<p>B@r!um, it’s scary how closely your opinions in your last several posts mirror my feeling about education and learning in general. It would be good that while opportunities are available for those who are truly interested in either exploring or learning a subject in-depth, for someone who’s lukewarm, it’s better they learn skills that are relevant in today’s society and not be forced to learn one of x different things that are irrelevant for most of us.</p>
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American kids will care about learning in school when they have to make a real, tangible sacrifice in order to attend. Nothing complicated about that.</p>
<p>Dad<em>of</em>3, if you don’t develop the skills to approach primary artifacts ranging from buildings to paintings to works of literature, then you leave yourself in the hands of interpreters, and, especially when it comes to primary artifacts that touch upon controversial religious or political subjects, that can put you at a disadvantage. Does this mean that people who don’t develop that independence will necessarily have poorer personal lives or not make as much money? No. But it does mean that they will remain dependent and more susceptible to being deceived. To me, this diminishes their essential human freedom, and it makes me sad to see.</p>
<p>The kid in the video is so right. No one at my school really cares about the actual learning, as they prefer to just pass the class and move on. </p>
<p>It really upsets me when students at my school say “My teacher GAVE me a C this semester” or “I can’t believe Mrs. Smith GAVE me a D on my essay.” They completely deny the fact that they earned the grade they received. When I get a B on a project, I understand that I didn’t put my best effort forth. I don’t fight my teacher over the grade citing the typical “Oh my English teacher hates me so I will never pass.” </p>
<p>I think to fix education, we need to make students accountable for their work. They do not work hard enough for their grades and always blame someone else for their shortcomings. Sure the kids on CC are great, but they represent only the top 10% of students.</p>
<p>@SLACFac I completely agree with you that people should be well-educated and well-rounded for the reasons you stated. However, I don’t think that high school currently gives you those advantages, because they teach you those interpretations (instead of focusing more on the facts), which still causes a sort of indoctrination.</p>
<p>SLACFac, if the goal of secondary education is to enhance our understanding of the world that we are currently living in, why don’t we start by studying our world right now? Let’s examine contemporary social trends and politics and literature, and incorporate older sources to give us a wider or more nuanced perspective where it makes sense. THAT would make me appreciate and care about old material. If you randomly hand be a book by Kafka or give me a lecture on the different schools of arts, I don’t know how to integrate that meaningfully into my mental picture of the world. </p>
<p>I am not arguing that we shouldn’t teach history or art or chemistry. I am saying that we need to communicate the message in a way that makes sense to the recipient. </p>
<p>Unlike older generations, current students have grown up with access to virtually unlimited amounts of information. By necessity, we have learned to prioritize the information that seems relevant to us and ignore the rest. School is the only institution that routinely delivers information unprompted and without a tangible purpose for the recipient. That makes school material naturally land in the mental trash bin of many youngsters.</p>
<p>Though it saddens me to feel this way, I do not enjoy “learning” in the way it’s done in school. I love to actually learn new things, but I feel like school forces things on students, which makes them want to rebel. I really think that being forced to read specific books at a specific pace has really tainted my love of reading.</p>
<p>Another problem (perhaps the greatest, in my opinion), is that schooling is all based on making sure everyone meets the expectations and nothing more. I go to a fantastic public school in MD, which is well-known for it’s good school system, but it seems the administration only cares about pushing kids hard enough to pass the HSAs. Should we have a meritocracy in our schools and give up on kids who don’t test well? Of course not! But it is unreasonable to not push kids to be more than mediocre. If everyone stops when they meet expectations, who will be the leaders and exceptional thinkers of the future?</p>
<p>I think there needs to be a drastic shift in societal views of education in order for kids to enjoy learning again. I hear kids in elementary school saying they hate school and it really makes me sad. My mom told me a story about when my siblings and I were all in elementary school and we were all checking out books from the library near the end of summer break. A woman nearby turned to my brother and said something along the lines of, “I bet you’re really sad you have to go back to school soon.” My mom actually yelled at her (in her “library voice,” of course) for perpetuating the foolish societal belief that school is something that gets in the way of fun. Maybe when parents read to and do homework with their kids, kids will start to enjoy learning at a young age.</p>
<p>Am I the only one who thinks it’s not the educational system that’s deficient, it’s that parents are far more lenient with their kids?</p>
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If anything I would say the exact opposite is true based on what a high school typically teaches in anything controversial.</p>
<p>But my comment was in other less controversial areas. Take visual arts - If a student is really interested in the subject, then great - there’s time to study all aspects; if a student is indifferent, it would be far more useful to teach him how to use his smartphone and Photoshop to take better images than drone on about Monet or Renoir or long dead some Egyptian painting style. I would have done much better if my art teacher had talked about the difference between Kodachrome and Kodacolor and went over dodging and burning or filters than anything I cared to learn in several years of art class and cave paintings from thousands of years ago. If there’s anything that’s common, say composition, then cover it, otherwise, just focus on what’s relevant now. Same with literature - maybe reading “A tale of two cities” or “Pride and Prejudice” should have made me a better person - it didn’t. I just found them verbose, boring, and irrelevant. I would have done a whole lot better with something like the Odessa File if it was felt that I had to be taught literature. </p>
<p>And I’m not picking on art or literature only - I think our schools’ obsession with Calc is misplaced - for a large number who know they aren’t going to an Engg track, it’s a waste, and painful at that. If for some reason we have to have a mandatory x years of math, Statistics would be more relevant for the masses.</p>
<p>DS and I both studied EE and Comp Sci, and thank heaven he wasn’t subjected ad nauseum to the historic moments involving vacuum tube devices or '60s computer architecture because a year learning something contemporary is vastly more valuable than spending the same time with some iconic but thoroughly obsolete thing from the past instead.</p>
