How much has political correctness damaged parents' confidence in schools? And in the age of the internet, is compulsory classroom schooling still the only way?
Initially reluctant homeschooling mom of 8, living in rural Midwest, USA chiming in. Since having a baby every other year (happily) for 14 years made consistent, complicated lessons challenging, we simplified and focused on the three R's, with a heavy emphasis on Reading, in the form of read-alouds. As many classics as I could manage. They were as eager to hear the stories as I was to read them! The oldest 3 earned their BAs in 4 years, the next 2 are working on them, and I have 3 teens at home still. At times I worried about not hitting all the traditional subjects, but as commenter Urbaschek said above, maybe what our kids learned was "in spite of their education rather than because of it."
My mother was born in 1910 in Alabama. The district was so poor that they met for school in the basement of a local church, and went to school five months a year. Both of her brothers ran their own businesses and she went to college and became a minister. I think of that whenever I hear that we need a millage increase for schools.
"Ah yes, but times are different now..." (the first thing that you will hear in answer to your statement above). And indeed they are, but not necessarily in ways that justify the failures of the present-day ponderous bureaucratic apparatus that characterise any public school district today in the United States. Author Cunningham illuminates the failing cultural changes underway since the sixties, clearly post modernist wokeism is a failure point, and must be dealt with, but postwar America changed economically in ways that created single-parent households and/or households where both parents had entered the workplace out of necessity. I cannot risk turning my comment into a 500 page essay on the failures of the public schools but it should go without further elaboration that we need a complete re-examination of what will be necessary to fix schools that are turning in student test scores well under those of home schooled groups.
It may seem odd, but some people don't want their children turned into homosexual communists.
Some things that I think could be added to the school curriculum:
Methods of control: What methods do the powerful use to control the populace? Classroom exercises would be in order, wherein students think up what kind of subterfuge they could use if they were kings and queens, how they would recognize it and how to counter it. People often don't recognize them for what they are when they see them. The series The Hunger Games would be illustrative. (My opinion is that military veterans are more likely to recognize them than others, but individuals vary.)
The use of false flag operations through history: This might be thought to be part of methods of control, but I think it deserves it's own heading. Students should be asked to explain what kind of false flags they would plan if they were a king and were trying to subjugate their populace.
Criminal thinking: Yes, criminal. Police officers over time learn to think like criminals; while walking or driving they will notice good places to perform a mugging or rape, think how they would rob a particular store, and so on. It's part of the job for them and makes them better officers, but there's no reason the average citizen couldn't learn it.
Genocide and democide in history: An important thing to know about. Since it's important to know that it can happen here, know what factors bring it into being, what can prevent it and what we as individuals and families can do about it. Highlights the need for marksmanship training. For resources, see the University of Hawaii Democide Project: https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html
The Emperor has no clothes: Of course he doesn't, and it's amazing to see how often this phenomenon happens. Classroom exercises can be done and essays written on how they would exploit this effect if they were kings and queens.
Understanding propaganda: The five rules of propaganda should be taught, posted in the classroom, and explained, discussed, then perhaps classroom exercises of students making up propaganda while others debunk it. With all of the propaganda perpetually in use, and seemingly getting worse lately, I think this is important. Students should be required to design their own propaganda campaigns.
The rule of simplification - reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
The rule of disfiguration - discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
The rule of transfusion - manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
The rule of unanimity - presenting one's viewpoint as if it were unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: draining the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure , and by 'psychological contagion'.
The rule of orchestration - endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
Marksmanship: Since a nation of riflemen cannot be tyrannized. It was once taken as a given that all young men knew how to shoot, but it wasn't even true back then. Start with sling shots in first grade and work up. In high school, infantry weapons. Include cleaning and maintenance. To those concerned about guns in schools, remember that high school boys in America used to take theirs to school and have them in their lockers so as to go hunting after school. The school shootings only began after the passage of the Gun Free school Zones Act.
Willpower: This is more important than many people realize. It's a truism about the brilliant people who end up failures simply because they did not have the guts to not give up. “Freedom is what everyone wants - to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.” Jocko Willink
You can find them out there on the internet, and they are certainly not original with myself. The fact that you have not heard of them may be evidence that powerful people really don't want them widely known, else why are they not mention in school, especially in Civics class? I believe they were recognized in the middle ages but am not sure. You might like my essay on propaganda:
In my senior year in high school, 1957, I took a class called Senior Problems. I figured it would be an easy class and the teacher liked Jazz. He taught us about how to buy all types of insurance, open a bank acct., the uses and abuses of credit and the one book we were assigned was; How To Lie With Statistics. He talked about the dangers of facism and communism and suggested that we go hear Gerald L.K. Smith, leader of the American Nazi Party (America First Party). That class and music was the only reason I went to school.
