And as the Republican’s (especially here in NV) work hard to cut funding for education, this will all only get worse.
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
[…]
“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”
Now a days they want to teach to a test, and not let teachers teach kids how to use their brain for anything more than rote memorization. There’s more to using your brain than memorizing.
This does, however, keep the powers that be in power, because if people don’t know how to think, they will be less likely to question those in power.
Too many big words.
This article suggests the solution is to change the way students are measured and how teachers are compensated. I agree teaching to standardize tests and basing teacher salaries off of them is bad, but these are only the symptoms of the problem. The real solution is to abolish the public education system. These are simply prisons for defensless young minds. They don’t teach reasoning, questioning, and thinking. In fact, they teach the exact opposite — how to follow, obey the rules, go along with the group concensus … how to become sheeple.
Fearmonger, much? It’s amazing that the only attributed quotes in the article are from dead people. The living folks who are (supposedly) quoted refused to let their names be published. That’s how important this issue really is, I guess.
From IES Nat’l Center for Education Statistics
Public elementary and secondary schools costs
(Using inflation adjusted dollars)
1961-62 $ 2,769/student
2006-07 $10,041/student
Students per Teacher ration continues to drop
1960 25.8 students per teacher
2011 15.2 students per teacher
But over the past 50 years of never-ending increases in “investments” for public education, the average scores for reading and mathematics have flat lined.
Despite the vast amount of money sunk into education since 1971, the product has not improved at all due to the government monopoly. Taxpayers are finally demanding more control of the system — or choice for all parents to take their money and opt out of it.
Control the education … control the people …
“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”
– Josef Stalin
“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”
– Karl Marx
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
He spelled “financiers” wrong.
its all being brought to you by the gates foundation. ’cause ya know ol’ bill is an expert at education! just look how her educated everyone about writing computer viruses, malware , trojans, ect…
next up from bill and company, a primer on how to brick a cell phone maker.
benson…one aspect in this, and I’ll admit it’s a small one but it does impact your stats, is that the kids who used to be sent off to institutions are now inside the public schools. Lots of one-on-one there, the number of special ed teachers is very high compared to 1960. They are the expensive ones, the ones who’ll be left to the state if the GOP privatizes everything. (They’re not profitable, you see…)
Also, that average class size is tweaking my BS meter. Can’t say I’ve seen many classrooms that small, anywhere. (I visit lots of schools in the US)
#10, I thought it was low, too, until I did some checking (I work with the local school board). Not all classes are filled to capacity. Some may only have 10 students in them because that is all who signed up for it (HS electives). And SE classes may only have 5 or 6. Texas’s target rate is 22:1. The local school system is like 19:1.
There is one easy fix that will save money and make more available to fund schools.
Eliminate ALL Federal involvement in education (including the elimination of all Federal departments dealing with education). Take whatever percentage of taxes collected by Fed for education and transfer it to State taxes (reduce Fed income tax by 0.5% and increase State tax by 0.5%)
The closer you get the collection and spending of money to the schools, the less waste you will see and the more control the schools and parents will have.
#10 jbenson2 said
“1960 25.8 students per teacher
2011 15.2 students per teacher”
I never trust stats in comments without a link to the source. So here’s my stats from the Nat’l Center for Education Stats:
The 2008 Average Class Size was 23 students.
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ctes/tables/h116.asp
So why is there a a discrepancies between between 15.2 and 23? Because excessive paperwork such as NCLB and other mandates.
BTW, private schools have almost the exact same pupil to student ratio.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_064.asp?referrer=list
This topic is very interesting and I’m surprised it hasn’t been discussed in detail on more occasions, aside from the bumper sticker cliches.
Education in America was getting better through the 40’s and early 60’s. At that time religious schools received no public funding, except for their tax exemption status as a religious institution. This limited their enrollment and therefore their influence on the citizenry. Imagine a system where the church could shame patents for not sending their kids to the parochial school in support of their local church, through a voucher. The Church argued that the smaller class size at the parochial schools provided a better education and therefore they should be able to provide a premium alternative to the public system. The Government argued that the parochial schools were in fact already spending more per student than the public schools and that taking additional money away from the public system to give to the parochial schools would dramatically weaken the public school system. Which is exactly what the Church wanted.
The beginning of the assault on the public education system came when these religious institutions decided to lobby for a voucher system that would allow parents to spend the taxpayers money either on the public school system or on the church education. Between the churches tax exempt status and the additional voucher money the parochial schools, would become the most viable education option, while the public schools would deteriorate out of existence. In that case, families would be forced to send their kids to a parochial school even if they were not religious or unaffiliated.
Since the government and secular leaders in the community fought and prevented this (madrasah like system) the christian right decided to deploy a new long term tactic that would eventually allow the Church to prevail, the Defunding of the public school system.
Over the past 45 years the religious right has systematically supported congressional members that would support the defunding of public education, reducing budgets for new schools, reducing budgets for teachers and reducing budgets for supplies. They even lobbied to influence and then control the Texas Board of Education (Texas is the largest single buyer of textbooks in the nation) to change the curriculum of the nations schools to stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and present Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?_r=1
This has been nothing more than a concerted effort to indoctrinate the country into moving America to a religious state with christian corporate rule.