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<p>There’s definitely a kernel of truth there. As the kid said in his video, there are too many ridiculous art classes that the parents petition for. “Oh, little Jack is too sensitive to take Algebra; Math and Politics, which teaches you basic addition that comes with teaching about how the colorful maps in the electoral college pick the President. That is much more his style.” Man up.</p>
<p>Dad<em>of</em>3, well said! I fully agree with you.</p>
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<p>I’m not convinced that stricter parenting would solve the problem. The impression I got in school is that the best students had very intellectual (but not necessarily strict) parents. And then there were the students who had mental breakdowns in the days leading up to a big exam because they were trying so hard to make sense of material that just didn’t make any sense to them. That was the result of strict parenting.</p>
<p>A desire to learn and the right mindset to succeed in academics seem to come from parents modeling and encouraging such behavior, not parents setting strict rules.</p>
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<p>Or, most likely,from spending the days leading up to the exam Facebookig and Tweeting and then having a nervous breakdown from trying to cram a month of info the night before the big test.</p>
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When I went to high school, there was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter. In fact, most families didn’t even own a computer yet.</p>
<p>I don’t think that they were otherwise procrastinating either. I am thinking of students who spent their lunch breaks and free periods studying ahead for an exam in two weeks while everyone else was socializing and having fun. They were just under too much pressure.</p>
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<p>That’s another drawback for education on every level – you’re taught everything except how to study. 99% of the time, those 60 minutes are spent studying the wrong way (i.e. reading over your notes and highlighting). There are more effective ways to study, and the lack of knowledge of how to do so effectively is, in my experience, what causes students the most stress.</p>
<p>I’m jealous that you got an hour for lunch!</p>
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Lunch break was fun, but it also meant that we didn’t get out of school until 3:30…</p>
<p>^ I’m guessing you got in later, then? Win win ;).</p>
<p>Does 8am count as late? I guess. Given that my school bus picked me up at 6:50, I am glad that school didn’t start earlier.</p>
<p>Haha. We get in @ 8:30, & have 40 minutes for lunch, then leave @ 3:30 :(! And I thought our schedule was pretty winning!</p>
<p>Sent from my SGH-T959V using CC</p>
<p>OK, it’s late and I’m tired, so I’m deliberately picking one point of many to address here.</p>
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<p>I think it is so dangerous to just learn about contemporary things as though they items produced through some delightful creatio ex nihilo. Learning about things in this way means that you miss out on a lot of meaning. To steal a phrase, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your [or anyone’s] philosophy.</p>
<p>And that’s just it–most people aren’t educated enough or exposed to enough to actually correctly identify or contextualize the information that they need to know or that is relevant for optimal decision-making. Instead they use the narrow filters created by their very limited perspective, desires and perceived needs. This leads most people to be very bad at making choices–especially, though not exclusively limited to, collective ones–in the long-term. No one agrees on how to solve this problem, but some argue that discussion or other methods of learning about different perspectives, attitudes, etc. may be one of the best of a highly imperfect group of ways because it widens the frames of reference used for information gathering, etc.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the problem with bowing to demands that we teach what students think or have decided is relevant or contemporary or exciting is that there is such a thing as taste. Part of what we’re supposed to be doing in education is developing that sense of taste. (Another more formal term we might use here is “aesthetic education.”). Please note that saying “something is tasteful” is different from saying, “I like this.” Like Dad<em>of</em>3, I get virtually no personal enjoyment out of reading most 19th c. literature, but I understand why it was (and still is, to some) considered tasteful. Forcing myself to really think through why I have a negative reaction to this type of literature has allowed me to develop my own sense of taste and made me a better (and more open) critic and consumer of literature, art, film, etc. Again, do these things make me wealthier? Probably not, but I think they contribute to my human freedom and flourishing.</p>
<p>The problem with this at the high school level is easy to spot: there is no such thing as “right” or “wrong” taste in the same way that there is a “right” or a “wrong” answer to most types of math problems or science calculations that high school students do. Instead, it is more appropriate to talk about “better” or “worse” taste. Given this, these are some things that might happen:
1)“Taste” can’t be measured well on a standardized test, so the “taste” disciplines are reduced to the bits that can be measured well on such instruments, if the subjects are even measured on a standardized test (read=prioritized in school) at all.<br>
2)Because assignments that deal with questions of taste cannot be simply marked right or wrong, the grades given on those assignments can be open to a lot of contestation, which some K-12 administrators might find uncomfortable.
3)Because the institutional framework of modern K-12 is very hostile to teaching those subjects, a lot of people with real knowledge and passion for the “taste” disciplines are really not going to be inclined to teach them at the K-12 level.</p>
<p>As an aside, I were to make a list of Shakespeare plays I least enjoy, Midsummer would be close to the top. However, knowledge of the play, which I don’t like, allows me to appreciate this, which is one of my favorite things in the world:</p>
<p>[Beatles</a> Shakespear skit (in color) - YouTube](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhJ67QsFg1Q]Beatles”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhJ67QsFg1Q) <a href=“the%20Beatles%20spoof%20Shakespeare”>link text sic</a></p>
<p>SLACFac, you brilliantly managed to avoid the crux of our argument. No one was saying that we should stop teaching literature. Using your own example of 19th century literature, our question was the following:</p>
<p>Given that compulsory education is limited in scope, should 19th century literature be prioritized over contemporary issues (as it currently is)? </p>
<p>My answer is a firm “no.” Giving students information or tools that they cannot process (like 19th century literature when they are not yet mature enough to work with it critically) is no better than giving them no information or tools at all.</p>