I failed math in the 3rd. grade and have never been able to learn it to any proficiency. I could read at age 4, I learned by sitting next to my mother and looking at the words while she read them to me, in the evening, after she returned from work.
Aside from the musical experiences that were available at the schools I attended, school, for me, was a great waste of time. Everything that I learned came either from books that I read or experience. I am grateful for the typing class that I took.
I think that school is another form of industry who's main purpose is to perpetuate itself and provide employment and a method of social indoctrination to keep the sheep moving in the same direction.
That Senior Problems class sounds great, I wish I had had one available. One thing I've realized is that everything tries to survive; every organization will do what it can to perpetuate itself. Businesses may fail but government organizations never go away since they are protected from market forces.
Your schooling timeframe mirrors my own and much about your comment resonates with me, rather completely. One question, given your lack of either the ability to learn mathematics or maybe outright antipathy for math - how far did you progress into the world of your musical experiences? The reason that I ask is that in my experience (informal and anecdotal), the math and music capabilities seem to appear in the same individuals.
I was a professional musician for 65 yrs. I never thought about music mathematically. The counting was simple. Whole notes are worth 4, half notes 2, eighth notes are 1 &, sixteenths are 1 e & uh. I'm a visual learner and after looking at a page of music could visualize it. When playing without the music, I would "see" the page and play what I saw. Being able to visualize allowed me to be an accompanist for dancers; if I could see it, I could play it. I should have been playing during the silent film era.
Very interesting. During the lockdowns of schools because of Covid, I was never that concerned with children missing out on some essential knowledge, but was concerned about the losing of the social function of school, which I expected to do a lot of harm to their development, as we are now seeing. I think the number of contact hours at school can easily be at least halved without losing much in the sense of educational value / how much kids learn, and as a teacher I have noticed that most of teaching just flinging stuff out there and hoping something sticks with at least a few students. For the most part, there is not that much you can do to actually teach students something, the main exception being norms and values, which is something you can teach them by being an example and sharing life experiences with them. My own school experience, by the way, was mostly just doing what you had to but never really being challenged, so what I learned over the years was more in spite of education than because of it. I had hoped that the covid situation would have been the moment to radically change the way we educate kids, since it suddenly became so very clear what the most important essence of education was, namely the social aspects, but that unfortunately has not happened, and we are still muddying on as before, milling out mostly meaningless degrees and diplomas, more with the purpose of perpetuating the organisation of our labour market than for actually teaching students something worthwhile and motivating.
Very good, Graham. Lots to agree with here. I’m sorry to confess that I was one of those disruptive kids at the back but I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and came first in all my classes and top of my year. I would have learnt more if they had said “Here are all the books. Go learn what you want. “
Both my kids are very different than me and each other. I quit school as soon as I could at 16. My son was super smart but didn't love learning and has struggled to get going in life. My daughter really struggled with school but she just got her master's at a Russell Group uni and graduated top of her class. I think the secret is recognising that all kids are different. Not just in intelligence: in interests too. And some kids *should* be left behind.
"Public education as furniture" is an excellent way to look at it. Thanks to Obama, Obiden, Randi Weingarten and millions of anarchists and Marxists, Amerika's public schools are like IKEA kits that have instructions in Latin. Our public schools are turning out fine little Hitler Youth.
Seems like people are relying on AI to solve most of these problems, although there's no real idea how. The obvious benefit is that every kid's education can be tailored to their strengths/weaknesses. I could see an interesting system develop whereby there's a standard base of knowledge each student needs to acquire, and the number of years is flexible. The current system is the opposite; the number of years is fixed and you learn what you learn. With AI you can tailor the learning and help them along, but students don't progress until they've mastered the material. And they don't graduate until they've passed all the tests along the way. That in and of itself would motivate kids to try harder. And as an added bonus it would be much easier to let kids pursue different objectives; pre college or various career opportunities. Then each one of these objectives would require a distinct knowledge base to be mastered.
