I hated elementary school. This was back in the days where you memorized multiplication tables and wrote word lists 25 times. I actually couldn't read by the middle of first grade, yet I had an "A" in "Reading." Teacher told my mother that the way I would read was to keep re-writing those word lists until I had a functional vocabulary. My mother didn't buy it. She went to the teacher's store and bought a bunch of books and cassettes and sat with me at the kitchen table for an hour each night doing nothing but practicing reading. Then I took some standardized testing where I scored high and that score undoubtedly made my teacher, who taught me nothing, look good. We know that the standardized testing model can also make good teachers look bad. So the system needs some reimagining. Maybe what they do will work fabulously. Maybe it will fail. But we need to try some other stuff.
What, exactly is wrong with education today? Maybe it will fail? That's funny, and we've been trying some "other stuff" for about 40 years. How are those results?
Wait, you're kidding, right? Our nation ranks pretty terribly in math, science and reading relative to other nations and it is getting worse ever year. So what "other stuff" have we been trying for 40 years? When have we shifted how we think about education over the past four decades? Answer? Never. We add more standardized tests. We retire some of the older ones. We find new metrics to rank teachers with and yet we achieve no real results. We blame the teachers quite a bit. That's a pretty popular game. Or how about how nearly 11 million people in this country are considered to be functionally illiterate, including people who have graduate degrees? Does that really sound like we're hitting the mark? So yes, we need to start thinking of new ways to educate our youth because the present system, which has been consistently failing for the past four decades (and longer) is failing us and our children.
I think we need to take a step back. Things used to work much better. Why? Children need a base of factual knowledge to draw from in order to make important connections that then enable them to be creative, and think critically and, well, expand that knowledge even further. The more facts at an earlier age a child has, the more he'll be able to do this and pull ahead of his peers. So, while perhaps boring, rote memorization at the youngest ages is actually a practical and effective method to get those facts in, so that later they have this base to draw upon. Ground up. It starts with a good, sturdy, basic foundation, not a new tech trick or flipped classroom. Critical thinking requires basic ingredients to already be in the mix. Missing some important ingredients, then you're going to struggle. If you're struggling, then learning is an uphill battle. People get tired fighting uphill.
There are those who would say that the blame (if blame needs to be assigned at all) should go to the parent(s) who do not support their children's education by doing homework with them, encouraging reading, staying in touch with the school, etc. You can only ask the schools to do just so much, no?
Well like you illustrated all of our great educational minds over the past 40 years have done what exactly? Renormed the SAT, redesigned the SAT, No Child Left Behind, Common Core. All of that is from our educational institutions. Parents don't design the curriculum or change teaching strategies every 2-3 years. Educators do. Educators are in charge of education, period. That being said you and I agree on this one important point. It's not the teachers fault. It's math really, and the math doesn't care about our expectations nor does the math care about what we think should happen nor does it care what we want to happen. The math is this; in all populations you'll have retard/dumb/average/smart/genius. Doesn't matter that we want to make everyone smart. There are kids that simply do not want to learn. Some that don't have the tools to learn, and a lot that don't have parents who value education the way that you and I do. That's it...you cannot beat the math. You complain about adding more standardized tests, retiring old ones, etc. But then you show, as a measure of student success, TEST scores. Are tests bad or good? What do they indicate, in your mind?
