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Schools out! Let's talk education!


Ms. Spam
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So my same friend who posted about GMO's on Facebook posted this article today:

 

http://www.alternet.org/education/results-are-america-dumb-and-road-getting-dumber

 

The Results Are In: America Is Dumb and on the Road to Getting Dumber

 

 

 

The success of National Geographics Cosmos might appear to offer a glimmer of hope that America is ready to break free of the anti-intellectualism movement that has left this country in the wake of other developed nations when it comes to scientific literacy.

 

...

 

America remains a scientifically ignorant nation for two reasons: the resurgence of fundamentalist religion during the past 40 years, and secondly, the low level of science education in American elementary and secondary schools, as well as many tertiary colleges.

 

While television ratings for Cosmos may have stunned media critics and your average fundamentalist, Americans continue to poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth.

 

HA! we are compared to Nigerians in this article!

 

How dumb is America?

 

Cerina mentinoned Homeschooling an another topic, but if Americans are really this stupid and chose to homeschool education we will never advance.

 

We are truly seeing the decline of the US.

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I think this article is more about bashing religion than dealing with the underlining problem and that is that the U.S. educate more young people per capita than anyone else in the world. Plus the fact that each of the 50 states fund education differently and many states play politics with a child's education. Plus we as a nation do not trust nor treat educators as professionals,rather babysitters or lazy state employees. Plus our young people have way more distractions and entitlements attitude rather than thinking of education as a opportunity to advance themselves which is passed down from their parents who may or may not value education.

 

There is no magic bullet to our education problems.

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I agree. And for the record, I absolutely do not under any circumstances think that everybody should home school their children. I do not have enough faith in people for that. Rather, I believe it's a perfectly good option for some.

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Kids need to start learning "advanced" mathematics - algebra and calculus - much, much earlier than they are now. That approach might be a good start to fixing things. With a comfortable understanding of mathematics, then proper science courses can be introduced earlier in high school. Instead of teaching biology -> chemistry -> physics as is common (or at least it was when I was in high school), it should be physics -> chemistry -> biology, in order of increasing difficulty. Kids get turned off of science when they struggle with it, and biology is the worst way to introduce students to science. With the current fight over teaching the theory of evolution in public schools, it's no wonder so many know so little of science. The topic is turned into a land mine long before they can get hooked on it! If anything else might help, I'd suggest that perhaps dropping biology altogether in public schools and focusing on physics and chemistry in high school might alleviate the troubles of teaching touchy subjects to the children of god-botherers.

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I know and have taught plenty of smart believers and non believers of young people in all my years teaching and I don't see it as a major problem.

 

A larger problem would be labeling young people with this problem or that disorder. Along with that is the lack of parents who do not see education as the #1 priority in a child's life and enable their kids to be lazy and irresponsible. Take both of these issues I mentioned and combine them and this is why China will be out doing us in 20 years.

 

We medicate children too much,we pamper and enable them to think they are so special when they aren't. We do not challenge enough or allow enough creative thinking to happen because there are too many standards to teach in a single school year. There should be no summer vacation,rather two week holidays off after every 9 weeks. That way school doesn't stop for 10 weeks and students do nothing for that long. 2 weeks is enough to recharge the batteries.

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Belief/non-belief isn't really a problem, most of the time for most subjects. Few god-botherers reject electricity in favor of a theory of divine animation of technology, so physics and chemistry can be taught with fewer problems. The crux of the fighting about curricula in public schools is evolution, and dispensing with biology at the public school level would take a lot of the fight out of the fundamentalists. Pick your battlefields and all that.

 

I agree that retaining this weird summers-off schedule is absolutely horrible for retention. You basically end up re-teaching half of everything previously covered (and supposedly mastered) at the beginning of each new year. I've been in favor of year-round schooling (and uniforms) for years now. Tradition is hard to fight though.

 

I'm not sure China is all it's hyped to be. They have their own social problems that will slow their growth in the coming years. They'll top us, sure, but they have a terrible problem with poverty and lack of education, too. It's just that their government gets to control the information much more tightly than ours. Think of all these children of single-child homes - they're sure to be spoiled little brats for the most part. The preference for males, too, will lead to some major social problems over the next two decades, I think. A surplus of unattached (and unattachable) young men with a bit of the special snowflake attitude in them is going to have some downsides.