I think the crazy thing wouldn't be to tailor education more to the particular student, but that it took AI to get us there. I'm told that not that many decades ago, in America at least, there was a lot more tailoring--I'm told they called it "tracking"--in that there was a certain amount of effective sorting of children into classrooms (and perhaps schools) that would move at a faster or slower pace, according to the pupils' varying levels of ability. Win-win--to the extent the project succeeded (it would not have to be perfect to have benefits), the more gifted children wouldn't have to spend all their time in school bored, and could learn a lot more than in the present system; the slower children could better be accommodated as well, giving them material that challenged them but was not impossible for them to succeed in.
when I was in elementary school I remember we had this learning system called something like MRA (this was a really long time ago). There was this big box of files organized from easiest to hardest. And everyone would start at the beginning, and progress through to harder and harder. And each file had a learning lesson and then a quiz. And you'd bring the quiz results to the teacher, who would go through it with you. And then the teacher would have you progress to the next or redo the current depending on your test results. and then when you got to the end, you progressed to a whole new box coded a different color. I think it was the same set of files and colors all through elementary school; there were at least a thousand of them. anyway, I remember most kids really liking it, and I guess it was a very rudimentary form of the AI learning we might have some day.
When we "graduated" from that system we were sorted more or less as you say. We no longer went entirely at our own pace, but were sorted into classes based on our results with the earlier system. And that's when subjects would be separated, so you'd have a math teacher, social studies teacher, etc. and students were "resorted" for each subject again based on how well you did in each subject area in the elementary school system. And then finally in high school you were sorted again into three different tracks with different curricula.
A very detailed outline of a very old system, but seems like at least parts of it were worth keeping.
I agree, definitely seems worth keeping. And I suppose it's possible that the particular school you went to still does it that way, but my impression is that overall, America has thrown a lot of that out in a lot of places. Again, crazy.
Basically all children are beautiful and deserving of an education instead of an authoritarian manipulative indoctrination. Education is crucial to the new world now being born.
Is that right? I will check on that as time allows. I don’t even pay attention to who subscribes or who I subscribe to. But since you brought it up I will look into it.
That would be good. I've just had a message that you have 'followed' me which is a different thing. You previously were a free subscriber to my Substack so must have hit the unsubscribe button somehow? If you would like to continue receiving my posts you would need to resubscribe.
Once the state gets its hands on anything, it is loathe to relinquish it. Generally the institution expands and takes up as much money and space as it can. The survival and growth of the institution becomes the prime directive, as it were, not fulfilling its ostensible mission. Almost nothing the government administers works very well, unless it’s aimed at demoralizing and injuring the citizenry. Usually the answer is to spend more of other people’s money, regardless of the question.
Recognizing that this is an essay about education, if you pan out farther, it’s really about centralized institutional control of a large piece of human life, based on a model from 100 plus years ago. Like every other centralized institution from over 100 years ago, public education doesn’t serve the needs of the populace very well. From almost any perspective except that of a sinecured bureaucrat, the structure of government does not comport with the modern person’s needs. Without getting too far down in the weeds, just as we are constantly reminded that technology (AI currently) will continue to eat a lot of jobs, it’s easy to apply that same calculus to government. We don’t need massive government. It needs us however. Besides the basic governmental night watchman function and a few other critical areas, 80-90% of what passes as government could be eliminated with a huge improvement in the quality of life for most people. Almost everything, except killing people, is better done in the private sector. Almost all of our social problems stem from government actions from wars to poorly performing schools. Small governments can make small problems. Big governments make big problems.
As far as learning and education, there is no one size fits all, which is what most of primary and secondary public education tries to do. Kids learn at different paces and in different ways. Flexibility in learning can’t be accommodated very well in giant public schools. Even honors programs and special education often miss the mark. Technology exists to serve kids better, in a more customized, more economic fashion, whether at home, in a private school or in a state school. Socializing - yes this is important, but who says school is the only place it happens?
People can figure this out. They did for hundreds of thousands of years before the last century. The more dependent we make ourselves , the more we rely on convenience and accept mediocrity or worse, the more we position ourselves to become digital slaves. I’ll stop here.
Nice essay. I still work in education, and over the past few decades, I’ve been in some of the richest and poorest private and public schools.
