So, let’s start with how I agree. I do think that school is too much about “trivia” rather than thinking and forming your own opinions. However, I happen to have the privilege to go to a very small public high school which is less like the forced learned many have been talking about. For instance, one of the major projects we do every quarter is to debate about controversial history subjects, which have no true answer. However many things are “forced”, an example was when I had a group with which I had to teach/discuss with the class about The Great Gatsby. On our quiz which we gave the class we had a interpretive question, such as “what does this symbolize and why?”, intending our classmates to analyze and make a logical conclusion, and back it up for the ‘why’ part of the question. However our teacher did not like this and graded us down for it. All in all, I feel that our school is progressively changing towards the direction this article wants it to be, providing a large amount of choices in a school with only 400 students or so.

So this moves into how I disagree with this article. I believe that a completely free market, one with as many educational choices as there are books, would negatively affect the educational system. I believe there should be more choices, but I feel the amount of choices should not be in how to teach them, because that would only lead to standardized testing to make sure that everyone’s learning what they need to, and then everyone would be teaching children how to succeed on the test, rather than how to succeed later in life. The changes should be on what we teach. I think that diversity with subjects, especially with the arts, needs to be commonplace, but the thing which absolutely needs to be more commonplace is independent studies. I believe at least one needs to be done, and passed in order to graduate. Independent studies are when a student decides what he is going to learn, and what the finished product will be, be it a paper, a website, a song, or even a made-from-scratch robot. The student then finds a teacher to be their progress-analyzer and see how much they have done and make sure they have enough done to finish it on time. This is an option open to many high school students, but I think it should be available to middle school or even elementary school students. Also being approved for one is a hassle, because it deviates from standard teaching. So if we could implement a more interactive way to learn, interactive as in the student is teaching himself (and in a way the teacher), the current school system would be more efficient.

Summing up, I feel that the current system could use some more changes and stop teaching students in the direction of the SAT and more towards real life. However the system isn’t all bad, otherwise everyone here talking about how education needs to be changed would be incapable to do so. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I’ll keep it there for effect.

I agree with everything you said, except that the free market got us into this mess.

I would love for my children to attend the type of school you describe. I’d like to create the new education paradigm. Hell I’d love to own and operate a school based on the well being and happiness of children instead of the values we have today in our schools. But I can’t. Not because people do not want the thing you and I describe, but because entrepreneurs have been regulated out of the market in most states so we don’t get any fresh ideas.

Strange that you and I love Gatto’s writings and I think he believes in a free market and you believe he is saying the free market is the problem. I thought he said that “Forced Compulsory Government Schooling” was the problem and that we should not be forced to be educated, but should be allowed to make our own learning choices. To me… that sounds like a free market. A true free market is not the government giving you three choices, government operated public school, highly regulated private school – that is almost identical to government school because of the regulation, and homeschool. A true free market would have as many educational choices as we have when we buy food or books. The choices should be as limitless as our imaginations.

Are we communicating now?

“Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto
“What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated” by Alfie Kohn

Most of the points that I made above are made much better and much more eloquently by these two writers and educators.

So right now what we have are a bunch of schools that are so afraid of failure and of being the worst that they no longer take risks with the curriculum because making a mistake means losing federal funding.

More to the point, when you teach people that success is important, you’re also teaching them that failure is bad. If failure is bad, then anything that promotes failure is also bad. “High Standards” is another way of saying “Low tolerance for failure”.

We’re teaching our students that their successes are more important than anything else, and as a result, students are going to be highly unlikely to do anything that might not lead to success. If I get in trouble for failing, I’m not going to take any intellectual risks, nor am I going to try anything that’s truly challenging because it might turn out that I screw it up the first few times.

Learning doesn’t come from successes. Learning doesn’t come from “High Standards” that can be easily summarized (and easily tested). Multiple choice tests are easy to prepare for (anticipate the questions and memorize the answers) and even easier to grade. No original thought is necessary, because there’s no room for “E) Write your own answer in the space below, making sure to thoroughly explain” on a Scantron sheet.

You want students to learn? Take the competition out of the classroom. Get your students to stop worrying about where they are in relation to their peers by, you guessed it, not even making an issue of it. Stop worrying about which students are the best and get them to think, get them to work together and give them problems to solve, problems whose solutions require high-level thinking, analysis and synthesis of information in order to figure something out.

You can’t test this in a 3 hour test. What you can do, though, is get your students to talk about it, and demonstrate understanding, and encourage them to try everything. They’ll figure out soon enough what they’re the most skilled at, and they’ll figure out how to use those strengths to shore up or improve their weaknesses, or even better, they’ll figure out how to find people whose strengths counterbalance their own.

The problem is not that our system is inefficient - it’s brutally efficient and is working exactly like it’s supposed to: students are kept out of the home for 8 hours (or more) per day, and are forced to learn what basically amounts to trivia. Instead of teaching them how to build things, we’re teaching them the names of all of the tools. And that’s just fine, by most people. If our students aren’t asked any real, meaningful questions, and they’re never allowed to ask any real, meaningful questions (not that schools have the answers, but rather a good teacher should be able to help the student along the way of finding the answer, and in recognizing and dealing with the questions that come up with each answer), then what we’re going to have are a bunch of trivia-obsessed, ineffectual cogs.

Because, in today’s public education system, that’s all that students are.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have standards. I’m saying that what we should be doing is putting students into situations where they have to think, not memorize and regurgitate, and where they have to problem-solve and take in new information and maybe, just maybe, start making sense of the world. Or, I guess, we can treat them as tiny little barrels, waiting to be filled with knowledge, passive receptacles for the academic crap of the world.

I dunno about you, but I’d rather my students (I’m one year away from being a teacher) go out and find that knowledge on their own. To use a metaphor, I don’t want to tell them about the landmarks and famous sights of knowledge; I want to give them a map that says “Here there be treasure,” and watch as they run off, shovels in hand. I want to smash the obstacles that keep them from learning, not do the learning for them.

Steve keeps talking about self-actualization, and the ways in which he is in control of his own destiny. Seems to me that as a teacher, the greatest thing that I can do for my students is to show them that they, too, are in control of their destinies.

This reminds of a middle school experience in my math classes. I had a problem with turning in homework, but I would ace the tests. Because of the homework problem they refused to move me up to a higher level math course, and I think that was probably some of the reason I lost interest in schooling.

Take care.

Within 23 seconds I stumbled over several great educational posts and websites that I had to share with you! Kudos to BubbleJet from the Learning Online Info blog for the post about Engines of Education. This looks like a great…

…that pretty much says everything about our schools! I´ve written about it earlier and if you want to read the my point of view go to:
http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/the_education_s.html

Glad I found your blog. Reading this gives me power for what we want to do with Supercool School :) Rock on! Steli Efti