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You people watch too much TV. I know very few Christians who have a serious problem with learning evolution. You see and hear about this on all your major "news" outlets and might see some Facebook memes, but in real life (wtf is that?!), it's not much of an issue.

 

And high school biology is ridiculously easy and mostly memorization. I know more people who had an easier time in biology than chemistry or physics. Though I believe that chemistry should be taught first. Here, I believe, you only need 2 high school science credits to graduate high school, and when I was in school most kids took Integrated Physics and Chemistry (formerly Physical Science) their freshman year. Only the more advanced kids got to start with biology. Which meant that only the "smarter" bunch ever actually took chemistry or physics, because all the other kids would take IPC and bio and stop there, even though most colleges recommend 3-4 science courses for admission.

 

And sign me up for year-round school as well. Far too many parents let their kids lapse during summer.

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It's not a non-issue, though. "Few" is not "none". There only needs to be one really vocal god-botherer to make the subject taboo for everyone in the school district.

 

Anyway, physics is much easier than chemistry or biology, since both those subjects rely on physics as a foundation. Three laws of motion, four laws of thermodynamics, four equations for electricity and magnetism, and throw in a couple of the conservation laws for good measure. If the kids can't understand or memorize that much, they won't master chemistry or biology. Chemistry has to deal with over a hundred elements and millions of compounds - it's a ton of memorization, far more than physics. And biology is applied chemistry and physics! The fact that it is taught as a matter of memorization and regurgitation doesn't change the fact that it is a cross-disciplinary subject that shouldn't be approached without a mastery of far less intensive subjects. Biology and related bio-sciences are the next big thing. The 19th century was the century of chemistry, the 20th was the century of physics, but the 21st century will be the century of biology. It's finally becoming a true science, with rigorous mathematics applied to it and real experimental techniques being used in it. If kids think of biology as the touchy, hot-potato subject that at least one kid's parents object to every time it's discussed, they won't be interested in the topic, and certainly nothing that comes "after" it.

 

If our goal is to have better-educated citizens, then a grounding in the basics of physics, and nothing else, would be the best subject to teach as early as possible. Then students would be able to better understand their technology, and relate to physics and other sciences much more easily.

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And sign me up for year-round school as well. Far too many parents let their kids lapse during summer.

Absolutely. And it is the children of less privileged families who lapse most, as their parents have less time, money, and/or care to put in their children's development during the summer months. Malcolm Gladwell touched on this in Outliers with some really shocking statistics on minority/poor children falling further and further behind each year.

 

That being said, there is more to life than learnin' and counter-arguments about the idle summer months being valuable for recharging, creativity, etc... may hold some validity.

It's not a non-issue, though. "Few" is not "none". There only needs to be one really vocal god-botherer to make the subject taboo for everyone in the school district.

You have touched on the power of the squeaky wheel before, but it is true here as elsewhere. Simple things that 95% of the population has no issue with, like birthdays (Jehovah's Witnesses), bacon (Muslims, Jews, vegans), caffeine (Mormons) and frog dissections (animal rightists) become a minefield of outrage and hurt feelings if people's pwecious beliefs aren't catered to. Squeak squeak!

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Two memes to contribute. Pong, you're right. We MUST abolish monotheism if we're to progress as a society. I call for a return to polytheistic traditions like Greek and Roman culture. And just to make sure it doesn't do battle with intellectualism, we can introduce DNAisus-- the god of DNA and evolution.

 

Second meme. Is geology at the very top of the scientific ladder pavonis? ;)

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And sign me up for year-round school as well. Far too many parents let their kids lapse during summer.

Absolutely. And it is the children of less privileged families who lapse most, as their parents have less time, money, and/or care to put in their children's development during the summer months. Malcolm Gladwell touched on this in Outliers with some really shocking statistics on minority/poor children falling further and further behind each year.

 

That being said, there is more to life than learnin' and counter-arguments about the idle summer months being valuable for recharging, creativity, etc... may hold some validity.

 

That actually touches on another problem with our education system. It's not just the logistics that's failing us, but the philosophy behind it as well. Too many schools are focusing their attention with cramming testable knowledge down every child's throat. Kids are losing valuable creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills. There's far less actual learning going on than memorization and concept regurgitation.