One observation I had in the past 6 months, which kind of dovetails with what you say here, is the idea of a school with classrooms of 30+ kids is a terrible way of running an education system. Classically it was not done this way. Like you say, it came about during the industrial revolution. With lunch, recess, morning meeting, afternoon dismissal, and several “class transitions,” kids are only spending 3.5-4 hours learning out of a 7 hour day. Keep in mind this is in a “good” school with minimal disruptions. At the same time, the level of conformity you need to demand from each student to teach them in groups of 30 crushes the individual humanity of each student. More often than not, bright kids are bored, and dull kids struggle. The worst of both worlds.
As far as i can see, people paying attention are opting for classical schools or homeschooling. Maybe within the next decade we will see public school being regarded like medicaid today — a lousy government option you do what you can to avoid.
-- ". . . kids are only spending 3.5-4 hours learning out of a 7 hour day."
-- "At the same time, the level of conformity you need to demand from each student to teach them in groups of 30 crushes the individual humanity of each student."
-- "More often than not, bright kids are bored, and dull kids struggle. The worst of both worlds."
Preach, brother!
"As far as i can see, people paying attention are opting for classical schools or homeschooling. Maybe within the next decade we will see public school being regarded like medicaid today — a lousy government option you do what you can to avoid."
I think that's a fascinating way to frame it. I suppose that in certain circles, that perspective has already arrived.
". . . We were told that the talk encouraged boys to experiment sexually. Books for sale in the foyer afterwards included This Book is Gay, which is basically a sex manual. Parents were not offered an opt-out as it wasn’t 'sex education' but 'literature'."
That about sums it up.
As to your larger points, I agree--the pandemic shutdowns revealed the extent to which (at least in America--not your only thesis, I realize, but the place I have experience with) really the point of our schools had been babysitting kids for eight hours while their parents were at work, more than learning, all along.
This is consistent with my own experience of growing up in American schools: In the eight hours we had, there was an enormous amount of wasted time, we could have learned something like three times as much--if learning had been the goal; if that time had been used well. Or, perhaps more realistically, it would have been at least equally possible to learn the same amount in a third of the time, and end the school day before noon.
The fact that such is unthinkable in the present system goes a long way to proving the point all by itself.
You're right that throwing out some of the foundational assumptions of the present system would be "radical"--but, as you suggest, that beats blindly continuing to maintain a system that may no longer even serve its own original purposes on its own terms. Thank you for thinking about the unthinkable and contemplating radical possibilities.
Having read a lot about the struggles of inner city teachers trying to control disruptive students with little support from mostly black school administrators it seems to me that it would be possible to greatly improve the teaching environment by simply removing (expelling) those causing the most disruption. This would send a strong message about acceptable behavior and make it possible for most students to actually learn. Kids will quickly understand the consequences of disruptive behavior and change accordingly so relatively few would actually have to be removed. As with crimes like shoplifting it appears that society has given up on enforcing standards of accountability and thus its deterrent effect. A self fulfilling prophecy.
Please find four references, the first of which introduces a unique understanding of an entirely life-positive to education and schooling - it features many authors.
The second and describe what our violence staturated "culture" actually does to everyone and all.
The fourth describes the now common right-wing so called conservative assault on the most precious US institution the Public Library.
I think another aspect worth mentioning is how school has transformed into this place where kids in large only interact with others from the same year.
Meaning, instead of them finding mentors among their peers you are more likely to end up with 'kids teaching kids' or them finding mentors 'on the street', or online these days I guess.
Then there's the whole issue of lockstep years in education leading to demotivation and, in some cases, resentment.
Initially reluctant homeschooling mom of 8, living in rural Midwest, USA chiming in. Since having a baby every other year (happily) for 14 years made consistent, complicated lessons challenging, we simplified and focused on the three R's, with a heavy emphasis on Reading, in the form of read-alouds. As many classics as I could manage. They were as eager to hear the stories as I was to read them! The oldest 3 earned their BAs in 4 years, the next 2 are working on them, and I have 3 teens at home still. At times I worried about not hitting all the traditional subjects, but as commenter Urbaschek said above, maybe what our kids learned was "in spite of their education rather than because of it."
Thank you for this feedback....it all helps to flesh out the otherwise abstract discussion.
My mother was born in 1910 in Alabama. The district was so poor that they met for school in the basement of a local church, and went to school five months a year. Both of her brothers ran their own businesses and she went to college and became a minister. I think of that whenever I hear that we need a millage increase for schools.
