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[redwallzyl]

Part of the issue (How to keep children interested/engaged, while also assuring a more or less uniform practice of availability and standardized educational CV) is that what interests students is a very "per student" thing, and what society wants from schools is "homogeneous CV acquisition."

EG, the society is less concerned that billy and jane like English class, or develop a love for literature. The society wants billy and jane to be able to read instructions competently.

Then there is the whole, "billy is from an inner city with a high crime rate (and is also black), while jane is from an affluent suburban area with a low crime rate (and is also white)-- how do we assure that billy has the same CV as jane (or even has the same opportunities to gain a robust CV as jane)?"

Even with our "Cookie cutter, all kids are cardboard cutouts" approach to education, we *STILL* are not achieving this latter goal.

If we adopted, say-- the German methodology, where interests are identified early, nurtured, and students guided down preset pathways to assure high quality but very disparate outcomes-- we would have the "equality" people up in arms, because it would (by necessity of its design) segregate outcomes, and have strong statistical biases in those outcomes based on population and geographical demographic profiles. (What is interesting to impoverished inner city kids is going to be different than what is interesting to privileged affluent suburban kids, and so, the interest scores for various academic paths will be different, so on a track-based system, you will have wild differences in rates between the two.)

This is getting into the "I want my cake and eat it too." territory.  Not every child is a budding physicist, or a writer of masterful fiction, or an aspiring engineer.  Some kids really are "Future janitor."  Society does not want to acknowledge this, is in love with the idea that everyone should be cookie-cutter equal as children, even when in practice, all this does is disinterest 99% of the student body, and ensure a homogeneous but terrible outcome.

The biggest issue with the american system is the funding. Its inherently unequal and that will inevitably produce undesirable outcomes until removed. Its hard to talk about fixes when we are not even trying. It seems impossible to do anything when the solution of a certain group is to keep cutting funding, shoving more kids into classrooms, and closing down schools.

[wierd]

Underfunding is indeed a serious issue.

But so is "One person in class cant figure out how to use commas, so the first half of the year will be review hell for everyone else, because we dont dare segregate the kid who cant figure comma use out and give him private tutoring."

[redwallzyl]

Underfunding is indeed a serious issue.

But so is "One person in class cant figure out how to use commas, so the first half of the year will be review hell for everyone else, because we dont dare segregate the kid who cant figure comma use out and give him private tutoring."

True fact, I recall nothing of proper comma use and have been winging it for years. No one seems to care.

[wierd]

Really? I do. If for no other reason, than because of the endless review hell I endured because of the handful of kids who could not read in highschool, because of a variety of reasons.

Just a few of the rules:
When creating lists. (though this gets complicated, as sometimes semicolon is more appropriate.) (ex: Billy likes candy, soda, and hotdogs. [yes, I used Oxford comma. Get over it.])
After introductory clauses (ex: When class is in session, please refrain from throwing spitballs.)
before dependent clauses (Jimmy likes waffles for breakfast, not dinner.)
after a prepositional phrase (Above most streetlights, one will often find a photo sensor.)

etc.

The issue happens in schools when kids can't seem to grasp that you should not make abusive use of commas.  Such sins as the comma spliced run-on sentence and pals.  You know, things like "Billy likes to eat breakfast in the mornings, but sometimes he likes to skip it, and instead go the whole morning without any food until lunch."   rather than "Billy does not always eat breakfast. Sometimes he skips it, going straight to lunch before eating."

This upsets English teachers, especially when they *JUST* went over this in class. For the kids that understand comma use, *YET ANOTHER GOD DAMNED REVIEW HELL SESSION BECAUSE BILLY CAN'T STOP USING RUN-ONS* makes kids that would otherwise be quite receptive to proper grammar, give up in disgust, as the experience becomes a monotonous litany of mental anguish.

This is the counterstroke to "no child left behind!"

The stated goal is to assure that Billy does in fact eventually learn how to use commas properly. It does that, by exhaustive review.
However, it also turns off 99% of the other students, through the same mechanism.

It is that way because the system is dependent upon creating standardized outcomes, rather than properly dealing with outliers.

[redwallzyl]

I think people might care a bit to much about commas. Just mark the offending sentence up with a red pen and move on. If they care enough they will fix it. If not it's not the end of the world. You incentivize change you should not force it. That won't be received well.

[Trekkin]

I think people might care a bit to much about commas. Just mark the offending sentence up with a red pen and move on. If they care enough they will fix it. If not it's not the end of the world. You incentivize change you should not force it. That won't be received well.

It also disincentivizes risking errors, which is one of my biggest problems with how schools tend to work currently: the mathematical necessities of grading on a fixed scale means there's no real incentive to go above and beyond an A+, but errors almost always cost points, and so the optimal strategy is to do as little beyond excellent as possible to avoid red ink. This carries over into the teaching of mathematics, which is almost always an exercise in the proofreading of arithmetic rather than learning new concepts just because arithmetic will get you every time but you can learn the concepts by rote. Science ends up working this way too: it's about fidelity to the one right answer rather than being progressively less wrong, which is the overwhelming majority of actual science.

People decry memorization, but I'd argue that reliance on memorization for learning is simply a result of a focus on testable facts and processes and the idea that freedom from errors and surpassing a set level of effort constitutes perfection, which are in turn outgrowths of the arcane processes of curriculum design.

[Kagus]

Heh, I remember the kids in the neighborhood we were staying at in India has asked us (my parents and me) to help them with their English homework.

It soon became clear that the Indian educational system was based solely around memorization, any and all variation from the exact, specific answer will earn you a smack. Asking the wrong questions or asking out of turn will also earn you smacks.