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Second meme. Is geology at the very top of the scientific ladder pavonis? ;)

It's the most cross-disciplinary. Geology is the intersection of physics, chemistry, and biology. Biology is just the intersection of physics and chemistry. More or less. ;)

 

There is no way a typical freshman has the mathematical background to fully grasp physics. If it were up to me, physics and calculus would be taught concurrently.

1. They don't need to have a full grasp of physics. The goal isn't to make them practicing physicists like me. It's to make them fans of physics. They only need to know the basic rules of physics as well as they may know the basic rules of football or NASCAR.

 

2. If we started teaching the proper math courses earlier (say, grade school), then high school freshmen could get a better (not complete) grasp of physics and technology.

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I know and have taught plenty of smart believers and non believers of young people in all my years teaching and I don't see it as a major problem.

 

A larger problem would be labeling young people with this problem or that disorder. Along with that is the lack of parents who do not see education as the #1 priority in a child's life and enable their kids to be lazy and irresponsible. Take both of these issues I mentioned and combine them and this is why China will be out doing us in 20 years.

 

We medicate children too much,we pamper and enable them to think they are so special when they aren't. We do not challenge enough or allow enough creative thinking to happen because there are too many standards to teach in a single school year. There should be no summer vacation,rather two week holidays off after every 9 weeks. That way school doesn't stop for 10 weeks and students do nothing for that long. 2 weeks is enough to recharge the batteries.

You can say that again. Great post.

 

I'll also add that what you people need to learn is language comprehension. Written AND verbal. What I notice online is the stark lack of correct understanding of what others are trying to convey, and it's a problem that effects American - perhaps all English speaking society, at all levels. Start at the earliest grade levels, and do NOT allow students to pass unless and until they get it or are diagnosed with a bona-fide neurological condition that inhibits auditory and visual processing. Impart the capacity to communicate effectively with others, as oppose to simply shout at each other, and the rest will follow.

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I think this article is more about bashing religion than dealing with the underlining problem and that is that the U.S. educate more young people per capita than anyone else in the world.

While I admit the article does religion bash I do find it interesting that maybe people slide backwards. The people polled in the article are not kids currently learning in school but things grown Americans believe in. What if we're getting learning and proper learning in schools - as witnessed by many of the successfully employed people who post here in the Lyceum - but overtime the people whom you chose to associate with cause you to believe differently. Peer pressure, religious fervor of people who may control an aspect of our lives such as an employer or a Church congregation, media and so forth. So you are afraid to speak out because you will be the dissenting voice or because you'll lose a job or daycare for your kids. I can easily see how facts are whitewashed with a varnish of good story telling fear mongering.

 

Second, I genuinely do not believe that per graduating student with a firm grasp of basics based on a percentage of the population in a specific country that we do not educate any more or less than say, China, India, Mexico or Russia.

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Ah, our recurring education thread. I feel like we have one of these every month or so. And the same irrelevant ideas are offered up, time and time again. The problem is you guys are all just focusing on symptoms and not the root cause of the problem. It's like a guy has an infected cut, and you guys are all suggesting different ways of cleaning the wound, or dressing it, or relieving the pain... but at the end of the day, that cut is not going away until you take some antibiotics. The question isn't so much what can be done about education; you have to look at a prior question and ask whether education is even worthwhile in the first place. And the thing is, most people, unfortunately, are simply too stupid for an education and are not deserving of an education since they do not have the mental faculties to understand anything beyond a child-like level. It's like you guys are all debating different ways of teaching a horse language, and getting frustrated when it doesn't understand. I'm going to suggest that, instead, we just put that horse on a plow.

 

 

This problem is a very easy one to solve. There's no political will for it, of course, but the solution is easy. We only need to do two things:

 

1. Immediately institute my plan to require parental licensing.

 

2. Nationally ban public education beyond the 6th grade level and close all public schools above that level. Replace each public school with a public trade school where the following programs would be available: electrician, plumbing, IT and network infrastructure, auto mechanic, metal working and welding, oil/gas rig working, truck driving and other large vehicle operation (forklift, etc), electronics repair and manufacture, construction and HVAC, furniture and carpentry, basic health care (nursing assistants, etc). These schools will operate on a strict 3-strike disciplinary rule. The first 2 gets you corporal punishment. The third and you are booted out and can take your pick of 3 options: manual labor camp, drafted into the military, or homelessness.