"Ah yes, but times are different now..." (the first thing that you will hear in answer to your statement above). And indeed they are, but not necessarily in ways that justify the failures of the present-day ponderous bureaucratic apparatus that characterise any public school district today in the United States. Author Cunningham illuminates the failing cultural changes underway since the sixties, clearly post modernist wokeism is a failure point, and must be dealt with, but postwar America changed economically in ways that created single-parent households and/or households where both parents had entered the workplace out of necessity. I cannot risk turning my comment into a 500 page essay on the failures of the public schools but it should go without further elaboration that we need a complete re-examination of what will be necessary to fix schools that are turning in student test scores well under those of home schooled groups.
It may seem odd, but some people don't want their children turned into homosexual communists.
Some things that I think could be added to the school curriculum:
Methods of control: What methods do the powerful use to control the populace? Classroom exercises would be in order, wherein students think up what kind of subterfuge they could use if they were kings and queens, how they would recognize it and how to counter it. People often don't recognize them for what they are when they see them. The series The Hunger Games would be illustrative. (My opinion is that military veterans are more likely to recognize them than others, but individuals vary.)
The use of false flag operations through history: This might be thought to be part of methods of control, but I think it deserves it's own heading. Students should be asked to explain what kind of false flags they would plan if they were a king and were trying to subjugate their populace.
Criminal thinking: Yes, criminal. Police officers over time learn to think like criminals; while walking or driving they will notice good places to perform a mugging or rape, think how they would rob a particular store, and so on. It's part of the job for them and makes them better officers, but there's no reason the average citizen couldn't learn it.
Genocide and democide in history: An important thing to know about. Since it's important to know that it can happen here, know what factors bring it into being, what can prevent it and what we as individuals and families can do about it. Highlights the need for marksmanship training. For resources, see the University of Hawaii Democide Project: https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html
The Emperor has no clothes: Of course he doesn't, and it's amazing to see how often this phenomenon happens. Classroom exercises can be done and essays written on how they would exploit this effect if they were kings and queens.
Understanding propaganda: The five rules of propaganda should be taught, posted in the classroom, and explained, discussed, then perhaps classroom exercises of students making up propaganda while others debunk it. With all of the propaganda perpetually in use, and seemingly getting worse lately, I think this is important. Students should be required to design their own propaganda campaigns.
The rule of simplification - reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
The rule of disfiguration - discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
The rule of transfusion - manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
The rule of unanimity - presenting one's viewpoint as if it were unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: draining the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure , and by 'psychological contagion'.
The rule of orchestration - endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
Marksmanship: Since a nation of riflemen cannot be tyrannized. It was once taken as a given that all young men knew how to shoot, but it wasn't even true back then. Start with sling shots in first grade and work up. In high school, infantry weapons. Include cleaning and maintenance. To those concerned about guns in schools, remember that high school boys in America used to take theirs to school and have them in their lockers so as to go hunting after school. The school shootings only began after the passage of the Gun Free school Zones Act.
Willpower: This is more important than many people realize. It's a truism about the brilliant people who end up failures simply because they did not have the guts to not give up. “Freedom is what everyone wants - to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.” Jocko Willink
https://drp314.substack.com/p/things-not-taught-in-school
This is a wonderful comment, with much food for thought. I had not heard "the five rules of propaganda" before, and will have to internalize them.
You can find them out there on the internet, and they are certainly not original with myself. The fact that you have not heard of them may be evidence that powerful people really don't want them widely known, else why are they not mention in school, especially in Civics class? I believe they were recognized in the middle ages but am not sure. You might like my essay on propaganda:
https://drp314.substack.com/p/propaganda-thoughts
In my senior year in high school, 1957, I took a class called Senior Problems. I figured it would be an easy class and the teacher liked Jazz. He taught us about how to buy all types of insurance, open a bank acct., the uses and abuses of credit and the one book we were assigned was; How To Lie With Statistics. He talked about the dangers of facism and communism and suggested that we go hear Gerald L.K. Smith, leader of the American Nazi Party (America First Party). That class and music was the only reason I went to school.
I failed math in the 3rd. grade and have never been able to learn it to any proficiency. I could read at age 4, I learned by sitting next to my mother and looking at the words while she read them to me, in the evening, after she returned from work.
Aside from the musical experiences that were available at the schools I attended, school, for me, was a great waste of time. Everything that I learned came either from books that I read or experience. I am grateful for the typing class that I took.
