It was towards the beginning of 12th grade and I didn’t have enough credits to pass. I didn’t want to do 12th grade again, so I just left. School sucks. School is the worst thing ever – Jeremy Leabres, skateboard champion.
Our kids are all packed up and ready to go back for another school year, and just like the last 150 years, the basic schooling model remains the same. Take 20 to 30 kids of the same age and cram them into a classroom and they all have one teacher.
It’s the centralized, bureaucratic institutionalization that’s been going on since forever.
Of course, the so-called educators will claim that the overall public education system has changed in many ways. Maybe, but the way we are taught has not. Some kids may be fine with this setup, but others struggle.
It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it’s like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you’re silent and listening to an idiot. That’s an epitomizing idea, getting called ‘Nothing’ for your whole high school experience.- Ezra Miller
Our current schools do not accommodate different learning styles– all they really care about is high test scores. Students are taught to test, not think critically.
SOLs rely on memorization, repetition, and regurgitation: they train students to know the answers, but not how to find and understand the answers. Research shows that public schools aim at facts and concepts at the lowest cognitive levels, rather than the development of intellect.
Kids are all different and need to learn in different ways.
The four learning styles are visual learners, auditory learners, reading/writing learners, and kinesthetic learners. Research from Hal Pashlernotes that learning styles are not hardcoded, can change over time, and can also overlap.
Kinaesthetic learners, students who learn best by being active, have it the worst. For them, the classroom is the worst place in the world. These learners are consistently struggling, bored and generally disengaged.
By continuing along with this standardized type of schooling, we are putting millions at a disadvantage.
Our public school system is our country’s biggest and most inefficient monopoly, yet it keeps demanding more and more money – Phyllis Schlafly
Literacy rates have stagnated since 1971, while there has been no progress in math since 1990.
The American mantra in education is that lack of money is the big issue. However, it is the stagnant educational system that relies on testing that is causing the problem.
While we teach to the test, the kids quickly forget it as soon as it’s over. According to research by neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland the information leaves pretty quickly.
They note that the brain quickly disregards information that is no longer required and that forgetting is an evolutionary strategy to promote the survival of the species. Richards and Frankland : From this perspective, forgetting is not necessarily a failure of memory. Rather, it may represent an investment in a more optimal mnemonic strategy.
We need to get rid of the testing culture, it’s killing us.
Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the workforce without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid? – Charles Platt
It’s about memorizing as much information as possible rather than learning how to think. It is putting undue stress on teachers and students and may also be the reason that many teachers are already leaving the profession.
Can’t school be a fun place for kids?
Maybe there’s not enough playtime, and we’re starting our kids too soon, not letting them be kids first. Research from the University of Cambridge concludes that there are benefits of later starts to formal education. This evidence relates to the contribution of playful experiences to children’s development as learners and the consequences of starting formal learning at the age of four to five years of age.
Data from Paul Boyce, Schools Are Outdated. It’s Time For Reform was used in this article.
About the Author
Starting school earlier for children allows parents to work. Most 2 parent households have 2 working parents, and the cost of childcare is astronomical. There is a big push in the state of Virginia to offer QUALITY public pre k options for families. Some schools have prek and kindergarten options with little or no play because the teachers were not educated or trained in early childhood development. Research suggests that every 1$ invested in quality early education, society receives a return of up to $17. These children are more likely to own a home and be employed in the future. They are less likely to be incarcerated, repeat grades, or even drop out. So yes, it does involve money. However, pouring money into programs without the proper training, resources, or education doesn’t do much. I can’t speak on behalf of teachers who teach older grades. What I do know is that playful experiences happen all day in quality preschool programs. The study that you cited at the end of your article was in favor of play based preschool, which is what Virginia is pushing for currently.
•Looking across the full study period, from the beginning of Head Start through 3rd grade, access to Head Start improved children’s preschool outcomes across developmental domains, but had few impacts on children in kindergarten through 3rd grade.
•In terms of children’s cognitive outcomes, access to Head Start had an impact on children’s language and literacy development while children were in Head Start. However, these early effects rapidly dissipated in elementary school, with only a single impact remaining at the end of 3rd grade for children who entered at age 3 and a single impact for children who entered at age 4.
•Findings related to children’s social-emotional development differed by age cohort and by the person describing the child’s behavior.
◦For children who entered at age 4, there were no observed impacts through the end of kindergarten but favorable impacts reported by parents and unfavorable impacts reported by teachers emerged at the end of 1st and 3rd grades. One unfavorable impact on the children’s self-report emerged at the end of 3rd grade.
◦For children who entered at age 3 there were favorable impacts on parent-reported social emotional outcomes in the early years of the study that continued into early elementary school. However, there were no impacts on teacher-reported measures of social-emotional development for the 3-year-old cohort at any data collection point or on the children’s self-reports in 3rd grade.
From: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/opre/resource/third-grade-follow-up-to-the-head-start-impact-study-final-report
Total waste of money.
Your Article sights impacts in elementary school from one program. It doesn’t say anything about the programs quality which is my point. The people who worked at head start in the past received little to no training or education in early childhood development. This is why there is a push for quality. For every study of an ineffective preschool there is one that counters that.
https://www.ffyf.org/new-harvard-study-reveals-lasting-benefits-quality-early-childhood-education/
The difference? QUALITY
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/140/2/e20171488
Waste of money? Actually the opposite.
People naturally assume that the public school system is trying to do what’s best of the children. The fact of the matter is that these institutions have nothing to do with education. They are set up by people who, like all other people, have their own personal agendas. The public school’s true purpose is to put certain messages into the children’s heads so they’ll be more obedient of the government when they get older.
Consider the ‘grade’ system. You start off in first grade, where you’re placed not by academic ability, nor by willingness to learn, but by age. The reason for this is very simple. Most children already think of adults as if they’re their superiors, and now they’ll associate their position in the grade system with superiority. Obviously, that’s nonsense. A kid in the 5th grade may very well have less overall academic ability then a kid in the 2nd grade. Moreover, education isn’t something that can be ranked. The kind of education that tends to be more valuable later on in life is your specialization, not the sheer quantity of raw general knowledge.
Next, consider the way a classroom is structured. The teacher is in charge. The students are to listen to the teacher. This is most peculiar as well. After all, the teacher is a hired employee, who is in fact working for the students. If anything, the teacher should be listening to the concerns of the students, not the other way around. The reason the classroom setting is set up in this way is clear. The students learn at an early age to respect authority figures, so later on, they obey the government.
“Your Article sights impacts in elementary school”
The word is ‘cites’.
Congrats on your Head Start education.
SMDH.
I’m on my phone and no, I didn’t proof read a comment that I made on an opinion article. Thanks for the correction though! Lucky for me that you enjoy trolling others online with a fake name because you’re either too embarrassed or ashamed of yourself.
I went to a private school for preschool. Maybe if I had gone to head start I would have used the correct “cite”. Oh well.
Reading comprehension is also important. Had you attended a head start program, by 3rd grade any benefit disappears.
Regardless of the training level of the teachers. It is not a matter of “quality’, that nebulous, unquantifiable state that you lefties always revert to when confronted by reality.
And language matters. Words have specific meanings.
Like the ones written in the Federalist papers.
By some dude named “Publius”.
Why am I not surprised you missed the reference?