 

 

Do that and then evaluate students at the US' traditional-style schools (i.e. those that taught math, reading, etc.) and I bet their test scores would be as high as Finland's.

 

Not only that, we'd actually have GDP growth, low unemployment, and perhaps we'd even be competitive with China again. Not to mention inner-city crime would virtually disappear. On the negative side, a ton of teachers would lose jobs. But whatever, it's not like they're doing much of anything anyway, except collecting an inflated paycheck and pretending to be useful.

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...but at the end of the day, that cut is not going away until you take some antibiotics.

Just to be pendantic, the cut isn't going to "go away" until the body heals the wound. The infection, if any, would have to be addressed with antibiotics. I think we're talking about why there's a cut in the first place, and how stupid it was to get cut, and how to not get cut again in the future.

 

ask whether education is even worthwhile in the first place. And the thing is, most people, unfortunately, are simply too stupid for an education and are not deserving of an education since they do not have the mental faculties to understand anything beyond a child-like level.

Have any data to support this position?

 

 

1. Immediately institute my plan to require parental licensing.

I'm pro this position, if only to keep the chronically stupid from propagating as seen in Idiocracy.

 

2. Nationally ban public education beyond the 6th grade level and close all public schools above that level.

What's so special about 6th grade? Why not 5th or 7th? What are the basics that should be taught by 6th grade or, what, 12-13 years of age?

 

 

Do that and then evaluate students at the US' traditional-style schools (i.e. those that taught math, reading, etc.) and I bet their test scores would be as high as Finland's.

I'm not familiar with Finland's style of education. Is this approach the same as theirs? If not, why not simply implement the Finnish approach?

 

On the negative side, a ton of teachers would lose jobs.

Couldn't they just get re-educated for different jobs?

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Guest El Chalupacabra

If you ask me, this won't solve all the educational woes, but it is a hell of a start.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/10/justice/california-teacher-tenure-lawsuit/

 

Tenure. What an outdated policy, anyway. Very few other professions have anything remotely like tenure, and personally, I don't think anyone should have tenure for any job. I don't care what they do for a living, and that goes twice for education. As far as I am concerned, the idea a teacher in a university setting can attain tenure, and essentially have a job for life, is indefensible and cannot be justified morally or economically. Especially when these faculty members work side-by-side with support staff that don't have the same protection. In what world is that fair? I know the original intent was likely to retain researchers and professors by offering a tenure track, but I've seen faculty who bust their ass time and again, and once they get tenure, they don't give a sh8t. they stop producing and stop being innovative. Hell, some just stop coming to work, period. How does that help a university, then?

 

And when you get to the public school system, tenure is even less justified. Look, I am pro-teacher, since I have family members who taught or are currently teaching, but I'm sorry, as much as I know school teachers have it rough, nobody deserves to have tenure. It's just not sustainable, and it is part of the reason schools are stagnant. Districts pay tons of money to keep tenured faculty around, and that is money better spent on performance based salaries. Teachers who produce results should receive better salaries. People who fail as teachers, should be out, whether they have 1 year or 50. Period.

 

One other money black hole is administrators in the educational system, everything from administrative assistants (secretaries) to Superintendents. Both in higher education and in public schools, there are simply way too many of them, and they get paid way too much. You wanna know where your money goes every time your state or municipality raises taxes for education "in the name of the children?" Not always to teachers. And sure as hell not always to infrastructure, classroom equipment, etc. It goes to these administrators' salaries. Sometimes you get little fiefdoms of cronyism where administrators set themselves and their friends up with nice six-figure incomes, on your dime. And when it comes to a sense of entitlement, I have seen first hand where these administrators also get sweet packages that pay for stipends for vehicles, lodging, and even performance bonuses (where they or their friends set the bars, and man do they set them low!), as if they are CEOs at Enron with golden parachutes.