I think that school is another form of industry who's main purpose is to perpetuate itself and provide employment and a method of social indoctrination to keep the sheep moving in the same direction.
Thank you for this.....more 'colouring-in' of the subject.
That Senior Problems class sounds great, I wish I had had one available. One thing I've realized is that everything tries to survive; every organization will do what it can to perpetuate itself. Businesses may fail but government organizations never go away since they are protected from market forces.
Your schooling timeframe mirrors my own and much about your comment resonates with me, rather completely. One question, given your lack of either the ability to learn mathematics or maybe outright antipathy for math - how far did you progress into the world of your musical experiences? The reason that I ask is that in my experience (informal and anecdotal), the math and music capabilities seem to appear in the same individuals.
I was a professional musician for 65 yrs. I never thought about music mathematically. The counting was simple. Whole notes are worth 4, half notes 2, eighth notes are 1 &, sixteenths are 1 e & uh. I'm a visual learner and after looking at a page of music could visualize it. When playing without the music, I would "see" the page and play what I saw. Being able to visualize allowed me to be an accompanist for dancers; if I could see it, I could play it. I should have been playing during the silent film era.
This comment should be made into a vaccine. I know just the people to do it.😬
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M8j1xWbyfjI
werewolf game
Thanks for adding this YouTube into the mix. You'll find a lot more essays about the 'problems with our current paradigm' if you subscribe.
Cool. Learning to think should be taught, a lot of such things could be done in school, but don’t hold your breath.
School is a pretty good place to meet people you own age.
Brilliant comment David. The first words made me laugh, the rest made me think.
Very interesting. During the lockdowns of schools because of Covid, I was never that concerned with children missing out on some essential knowledge, but was concerned about the losing of the social function of school, which I expected to do a lot of harm to their development, as we are now seeing. I think the number of contact hours at school can easily be at least halved without losing much in the sense of educational value / how much kids learn, and as a teacher I have noticed that most of teaching just flinging stuff out there and hoping something sticks with at least a few students. For the most part, there is not that much you can do to actually teach students something, the main exception being norms and values, which is something you can teach them by being an example and sharing life experiences with them. My own school experience, by the way, was mostly just doing what you had to but never really being challenged, so what I learned over the years was more in spite of education than because of it. I had hoped that the covid situation would have been the moment to radically change the way we educate kids, since it suddenly became so very clear what the most important essence of education was, namely the social aspects, but that unfortunately has not happened, and we are still muddying on as before, milling out mostly meaningless degrees and diplomas, more with the purpose of perpetuating the organisation of our labour market than for actually teaching students something worthwhile and motivating.
Thank you for this....what you say all rings true with me.
Very good, Graham. Lots to agree with here. I’m sorry to confess that I was one of those disruptive kids at the back but I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and came first in all my classes and top of my year. I would have learnt more if they had said “Here are all the books. Go learn what you want. “
Both my kids are very different than me and each other. I quit school as soon as I could at 16. My son was super smart but didn't love learning and has struggled to get going in life. My daughter really struggled with school but she just got her master's at a Russell Group uni and graduated top of her class. I think the secret is recognising that all kids are different. Not just in intelligence: in interests too. And some kids *should* be left behind.
"Public education as furniture" is an excellent way to look at it. Thanks to Obama, Obiden, Randi Weingarten and millions of anarchists and Marxists, Amerika's public schools are like IKEA kits that have instructions in Latin. Our public schools are turning out fine little Hitler Youth.
Seems like people are relying on AI to solve most of these problems, although there's no real idea how. The obvious benefit is that every kid's education can be tailored to their strengths/weaknesses. I could see an interesting system develop whereby there's a standard base of knowledge each student needs to acquire, and the number of years is flexible. The current system is the opposite; the number of years is fixed and you learn what you learn. With AI you can tailor the learning and help them along, but students don't progress until they've mastered the material. And they don't graduate until they've passed all the tests along the way. That in and of itself would motivate kids to try harder. And as an added bonus it would be much easier to let kids pursue different objectives; pre college or various career opportunities. Then each one of these objectives would require a distinct knowledge base to be mastered.
