Thinking about school and how my friends child is not enjoying it at all. The lack of ability to be flexible and allow all or at least most children to develop and thrive is still a huge problem. It is interesting to watch the corporate and religious fanatics inexorably take over the charter school movement as parents faculty and administration try to use it to create the flexible school. That being said the charter and interzone options do not address the underlying cause of uneven education. The root problem is still social inequities visited upon OUR (a society is parent to every child) children by families and society. It seems to me that a healthy society would expend the resources to give all it's children a chance at a good life. I would only take a couple of generations to turn the whole thing around.
Ah, the schools are doing exactly what they are designed to do, create a large number of people who are afraid and unaccustomed to questioning what they are told to do and why they are doing it. I agree with Salmon Khan's assertion that it is not a matter of lack of resources it is rather a problem with the structure of the schools that we all take for granted. But watch out! What would happen if millions of young people were taught to question and imagine and .........
ReplyDeleteThe people in power and all those who were arroyo runner by the school system would be very afraid.
Taught by the schools not "arroyo runner" by the schools
DeleteYes if the paradigm is obedience as opposed to learning ,no matter how much money we throw at schools we still will not get the results that many of us desire. Th lack of flexibility ,makes it hard to allow for personal growth.
ReplyDeleteThat is very true. Your mother once told me that the function of the public schools was to turn out an unquestioning, docile labor pool.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, one thing that really scares me is when people use the excuse that schools just need to be more efficient as a reason to cut budgets. Fact is that teachers are vastly underpaid, compared to other professionals who have both a college degree and extra credentialing on top of that. When Philip was in the public high school in Albuquerque, I was astonished at the number of teachers who had to have second jobs to make ends meet. He had one teacher who was a bartender at night, another who was a mortician (she said the corpses listened far better than her 9th grade English students), etc. So some money must be thrown at the issue, but the real problem is seeing that the money gets thrown in the places where it can do some real good.