basic algebra, or teach chemistry. Maybe when you home school you just learn it all over again at the kid’s pace, I dunno. But I don’t feel particularly equipped to teach any subject. The idea of parents, many of whom probably didn’t do particularly well in school themselves, appointing themselves as educators, has always freaked me out a bit.
My wife was a teacher for 35 years, and she will tell you that whatever you think a school should be teaching, there will be at least one family in every class who not only disagrees with it, but is a living example of whatever you’re trying NOT to teach.
Think payday loans are bad? There’s at least one family that uses them almost every month. Think renting is better than owning? There’s at least one family who is teaching their kids that owning a house is not only the American Dream, but also the only way to build generational wealth. There are families who are convinced that mentioning any kind of skilled trade is an insult to their child’s intelligence, and others who believe college is a waste of time.
That doesn’t even begin to address the culture wars, where every book, every lesson plan, every handout is scrutinized to make sure to make sure it’s not ideological or woke or something-ist.
And the teachers and administrators and school boards have to push all those threads through a single needle and find enough money to fund it.
I’d be pleased if Americans would learn a) that the Roman republic existed and b) its significance to the founders of the United States. To hear people talk you’d think there’d been nothing but empire all along. You’re right; to learn how the republic was replaced by the empire is a warning the moderns should heed.
So you don’t teach that a particular outcome is right or wrong per se, you try to give them whatever mental tools and insights your particular subject offers, so as to decide for themselves what suits them. Though granted, that alone can be anathema to some parents.
It can happen in the US. Some communities in the US have experimented with deliberately mixing up students geographically, in an effort to overcome the injustices associated with poor (and black) areas getting worse schools while rich (and white) areas get better schools (it didn’t work; all of the schools ended up bad, and the rich, white families fled to the suburbs and/or to private schools). And some communities are currently experimenting with a wide variety of more specialized schools, so a student who’s interested in art might go to a different public high school from one interested in engineering. Or trades, or business, or whatever.
Then there are schools like New York’s Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Technical high schools, which were founded as “schools for students who are interested in math and science,” but gradually turned into “schools for students who scored high enough on the admissions test to get in.”
Sounds about right.
Sometimes you have to teach what to think, and sometimes how to think, but I way on the side of leaning towards the latter.
So a high school graduate should know enough economics – say, what inflation is and tariffs are – to understand the New York Times. But teaching that buying is better than renting, or that index funds are good and individual stocks bad – no.
I don’t think mentioned yet is calculus vs. statistics. I do lean towards statistics.