For sure the christian (republican) right does not want your kids or you to THINK!
That’s why you can’t remember when Education Was About Teaching Kids To Think.
#9 Another TeaDud fail.
You keep promoting this, and fail every time to resolve the associated problems.
Buzzwords are not ideas. Dogma is not a plan.
So far, nobody has mentioned that the students who arrive at the schools each morning are a far different breed overall than the students of 1962.
There are exceptions galore, both ways, of course, but the majority of kids are far, far closer to the “stupid spoiled brat who is there to be disruptive” than the “student wanting to learn”. It’s Jersey Shore vs. Leave it to Beaver and I think that this has a huge impact on the results, regardless of any improvement or deterioration in teachers or curriculum.
Until graduate level at university, all education is about rote memorization.
Choke it down and puke it back.
The last thing anyone is interested in is your opinion/input.
If you get discouraged before you reach graduate level, you’re not a member of the world leader class.
The trick is to entertain yourself, and keep your sanity, until you reach graduate level.
Note that I said until you reach “graduate level“, not until you “graduate“.
I’ve been friends with CompSci professors in lots of places in Canada and in the ‘States.
They always assumed that I must be a post-graduate student just because I had T-shirts and Sweat-shirts from Cambridge in England, l’ Université de Paris in France, N.C. State, Concordia University, Simon Frazer and Carleton U. in Canada, and that I actually knew the work of people who taught and did research there as well as some of the people, that I was an academician myself (and I did nothing to either claim or deny that I was or wasn’t.)
I only have a relatively recently acquired Associate’s Degree in Business because I was getting out of the software development business and wanted to keep my mind active.
I’ve seen software development go from a hopeless mishmash of cobbled together code, to procedural code, to libraries of procedural code, to Object-Oriented code and I know what’s going to come next when we grow past object orientation and start to take relationships into account.
Not bad for a kid from Québec with a high-school leaving certificate and “du front tout autour de la tête.”
Now I’m jst playing with Arduino open-source hardware and chillin’.
That’s the beauty of just waiting for the inevitable.
Until graduate level at university, all education is about rote memorization.
Choke it down and puke it back.
The last thing anyone is interested in is your opinion/input.
If you get discouraged before you reach graduate level, you’re not a member of the world leader class.
The trick is to entertain yourself, and keep your sanity, until you reach graduate level.
Note that I said until you reach “graduate level“, not until you “graduate“.
I’ve been friends with CompSci professors in lots of places in Canada and in the ‘States.
They always assumed that I must be a post-graduate student just because I had T-shirts and Sweat-shirts from Cambridge in England, l’ Université de Paris in France, N.C. State, Concordia University, Simon Frazer and Carleton U. in Canada, and that I actually knew the work of people who taught and did research there as well as some of the people, that I was an academician myself (and I did nothing to either claim or deny that I was or wasn’t.)
I only have a relatively recently acquired Associate’s Degree in Business because I was getting out of the software development business and wanted to keep my mind active.
I’ve seen software development go from a hopeless mishmash of cobbled together code, to procedural code, to libraries of procedural code, to Object-Oriented code and I know what’s going to come next when we grow past object orientation and start to take relationships into account.
Not bad for a kid from Québec with a high-school leaving certificate and “du front tout autour de la tête.”
Now I’m jst playing with Arduino open-source hardware and chillin’.
That’s the beauty of just waiting for the inevitable.
#16 Careful where you point that finger, man. The kids are at the end of the string; the final product, as it were. What you are saying is tantamount to “the product is inferior because the product is inferior”, a circular argument.
Most kids are spoiled? Granted. How did they get that way? Didn’t happen in a vacuum…
Most kids don’t want to learn? Again, granted. And again, how did that happen?
The larger issue here is the previous generation, the people who act as primary molders, and then secondary informers to the next generation. In other words: PARENTS.
Society, which is made up of the parents of the next generation, has already decided: To be smart, is to be boring and a social pariah, and therefore a bad thing. To think for oneself is likewise, anomalous behavior, because we are driven (and drive others) to be unique “just like my friends”. It is no wonder that with all the cuts to education, there is little or no outcry. Education is an irrelevant burden, and cutting funds to it is good for society, under these conditions.
Not firing unqualified teachers isn’t going to make things better. Dump the teachers unions and education will get better.
As for teaching kids to think, I can tell you this: The emphasis in career tech education is on incorporating math and science into the curricula. The big move in tech classes, even HS IT classes, is to try and put as much 3R’s as possible into the program. The subject may be bending fenders or adding a network printer, they want 3R’s (and some assessment) in that program somewhere.
Critical thinking is something most publishers build into courseware automatically, but I know some bigger publishers are lazy about it. The job of developing thinking skills usually falls to the teachers, and at that point the ability varies widely. Very widely.