What resulted was a group of kids with absolutely phenomenal memorization abilities, capable of storing an entire book's worth of problems in their head at a time... But with absolutely no understanding of any of it.

Asking the questions on the exam sheet would produce perfect recitations of the answer paragraph. Asking the questions with slightly different wording (I.e., "On page three, what paragraph comes after the first one?" rather than "What is paragraph two on page three?"), or even asking the same questions with the same wording but not in the order they're printed on the exam sheet will result in nothing more than several blank, worried stares.

We also ended up correcting some of the bad grammar and spelling that was present in the book, an act that earned the kids even more smacks and one very peeved teacher... But that's a different matter, heh.

And then you have Norway, and you know how the northern European countries are with their excellent educational systems... Well, except for the occasional little  blunder like the mandatory university course with its less than 40% pass rate on the exam, and that grade school kid who was just a bit too bright for his class and ended up going past the set goal page for that week.

When he delivered the workbook to his teacher, the teach just erased everything he'd done beyond the "appropriate" stopping point before handing it back.

Naturally, this was a bit of a blow to the child, whose parents tried contacting the school and asking if they could make an exception to the enforced standardization of the curriculum and let him have some different tutoring or at least give him a more challenging workload to stimulate his noggin.

The only response they got was a notification from Child Services that they'd been reported for child abuse and would be subject to review.

It's difficult to find English coverage of the event, but here's something.

After CPS had finished their investigation and discovered nothing wrong with the boy or his parents, they tried to help the family reach an agreement with the school, which the school was unwilling to discuss. The parents said that they'd "learned their lesson" and would not attempt to ask for individual education for their kid anymore.


The problem with school systems that actually inspire interest and curiosity in their students is that they don't look good on paper... There's no official metric for measuring how "curious" or "engaged" a child is, and it's not like you can get a job with those things anyways, which is the real reason anyone should get an education, right?

I remember hearing good things about some kindergarten in Germany, where they gave the toddlers knives and set them out in the woods every day. I also remember them getting lambasted by concerned and completely unassociated parents, just like when that Danish zoo got in trouble for showing kids that lions eat meat, and giraffes are made of meat.

[JoshuaFH]

So, in short, that pedagogy today is mostly based on a mixture of a shitty version of the scientific method, bureaucracy, tradition, political tension, and social expectation, everything except what is needed and wanted by the student's themselves.

I just finished the book I mentioned earlier, How Children Learn, and I moved onto its sister book: How Children Fail. It's surreal that what I read in that book is now being paraphrased at me again by all of you in your posts; not exactly, but pretty close. That book was written in 1960, but I guess it might as well have been written today. It really makes me worried, but also even more interested in the topic.

[Trekkin]

So, in short, that pedagogy today is mostly based on a mixture of a shitty version of the scientific method, bureaucracy, tradition, political tension, and social expectation, everything except what is needed and wanted by the student's themselves.

And that it's partly a descendant of compulsory education being implemented as an alternative to child labor, so it was as much about containing children as educating them; that's not to say that it's exclusively day jail for children, but rather that all the effort put towards making school educational had to fit within a framework intended to incarcerate them for specific blocks of time and so forth.

[scourge728]

To be fair, I can definitely see why giving kindergartners knives is a bad idea, because they tend to be dumb and clumsy, and that is a bad combination with sharp objects and forest critters

[Doomblade187]

To be fair, I can definitely see why giving kindergartners knives is a bad idea, because they tend to be dumb and clumsy, and that is a bad combination with sharp objects and forest critters

The teachers supervise the trips. It sounds kinda like cub scouts to me. Therefore, I say eh, sounds cool.

[Reelya]

Really? I do. If for no other reason, than because of the endless review hell I endured because of the handful of kids who could not read in highschool, because of a variety of reasons.

This is often a rationalization for funding cuts however. e.g. closing down special-ed classes and using a buzzword like "mainstreaming" to make it seem like a good idea that they sprinkle the special-needs kids in every regular class, just hand-waving away the difficulties of special-needs kids completely. It's really just slashing expenditure and fobbing off the cost of dealing with the developmentally disabled kid onto every else (teachers, family, peers and the other students).

[Kagus]

Well, not all caboose students qualify as "developmentally challenged". There are plenty of ways you can struggle in an education without having a specific medical explanation for it, and with no fancy label they get to stay in the class that's way out of their wavelength.

[Hanslanda]

To be fair, I can definitely see why giving kindergartners knives is a bad idea, because they tend to be dumb and clumsy, and that is a bad combination with sharp objects and forest critters

The teachers supervise the trips. It sounds kinda like cub scouts to me. Therefore, I say eh, sounds cool.

I get that kids can be clumsy and foolish but... Making sometimes painful mistakes is an important part of learning.

[wierd]

To be fair, I can definitely see why giving kindergartners knives is a bad idea, because they tend to be dumb and clumsy, and that is a bad combination with sharp objects and forest critters

The teachers supervise the trips. It sounds kinda like cub scouts to me. Therefore, I say eh, sounds cool.

I get that kids can be clumsy and foolish but... Making sometimes painful mistakes is an important part of learning.

What a refreshing outlook.

I am practically up to my neck in helicopter "MY CHILD CAN COME TO NO HARM, EVAR!! EEEEVVAAARR!!" histrionics. The idea that little timmy might actually derive a valuable life lesson by suffering the natural consequences of his own stupidity with sharp/hot/other_danger objects is unheard of around here. Very nice it still exists in the world.