Nice article. I think an essential point to make could be Get out of the way. As Sugata Mitra's hole-in-the-wall experiment in India has shown, if children have the rudimentary tools - in this case an old outdoor computer - and are challenged in an unorthodox way to teach themselves about something, they can learn much more than one would anticipate. He has also done some interesting work on collaborative learning. Watch his TedTalk, he is a very charming speaker.
I appreciate the emphasis you place on critical thinking, and to accompany it I would also suggest another point teach children how to learn systematically without supervision.
- I personally am continually shocked at how many students I see that don't know how to use a dictionary properly, or have never even opened one thanks to smartphones.
- Taking notes in class below the university level has practically vanished from our public schools, and often when told to kids just don't know how.
- Further, real library skills are fading, researching in a library is essentially obsolete below the university level thanks to the deification of the internet. If the electrical grid fails in the future, entire generations of people won't know how to find a book in the library on how to fix it.
This is the reason there are so many courses at the universities that are about teaching students how to research and learn on their own in the first two years, because they don't learn it beforehand. Even these introductory courses are fading at the undergraduate level and being rescheduled for graduate students instead.
I am in what my colleagues call 'the trenches' of public education now, and I taught at the university level for many years, so I am under no illusions as to the successful nature of public schools today. Nor are many of my colleagues. It is surprising how many teachers view educating children to be successful in the world as a kind of battle against ignorance and apathy. Most of them however absolutely balk when I advocate home schooling . Upon showing them the research however, many changed their tune. That is a scary concept for teachers and teacher unions however, because it basically advocates getting rid of a ton of jobs. Even though in a complete home school world there would be room for professional teachers, there would by necessity be far fewer than there are today. And any attempt to reform the education system in many countries has to go through the unions sooner or later.
As to solutions, as it has been noted in the discussion here, inside of the present system any real reform is highly unlikely. The Waldorf schools and their kind have made some inroads in providing alternatives, but public education is modeled on the Prussian early-industrial nationalist model that instills obedience to the state and "manufactures" children into conformist laborers. And the government likes it that way, especially thanks to the oligarch industrialists who provide politicians with financial incentives to produce laborers. Never ever let it be forgotten that John D. Rockefeller funded and supported the push for compulsory public education in the USA with his advisor Frederick T. Gates who said:
"In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."
That said, I enjoy the idea of a return to the agora (Platonic Academy mixed with homeschooling and independent learning. It does not appear to be a coincidence to me that debate forms of education among learned men are more effective than lectures taken from dusty books, frontal instruction and memorization techniques. It would be a fantastic thing for me to see something along the lines of a football stadium repurposed to be full of professors circulating and debating and discussing with each other and students. That would enable people to follow ideas in a more interdisciplinary manner. Uff, I have to get up early and it is very late here.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post dwinblood!
Well said. If you missed the initial linked post about blindness... a couple of days ago I had the Prussian Education System in my crosshairs. :)
Also brilliant observation to mention agora. That is definitely worth revisiting. That process produced a lot of brilliant people. How many it truly produced we'll never know unless we develop a time machine since so much of their work was lost with the burning of the Library of Alexandria (catastrophe of ignorance).
I know there are good educators out there in Universities and in the K-12. A lot of them are confined by the increasing standardization, common core, and trying to homogenize our youth.
It still does me good to encounter educators who SEE it. They simply don't know how to stop it now, yet they do what they can.
The universities (unless you go to one that hasn't changed) are plagued by this same thing. Since the guaranteed student loan and the requirements to get funding that is guaranteed tons of "colleges" have sprung up. I've encountered people with three PhDs and was baffled how they had ONE when I spoke to them. I've encountered Bachelors and Masters degree computer science students that I was left wondering if they got their degree out of a Cracker Jacks box.
The education in the U.S. is deteriorating rapidly. Seems to have happened when we decided the Federal Government should be in charge of it. Most people don't even know there was no Department of Education prior to 1986.
You are bang on the money to my mind. Important too is the General Education Board and its role in the states. Less benevolent than it may seem. Also worth noting is that Frederick Gates mentioned in my post above is, I believe, a forefather of Bill Gates. The Gates Foundation got into the education game with common core and that has been an unmitigated disaster.
Your posts always just grab hold of me and won't let me go softly into that good night. I may pick up more in the comments where there's an interaction between you and the commenters that just expands on your original post.
You may add twice as much in your replies than you had in your original post.
I had to look and see if the Teachers Unions grew along with the creation of the Dept of Ed and here's what the American Federation of Teachers web site says:
English translation , "We latched on to that government teat and haven't stopped sucking yet."
Neither literally nor figuratively, they suck big time.
In my opinion, that's also a huge barrier to education reform, the cash cow that is the teachers union.
Add to that the idea that it's not about education, it's always been about indoctrination for the masses and it all makes sense. It's wrong but there's a logic to it.
There is a documentary out there I think called "Waiting for Superman" or something like that and it was about education and problems with it. The things that are happening in some states due to unions is ridiculous.
I had totally forgotten about that.
All I kept asking myself as a parent was "Was it this bad when I was in school? I don't remember it being this bad". I graduated from High School in 1989. The Department of Education didn't exist until 1986.
So when people like Ron Paul are calling for getting rid of the department of education. People scream like he is crazy. How many of them know that it didn't exist prior to 1986 and we did just fine, perhaps even better than now?
When he calls for the end of the IRS and income tax, how many of the people don't know that prior to 1913 such a thing didn't exist?
They act like it is crazy before they even look into the history.
How many people think the pledge of allegiance always had "one nation under God" without looking into it and finding out that it was added in 1950s (54 I think, I didn't go google it)? It was added with the idea that it was fighting communism, or at least that was the excuse.
How many people see someone hold their hand out like a Hitler style Zeig Heil type salute and call that persons Nazi's without realizing that we used to hold our hand very similar in the U.S. when stating the pledge to the flag. We only changed it AFTER the Nazi's in an attempt to avoid the stereotypes.
There are a lot of things people think are crazy and nuts, yet they just are having kneejerk reactions without stopping to think, research, etc.
They have drunk from the everlasting spring of kool-ade (and I understand the Jim Jones connotation) and gone back for refills.
I'll hold out hope.