I think the crazy thing wouldn't be to tailor education more to the particular student, but that it took AI to get us there. I'm told that not that many decades ago, in America at least, there was a lot more tailoring--I'm told they called it "tracking"--in that there was a certain amount of effective sorting of children into classrooms (and perhaps schools) that would move at a faster or slower pace, according to the pupils' varying levels of ability. Win-win--to the extent the project succeeded (it would not have to be perfect to have benefits), the more gifted children wouldn't have to spend all their time in school bored, and could learn a lot more than in the present system; the slower children could better be accommodated as well, giving them material that challenged them but was not impossible for them to succeed in.
Everything old is new again, perhaps...
when I was in elementary school I remember we had this learning system called something like MRA (this was a really long time ago). There was this big box of files organized from easiest to hardest. And everyone would start at the beginning, and progress through to harder and harder. And each file had a learning lesson and then a quiz. And you'd bring the quiz results to the teacher, who would go through it with you. And then the teacher would have you progress to the next or redo the current depending on your test results. and then when you got to the end, you progressed to a whole new box coded a different color. I think it was the same set of files and colors all through elementary school; there were at least a thousand of them. anyway, I remember most kids really liking it, and I guess it was a very rudimentary form of the AI learning we might have some day.
When we "graduated" from that system we were sorted more or less as you say. We no longer went entirely at our own pace, but were sorted into classes based on our results with the earlier system. And that's when subjects would be separated, so you'd have a math teacher, social studies teacher, etc. and students were "resorted" for each subject again based on how well you did in each subject area in the elementary school system. And then finally in high school you were sorted again into three different tracks with different curricula.
A very detailed outline of a very old system, but seems like at least parts of it were worth keeping.
I agree, definitely seems worth keeping. And I suppose it's possible that the particular school you went to still does it that way, but my impression is that overall, America has thrown a lot of that out in a lot of places. Again, crazy.
Interesting.
Basically all children are beautiful and deserving of an education instead of an authoritarian manipulative indoctrination. Education is crucial to the new world now being born.
Did I say different? I see you have unsubscribed me from your other 700+ reads.
Is that right? I will check on that as time allows. I don’t even pay attention to who subscribes or who I subscribe to. But since you brought it up I will look into it.
That would be good. I've just had a message that you have 'followed' me which is a different thing. You previously were a free subscriber to my Substack so must have hit the unsubscribe button somehow? If you would like to continue receiving my posts you would need to resubscribe.
Sure enough. Thanks for letting me know.
Thanks for that.... and I've just subscribed back.
The edu we have must be destroyed for the new world to be born, indeed for us to survive
We are going to be alright. So are the children. Talk with them - they are listening.
"A future without schools is certainly hard to imagine but not impossible."
Not at all. Everything burns.
Yes.,.. and everything put together sooner or later falls apart.... that's another song lyric!
Once the state gets its hands on anything, it is loathe to relinquish it. Generally the institution expands and takes up as much money and space as it can. The survival and growth of the institution becomes the prime directive, as it were, not fulfilling its ostensible mission. Almost nothing the government administers works very well, unless it’s aimed at demoralizing and injuring the citizenry. Usually the answer is to spend more of other people’s money, regardless of the question.
Recognizing that this is an essay about education, if you pan out farther, it’s really about centralized institutional control of a large piece of human life, based on a model from 100 plus years ago. Like every other centralized institution from over 100 years ago, public education doesn’t serve the needs of the populace very well. From almost any perspective except that of a sinecured bureaucrat, the structure of government does not comport with the modern person’s needs. Without getting too far down in the weeds, just as we are constantly reminded that technology (AI currently) will continue to eat a lot of jobs, it’s easy to apply that same calculus to government. We don’t need massive government. It needs us however. Besides the basic governmental night watchman function and a few other critical areas, 80-90% of what passes as government could be eliminated with a huge improvement in the quality of life for most people. Almost everything, except killing people, is better done in the private sector. Almost all of our social problems stem from government actions from wars to poorly performing schools. Small governments can make small problems. Big governments make big problems.
As far as learning and education, there is no one size fits all, which is what most of primary and secondary public education tries to do. Kids learn at different paces and in different ways. Flexibility in learning can’t be accommodated very well in giant public schools. Even honors programs and special education often miss the mark. Technology exists to serve kids better, in a more customized, more economic fashion, whether at home, in a private school or in a state school. Socializing - yes this is important, but who says school is the only place it happens?
People can figure this out. They did for hundreds of thousands of years before the last century. The more dependent we make ourselves , the more we rely on convenience and accept mediocrity or worse, the more we position ourselves to become digital slaves. I’ll stop here.
