The utter insanity of blaming teachers only and letting parents and students off the hook.

[wickerwoman]

32. I've taught in the US and in China.

The standard of teaching was much higher in the US but the standard of achievement was higher in China. Why?

1. Parents in China accept nothing less than straight As. In the US, if a student gets a bad grade, the parent is as likely to blame the teacher as the kid. In China, there are no excuses. Even with a "bad" teacher the student is expected to get an A.

2. The general culture stresses hard work, learning and achievement. There's a saying "Give your kid a happy childhood and you have given them a failed adulthood." Kids are not allowed to sit around playing video games and watching TV seven hours a day. When they aren't in school, they're at music lessons or sports or language classes, etc. Even very poor families spend every last spare penny on their kid's education.

I'm not saying that the US should emulate China's model. All of that pressure and regementation is terrible for kids and crushes their creative spirit.

But I am saying if you want to see *genuinely* inept teaching, go to China. The kids succeed anyway because the message they get from their parents and from society is much more powerful and enduring that what they get from their teachers.

Another good example is Jamie Oliver's Dream School experiment. He hired world-renowned charismatic experts in the fields of biology, history, music, photography, etc. and gave them unlimited budgets to design lesson plans and then put them in a room full of the British equivalent of high school drop-outs and for the most part, the kids didn't learn a thing. They talked over the teachers, got into fights, slept, skipped classes.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Putting the best teachers in the world in front of kids that just don't give a shit because they know they can drop out and make millions on Jersey Shore and then evaluating the teachers based on how the kids perform remains a fundamentally stupid idea.