Education Outrage: Why do we still have schools? - 1 views
educationoutrage.blogspot.com/...-do-we-still-have-schools.html
education school learning competition stress right answers bullying curiosity classroom grades certification practical skills learning by doing Plato Dewey
shared by Melissa Seifman on 18 Apr 09
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Competition: Why should school be a competitive event?
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We learn what we choose to know in real life.
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Stress: When 6 year olds are stressed about going to school you know that something is wrong.
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Right answers: School teaches that there are right answers.
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But, in real life, there are very few right answers.
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Bullying and peer pressure
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In school there are always other kids telling you how to dress, how to act, how to be cool.
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Stifling of curiosity: Isn’t it obvious that learning is really about curiosity?
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Adults earn about things they want to learn about. Before the age of 6, prior to school, one kid becomes a dinosaur specialist while another knows all about dog breeds. Outside of school people drive their own learning. Schools eliminate this natural behavior.
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Subjects chosen for you:
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Classrooms:
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Classrooms make no sense as a venue for learning unless of course you want to save money and have 30 (or worse hundreds of) students be handled by one teacher.
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Schools cannot work as places of learning if they employ classrooms.
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Grades: Any professor can tell you that students are pretty much concerned with whether what you are telling them will be on the test and what they might do for extra credit.
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I disagree - Employers do have rating systems, performance evaluations, but most of those are on the whole person, not just technical or academic skills
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Parents do not give grades to children and employers do not give grades to employees. They judge their work and progress for sure, but not by assigning numbers to a report card.
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Certification: We all know why people attend college. They do primarily to say they are college graduates so they can get a job or go on to a professional school.
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So, why is this the student's fault? Why blame, or disadvatage them for this? We should be fighting the system that causes students to work like this, not blaming them for doing it! it is the constant testing and league table system that is wrong.
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Confined children: Children like to run around.
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Of course in school, sitting still is the norm. So we have come up with this wonderful idea of ADD, i.e. drug those who won’t sit still into submission. Is the system sick or what?
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Academics viewed as winners: Who are the smartest kids in school?
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Those who are good at these subjects go on to be professors. So those are certainly the smartest people we have in our society.
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But, I can tell you from personal experience that our society doesn’t respect professors all that much, so something is wrong here.
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Practical skills not valued: When I was young there were academic high schools and trade high schools. Trade high schools were for dumb kids. Academic high schools were for smart kids.
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The need to please teachers: People who succeed at school are invariably people who are good out at figuring what the teacher wants and giving it to them.
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In real life there is no teacher to please and these “grade grubbers” often find themselves lost.
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Self worth questioned: School is full of winners and losers.
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In school, most everyone sees themselves as a loser. Why do we allow this to happen?
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Politicians in charge: Politicians demand reform but they wouldn’t know reform if it hit them over the head.
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Major learning by doing mechanism ignored: And last but not least, scholars from Plato to Dewey have pointed that people learn by doing. That is how we learn. Doing. Got it? Apparently not. Very little doing in schools. Unless you count filling in circles with number 2 pencils as doing.
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Government use of education for repression: As long as there have been governments there have been governments who wanted people to think that the governments (and the country) is very good.
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School is about teaching “truth.”
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Discovery not valued: The most important things we learn we teach ourselves.
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This kind of learning is not valued in school because it might lead to, heaven forbid, failure, and failure is a really bad word in school. Except failure is how we learn, which is pretty much why school doesn’t work.
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Boredom ignored: Boredom is a bad thing. We drug bored kids with Ritalin so they will stop being bored.
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What they mean is that school should be like they remember rather than how it is now
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Not accepting students with straight A's only shows your own prejudices. Students can be good at a range of subjects, without being passionately interested in all of them. Lots of people are self motivated, without being teacher pleasers, they just wish to do their best in everything for their own satisfaction.
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Why do we have schools? Instead of answering this question by listing all the good things that schools provide, which anyone can do, I will turn the question around: What is bad about having schools?
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Why do we have schools? Instead of answering this question by listing all the good things that schools provide, which anyone can do, I will turn the question around: What is bad about having schools?