“Remember When Education Was About Teaching Kids To Think?” //// No, I don’t and thats probably the problem right there. Podcast’s 3-4 sentences are on the right track, then he jumps to his own private rail.
You have to “know” something before you can think. Before that, its actually just emoting.
And a lot of education in the early years really is about socialization and perhaps even more about baby sitting and keeping kiddies off the street==ie socialization.
I still recall fondly ((trying to)) complain to Dear Old Dad that school was boring and the teachers crap and the kids assholes and his constant response, if any at all, was: “Your job is to learn in spite of the teachers, not because of them. Go read a book.” A lesson that serves me well in all other aspects of life.
A few High School college prep creative writing classes were my first exposure to being “taught” to think on my own. College was indeed much more of that. Graduate level was all that. So, a progression until the job market and back to square one. Thank god for training camp or I never would have made it.
Public Education: after keeping America “free” the most important thing society provides to its members. And yes—the Pukes want to take it away. The code language here is “returning education to local jurisdiction.” That is a plan to KILL education. LOOK MAH–JUST LOOK. The Federal Programs main good is to provide funding when local property taxes just don’t cut it.
As in all things USA–the process is corrupt and we spend more and get less than any other country, but thats a different issue. We can and should be doing much more in education.
We won’t though because it requires too many to care/think about more than themselves.
Stupid Hoomans.
Bobbo: Bloom’s Taxonomy.
There are better links, but that’s the first one I saw that looked interesting.
The assumption is that todays “teachers” can actually teach. As a former school employee, many of the “teachers” I encountered were attendance takers and room monitors and rarely anything more.
Teacher unions and administrator unions spend so much time fighting over power and money.
Teachers want to be administrators because it raises their final retirement rate, and administrators putting in their time until retirement, and the kids get lost in the shuffle.
Although there are some good and dedicated teachers out there, the school “system” soon beats it out of them.
Thanks Olo–I had not seen that before and do agree with the Modern Version. Interesting that “Regurgitating Dogma” is fully consumed at the very first stage?
While I studied Piaget, that line of inquiry stopped short of education—or at least I did.
Like everything else in america, education is not one thing and across this great land there are examples of everything/anything one can imagine or hypothesize or conclude upon. Just as “One size does not fit all” one description does not fit all yet that is our political speak: as subtle as a brick. Or bumpersticker to switch similies.
I think “mainstreaming” the disadvantaged has done great damage to the education of all the rest. As a result, the gifted get less attention than they would benefit from and once again, all of the rest of us suffer as a result. Same with disruptive types. Sad because “the right touch” at the right moment doesn’t require a lot of money or resources, just an expertise that isn’t much in evidence.
Reality isn’t fair. Do we deal with reality, or do we deal with fairness? Can we deal with both if we don’t recognize the conflict?
Basic education.
“Remember When Education Was About Teaching Kids To Think?”
I am still laughing from that title.
No way to take this post seriously.
Cursor_
I’m so excited to see academic elitism show its low opinion of vocational training and education. A large share of the economic success of the United States during the 20th century is owed to the American “invention” of the modern public research universities which focused on practical subjects like agricultural and industrial progress; which were a contrast to the older methodology of higher education found in Europe. But now over the past several decades, the trend has been to encourage pushing every single last kid off to gain a university education from schools that have been more than happy to cater to their every whim by creating frivolous degree programs that have no practical use at all. So the kids pile on more and more debt in the rat race to be more competitive than their peers for jobs that have no requirement for the “education” they’ve received in the first place; resulting in discriminatory effects on the poor and minorities, and more importantly creating a gross misallocation of resources that could have gone to more productive uses.
Well Sea Lawyer==what kind of education is really required to work at McDonalds? You post as if there was a manufacturing base in america? Even what is left will be gone in only a few more short years.
We are rapidly becoming what a lot of the world in revolt is, like Egypt: college graduates driving taxi’s.
Yes, time for REAL social engineering to counter/adapt to what is taking place according to the dictates of the Iron Discipline. What would you advise your kiddie to “study” when the reality is at age 21 there will be no jobs?
Ha, ha. Our poor kiddies. But the SuperRich are doing fine, stock market is up, who are we to complain?
Eliminate the Department of Education and make kids education a priority over protecting incompetent teachers represented by the teachers union.
Problem MOSTLY solved.
Guyver–yes and no. Back to the variability of the issue. I’m sure some areas would thrive and others would crash. Rich school districts would be world class, the South would be teaching from the WOTAN Bible.
So, which is better? Uniform mediocrity or a mishmash of everything? I’m thinking the latter. Let everyone from the South flip burgers while the Liberal Coasts continue scientific/tech advancement?
Freedom can be a bitch but let the geographic terms of opportunity play forth.
29, Bobbo,
Well if we stopped doubly taxing U.S. corporations we’d see a lot less moving of jobs overseas. In fact, if we did corporate tax reform we’d also entice foreign corporations to move many of their operations here and thus provide more jobs and preserve certain sectors. Instead we have too many politicians buying votes with class warfare.