Nice essay. I still work in education, and over the past few decades, I’ve been in some of the richest and poorest private and public schools.
One observation I had in the past 6 months, which kind of dovetails with what you say here, is the idea of a school with classrooms of 30+ kids is a terrible way of running an education system. Classically it was not done this way. Like you say, it came about during the industrial revolution. With lunch, recess, morning meeting, afternoon dismissal, and several “class transitions,” kids are only spending 3.5-4 hours learning out of a 7 hour day. Keep in mind this is in a “good” school with minimal disruptions. At the same time, the level of conformity you need to demand from each student to teach them in groups of 30 crushes the individual humanity of each student. More often than not, bright kids are bored, and dull kids struggle. The worst of both worlds.
As far as i can see, people paying attention are opting for classical schools or homeschooling. Maybe within the next decade we will see public school being regarded like medicaid today — a lousy government option you do what you can to avoid.
Very interesting all that. And Thank you for 'colouring in' my essay with your story from real life.
-- ". . . kids are only spending 3.5-4 hours learning out of a 7 hour day."
-- "At the same time, the level of conformity you need to demand from each student to teach them in groups of 30 crushes the individual humanity of each student."
-- "More often than not, bright kids are bored, and dull kids struggle. The worst of both worlds."
Preach, brother!
"As far as i can see, people paying attention are opting for classical schools or homeschooling. Maybe within the next decade we will see public school being regarded like medicaid today — a lousy government option you do what you can to avoid."
I think that's a fascinating way to frame it. I suppose that in certain circles, that perspective has already arrived.
". . . We were told that the talk encouraged boys to experiment sexually. Books for sale in the foyer afterwards included This Book is Gay, which is basically a sex manual. Parents were not offered an opt-out as it wasn’t 'sex education' but 'literature'."
That about sums it up.
As to your larger points, I agree--the pandemic shutdowns revealed the extent to which (at least in America--not your only thesis, I realize, but the place I have experience with) really the point of our schools had been babysitting kids for eight hours while their parents were at work, more than learning, all along.
This is consistent with my own experience of growing up in American schools: In the eight hours we had, there was an enormous amount of wasted time, we could have learned something like three times as much--if learning had been the goal; if that time had been used well. Or, perhaps more realistically, it would have been at least equally possible to learn the same amount in a third of the time, and end the school day before noon.
The fact that such is unthinkable in the present system goes a long way to proving the point all by itself.
You're right that throwing out some of the foundational assumptions of the present system would be "radical"--but, as you suggest, that beats blindly continuing to maintain a system that may no longer even serve its own original purposes on its own terms. Thank you for thinking about the unthinkable and contemplating radical possibilities.
Having read a lot about the struggles of inner city teachers trying to control disruptive students with little support from mostly black school administrators it seems to me that it would be possible to greatly improve the teaching environment by simply removing (expelling) those causing the most disruption. This would send a strong message about acceptable behavior and make it possible for most students to actually learn. Kids will quickly understand the consequences of disruptive behavior and change accordingly so relatively few would actually have to be removed. As with crimes like shoplifting it appears that society has given up on enforcing standards of accountability and thus its deterrent effect. A self fulfilling prophecy.
As I rapidly approach fathering age, I find myself thinking about this daily, and searching for solutions.
Please find four references, the first of which introduces a unique understanding of an entirely life-positive to education and schooling - it features many authors.
The second and describe what our violence staturated "culture" actually does to everyone and all.
The fourth describes the now common right-wing so called conservative assault on the most precious US institution the Public Library.
http://ttfuture.org
http://www.violence.de
http://www.wombecology.com
http://tomdispatch.com/banning-what-matters
I think another aspect worth mentioning is how school has transformed into this place where kids in large only interact with others from the same year.
Meaning, instead of them finding mentors among their peers you are more likely to end up with 'kids teaching kids' or them finding mentors 'on the street', or online these days I guess.
Then there's the whole issue of lockstep years in education leading to demotivation and, in some cases, resentment.
At a tangent perhaps, or perhaps undermining standard assumptions about education for the last two hundred years, I argue much modern folly can be attributed to the dominance of literacy in education and the abandonment of the other three modalities: https://www.hughwillbourn.com/book - a partial introduction is here: https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/cc5-lss3-why-did-we-make-these-mistakes