How about some brainstorming how to make better schools?
In your opinion, what would a better school-system look like?
Let's just brainstorm and throw some ideas out there.
For example:
- I wonder why so much effort is put on delivering information to the students and so little effort is put on teaching them how to handle information.
Why not teach students learning-techniques, time-management-techniques?
Why not teach them mnemonic techniques how to memorize long lists of boring trivia? (The swiss mind-artist Gregor Staub has taught his kids a modified version of the "ars memoriae"-technique by passing it off to them as a game about storytelling.)
- Why not a philosophy-class?
It could teach the students about various different philosophical concepts:
* For example, the concept that things are "good" or "evil", originally posited by the persian philosopher Zoroaster. (Then ask students whether it makes sense to split the world into good and evil, how to tell good from evil, whether good is always good and evil always evil...)
* For example: The religious concept of the will of a god determining the world vs the concept of a demiourgos (gods + laws of nature) vs the concept of laws of nature without gods.
* For example: What the scientific method is, where it comes from, its tenets and limits... And a few simple experiments ("Do things fall down? How do you know?"
to show them how to apply the scientific method.
* What is religion, what is believing, what kinds of religions are there...
- What is a discussion? How to hold a discussion? How to gather arguments? How to weigh arguments against each other? How to hold a speech in front of an audience?
- The philosophy-class could veer off towards mathematics and IT:
* Boolean algebra, logic structures (If A=B and B=C then A=C) ...
For example:
Remember the Windows-game "Minesweeper"? It's possible to use this game's elements to simulate the workings of a logic circuit-board: You can recreate a wire, a "NOT"-element, "OR", "AND"... If you have some space available, you can build an addition-element: You enter the first bit at one entry of the maze, the second bit at another entry of the maze, and at the exit of the maze you get both bits added up.
http://www.formauri.es/personal/pgimeno/compurec/Minesweeper.php
For example: This is how you build a wire in Minesweeper:
And this is a NOT-element:
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traditionalists. He thought experience should rule vs just regurgitating pap.
If you want to see that in action, read about Summerhill, the school.
But they killed off Dewey and we got a system that teaches kids to be just as fucked up as the people who are teaching them. Easier to control that way.
At your local land-grant university you can find the remains of these discussions, in the area of educational philosophy. It might make you sad to see how we have evolved, however.
Here's some older wisdom. It's not mine, but I'll phrase it in personal terms.
I passed through elementary school. We'd be given a chapter to read in the textbook. We'd come to school and be asked questions over it ("check for understanding, informal formative assessment" . We'd practice much of it, review it, possibly be asked to come up with inferences based on the information ("knowledge building" . Perhaps there'd be a quiz ("formal formative assessment" and reteaching prior to the (summative) test.
And a lot of students would fail. Their decoding skills sucked. Or they could decode but couldn't understand. You needed to figure out how to study, how to manage time. You'd need to sort out what was important in the reading (and certainly on the test) versus trivia (that may make the difference between a 90 and a 100 on the test). And learning required retention and incorporating this into one's knowledge. Good students figured this out. Students with educated or knowledgeable education-committed parents had a non-monetary cultural "boost" in terms of vocabulary, syntax, study skills, time management, and even how to sort out important from trivia, what learning was. They'd figure this out by 3rd or 4th grade and carry those skills with them. Others might figure it out in 8th or 9th grade, by which point they'd be at a disadvantage. Many never figured it out. (Some would use the long-since discredited "learning style" excuse to say it wasn't the students' lack of study skills or cultural background, but the teacher's fault. Notice the word "discredited" before "learning style."
Here ends the older wisdom. Grades were deemed mere rankings of ability, and so "we" came up with tests that required an explicit list of tasks and skills. Unless it was taught explicitly at least twice in class, you can't put it on a test. All the trivia is fine, but you don't test trivia, you test concepts, but you let the kids know which concepts will be on the test (or might be on the test, but then you have to limit the number). Yes, it's dumbing down the testing so that the formerly good kids get As without learning the study skills. We teach to the bottom 15% in many courses for "on level" students or repeaters.
In a lot of schools, though, that's still the case--good students suss out how to learn, poor students don't, mediocre students focus on facts and not knowledge building, and poor students aspire to rote memorization followed by memory deletion. Then they all get to college and a "study skills" class is required. The "good students" blow it off as the waste of time it is; the poor students see this and often do the same, even though they need them. Some politically "aware" kids realize it's an attempt at reforming part of their behavior or "culture" and insist that education be reformulated with them in mind. (They're the "compromise is evil, defiance is good" crowd). In some schools, esp. low SES/low performing schools, they have a required study skills class.
You can't "teach" these skills too early. Yes, that's ambiguous, and both readings are true. You can't have a class in which you teach these skills to early elementary school students. They don't have the metacognition for it yet and you teach nothing of use to most of the kids. Yet the earlier you get kids trained to do these things, the better. And the key to that is to train the parents. Then when the kid's mental development catches up, most of the time the connection is made quickly and easily.
Locally they tried this parent-training exercise. The first year it exploded. They had mostly black parents with mostly white trainers reading the script produced by experts. They held off a couple of years and brought in black trainers to say the same words--really, they had their scripts in hand as they spoke, both time--and this was judged acceptable. (Well, some of the Latino parents insisted on Latino trainers.) But mostly the parents just learned the facts, they memorized the vocabulary, and stopped attending the training sessions once they could repeat the facts back to the trainers. Their kids did no better in school because nobody *trained* the parents in new behaviors to train their kids. The parents had declarative knowledge, but didn't implement it; they never learned that learning requires knowledge integration and retention and memorization wasn't enough, they blindly repeated the phrase back and wanted their reward. Having missed the point of what education was, they (again) missed the point of what education was. (This is often what happens in study-skill classes. I don't know how many students I've seen fail core class after core class, but still get a solid A in "study skills", or kids who get an A in "criterion based" tests but retain nothing after 4 weeks, as expected when learning is fact recitation and short-term memory. For them, a study skills class is a test-preparation class.)
The local school district has announced a third round of parent-training, but will it work? If you can get past the parents' racism and their lack of education, perhaps.
As for the philosophy, some kids could handle it. Some couldn't. Depends, again, on their background. I know high school seniors who are in college-level history and literature classes, and HS seniors who are struggling to read a 300-word paragraph in 40 minutes. Those in college-level calculus and learning integration by parts and trig substitution and those who have to ask, time after time, how to add 1/3 + 1/2 or how to enter 1/3 into the calculator. I've seen college kids who miss the point of such classes.
Heck, once watched a high-school junior struggle with a test question. "If a student spills acid on his hand, what should he do first?" He couldn't understand the question. He was thrown by the phrase "a student." It might matter which student it was, and he wanted to know who spilled the acid. We simplified it on the fly to "If Dante spilled acid on his hand, what should he do first?" Immediately, the kid yelled out, "Dante, you stupid, spilling acid on your hand" and then answered the question correctly, once Dante stopped defending himself and saying he didn't spill any acid. The question was too damned abstract for the kid, who was not special ed. 17 years old with a developmental age of perhaps 8.
Most decent American high schools have implemented tracking. They don't call it that; in fact, they deny that they do it. But if you look at scores for SpEd, on-level, pre-AP, pre-IB and GT kids' classes, you see tracking just as clearly as you would have in 1965.
I like the idea of vocational training for some kids. Splitting out the humanities from the technical kids. And tracking, if the kids are given the option of requesting a review of their track status or moving up a level (or down a level) by request.