 

I've seen administrators feel entitled to the most expensive Macbook Airs available and dual 27" thunderbolt displays just to check email and play spider solitaire, then order a second set for home, simply because they don't feel like carrying their MacBook home, when a PC laptop\dock station at 1/4 the price would have done the job. My brother has told me his current principal at his school was fired from another school as principal (in the same school district), because she was so incompetent that both teachers and parents wanted her gone, only to wait out time as a do-nothing administrator for a couple years until her buddy made superintendent, and re-instated her as a principal at my brother's school.

 

And when it comes to administrative assistants, I have seen cases where you have an admin assistant who can't even manage to map a PST folder using outlook or create a distribution list, and is incompetent in every way imaginable, but because the administrator she works for likes her, rather than firing her and getting someone competent, they go out and hire a second admin assistant to do the job of the first. Such useless blobs of flesh typically just spend all day updating facebook, watching youtube videos, or going to sites and infecting their computers with viruses twice a week! Indeed, I have seen some administrators repeat this cycle, in some cases having 3 or 4 admin assistants, each in charge of doing 1 thing, and they can't even manage that and farm that job out to student workers or part time staff, all when all that was required was hiring ONE competent administrative assistant!

 

It's crap like that that just grinds the entire educational system to a halt and bleeds its funding dry, thereby preventing the hiring of quality teachers and employees. The sooner that ends, the sooner the system on the road to being fixed.

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Carrie I agree with the trade school idea.I think young people need to learn a trade so they can make a living one day. We are funneling too many young people into college who have no business being there.

 

As far as teacher tenure is concerned im up in the air on. One as a teacher I agree in getting rid of bad teachers. Teachers who do not show up each day to give it 100% and teach and care for their students need to go.

 

However the catch 22 to ending tenure is teachers are now at the mercy of state politicians and vendetta administrators. Unfunded educational mandates promising bonuses for teachers whose students do well on state tests created by textbook companies who have deep pockets and political influence is not the way to evaluate teachers.neither is the VAM model which no one understands.

 

I do not want my pay or career based solely on how a teenage student takes a test. Especially since I can only control what happens in my class and not at home where the child could be dealing with things most adults couldn't handle. Tenure is the only thing protecting good teachers from this "end all be all testing world" we live in right now.

 

Until someone comes up with a fair and impartial evaluation system for teachers I am going to protect myself from the powers that be that want to blame me for students not learning when there are more variables than just me being responsible for it.

 

Where I work now if I accept a bonus for my kids doing good on a test then I have to surrender my tenure status. Uh you can keep that bonus and choke on it.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

However the catch 22 to ending tenure is teachers are now at the mercy of state politicians and vendetta administrators. Unfunded educational mandates promising bonuses for teachers whose students do well on state tests created by textbook companies who have deep pockets and political influence is not the way to evaluate teachers.neither is the VAM model which no one understands.

Eff that! Keeping one bad policy around (tenure) because of another bad policy (vendetta administrators that could fire them) is an absolutely horrible idea. Fire incompetent teachers, and get rid of entrenched, incompetent administrators as well! One way to do that is allow the teachers to rate the administrators based on actually rating their job, not feel good questions like "Does your principal seem like a friend to you?" Don't laugh, that is an actual question that my brother is asked every year about his principal. That way you have a check and balance system of some sort, and the administrators can also lose their job, or be rewarded, based on what the teachers rate them as.

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Angry much, Chalup?

As far as I am concerned, the idea a teacher in a university setting can attain tenure, and essentially have a job for life, is indefensible and cannot be justified morally or economically.


I don't think the decision is related to universities at all. At least, it's not clear to me that it applies to everything from kindergarten to college. Even if a university is a "public" one, I don't tend to think of "public schools" as including institutions of higher education.

Especially when these faculty members work side-by-side with support staff that don't have the same protection. In what world is that fair?


Where did you get the idea that anything in life is "fair"?

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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

I don't think the decision is related to universities at all. At least, it's not clear to me that it applies to everything from kindergarten to college. Even if a university is a "public" one, I don't tend to think of "public schools" as including institutions of higher education.

I didn't say the decision had anything to do with universities at all. What I was saying is that tenure at universities is indefensible, and tenure at the public school level is even less so.

 

 

 

Where did you get the idea that anything in life is "fair"?

And where did you get the idea tenure was a good idea? Oh yeah, d*ck sucking grant writing and such. My bad.

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