Here’s a great piece from spiked online on what ails modern education. Here’s a taste, read the whole thing:
In virtually every Western society, education is in trouble. Unfortunately, however, policymakers tend to obsess only about the symptoms of the problem – unsatisfactory standards in core subjects, growth of a cohort of poorly schooled underachievers or erosion of classroom discipline – and not the cause.
Yet the main reason education often is not educating is because it finds it difficult to give meaning to human experience. Time and again, curriculum specialists inform us that because we live in a world of rapid change, the conventions and practices of the past have become outmoded, outdated or irrelevant. Present educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children.
The implicit assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit. But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than those of their elders because they are more tuned in to the present. So children are often represented as digital natives who are way ahead of their text-bound and backward-looking parents.
Although education is celebrated as one of the most important institutions of society, there is a casual disrespect for the content of what children are taught. Curriculum engineers often display indifference, if not contempt, for abstract thought and the knowledge developed in the past. Both are criticised for being irrelevant or outdated; only new information that can be applied and acted on is seen as suitable for the training – and it is training and not teaching – of digital natives.
In policy deliberations about education, the acquisition of subject-based knowledge is often dismissed as old-fashioned. Typically, an emphasis on the intellectual content of classroom subjects is labelled an outdated form of scholasticism that has little significance in our era. Policymakers often represent change as an omnipotent force that renders prevailing forms of knowledge and schooling redundant. In such circumstances, education must transform itself to keep up with the times. From this perspective, educational policies can be justified only if they can adapt to change.
Since they are likely to be overtaken by events, classroom innovations by definition have a short-term and provisional status. The instability that afflicts the education system is turned into the normal state of an institution that needs to be responsive to the uncertain flow of events. Although fads come and go, the constant feature of today’s throwaway pedagogy is a deep-seated hostility to teaching academic subjects to young people, especially to those who come from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. So-called modernisers regard the subject-based curriculum as far too rigid for a school system that must adapt to a constantly changing world. The dramatisation of change in Anglo-American education-speak renders the past irrelevant. If indeed we continually move from one new age to another, then the practices of the past have little relevance for today.
I will say two quick things to fix higher education (and secondary education and primary would improve also). I think bureaucracy should be trimmed. and I think Education Schools should be abolished. No one needs a 42-unit degree in “Education” or “Liberal studies” or whatever. Get a subject matter degree (especially for 7-12 educators) and then keep the mentor-teacher model.
I listen to folks in our Education department talk to us about “Millennials” and “digital natives” and they quite frankly have ceded the field to these narcissistic infantile shits. I’m the expert — I will meet you where you are — to a point. I’m not turning my class into a non-stop mashup because you need music to accompany your “experience”. I’m not a facilitator or a colleague. How can one be peer to someone who doesn’t know shit when I, in fact, know a lot more than shit? You can tell how much I love faculty meetings.
One of the real problems these days is that you have to be seen “doing something”, and doing the same thing other did before you isn’t “doing something”.
Another problem is that you no longer actually have to have done much of anything in order to be seen as an expert in everything, as long as you can mouth the right platitudes and strike the right poses. One example of that is Ezra Klein, who’s an expert at being an expert. Another example being our Community-Organizer-in-Chief Himself.
you need music to accompany your “experience”
The “Millennials” and “digital natives”, whatever those are, are afraid of silence. If there is silence, you have to listen to your own thoughts and ideas. You might even reexamine your actions and your future. That’s scares the bejeebers out of these people. But when you are plugged in, someone else is doing your thinking for you, and you get to ride along, fat, happy and stupid, And the Left has acquired the monopoly on supplying “thought” to these pliant morons, so what’s not to like?
To really achieve silence usually requires being alone. Being alone you have to think for yourself, instead of following the herd. You might even discover how useless and ill prepared you really are. Which is what a lot of what boredom really is– an inability to find useful things to do when given the opportunity.
Went to a Catholic grammar school in the 50s. One nun per classroom, about 60 students on average per class. One nun as prinicpal, with a single secretary. One janitor to maintain the school, 2-3 women in the cafeteria who were there at lunch time, for all I know they were volunteers. That was it, for 8 grades x 2 x 60 ~ 1000 students. There were three priests close by, but rarely were they seen in the school. I managed to get an education that to this day is better than what public high schools generally give out. Amazingly enough, without any of the bureaucracy of modern schools.
Thanks for your insight, Floyd.
Thanks TCW…
Kevin/Raoul… “expertise” has eclipsed wisdom and true knowledge in all areas of life. A medical expert need not be a physician these days as long as he has an MS in Hospital Administration or Health care Policy. That’s not to say that doctors can’t learn policy from experts because they can, but these “experts” seem to be an “exit only” information hub.
I’m thankful for the parts of the ivory tower aspect of education. Some unvarnished abstract thinking is good for people. The problem is when an ivory tower type doesn’t know his place in the cosmos and tries to “do” things.
Floyd,
What is the “ivory tower aspect”?
Experience without intellectual aspects is not usually good just as all knowledge and no experience is not good.
University should be a time to hash out ideas and talk about and argue the big picture: values, culture, character, etc. Where all those fit into out Western experience — where have we been and where are we going kind of questions.
The argument that some professors have “no real world” experience is a bit of a canard. I know plenty of people with life experience to burn but don’t know shit about life. Knowledge is a tool — if one has it but doesn’t know how to use it — it is useless.
Of course — it’s easy for me since I have real world experience.
Richard Bach, aviation writer extraordinaire, once wrote a short story about how he would teach people to fly. I think his theory is interesting in this case because he indirectly addresses this thing about Millennials and digital natives long before anyone thought up such tripe.
His vision (in this story), was a place where someone who wanted to learn how to fly would only truly “learn” if he first studied the birds, then build his own glider, then a Wright flyer, then a Curtis Jenny and so on through history. It was sort of a Kung Fu kind of school where you “experience” flight and of course would never exist, but the point was there is something to learn from all ages of our existence. If you read this story which he wrote before he penned Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you can sort of see the whole point of the seagull book in the making, but I digress.
Can anyone really appreciate what we have today, be it i-pods, computers or anything else without at least learning about what came before?
I don’t buy that line about “we have to teach these (punks) a certain way because they’ve been raised in a different time and can’t or won’t learn like (the old-folks) did”. Experience has shown me that people are quite adaptable, and given enough motivation they can do amazing things. Things that may even amaze themselves.
Touchy feely douche-bags are going to be the death of this nation.
“Wax on. Wax off.”
Outlaw – to an extent, what you (Richard Bach) describe is what many home-schoolers strive to achieve. In a world in which knowledge/data/facts often become obsolete (read Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” for a history of modern science and a reminder of how consistently “everything we know” is proven wrong within one lifetime) and human lifespans are approaching eternal, the one essential skill is self-instruction. This is particularly so as employers become less willing/able to train employees and as the idea of working for one employer (in one field0 one’s entire working life becomes increasingly delusional.
Meanwhile, what passes for education today is content free nonsense suitable to create the illusion of activity without permitting any measurable demonstration of achievement. As the joke went in the Soviet union: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
Much of teaching today is based on finding out how individual students learn and adapting a lesson plan that adds that catering to it. You do have to do that when you have special ed. kids in the class, or struggling readers from households that didn’t think reading was amongst the things they needed to teach their kids prior to schooling. But they also expect you to do this for kids who are behavioral basket cases. So much psychiatrist and behavior analyst bullshit backs up the education system because you have to cater to some kid who’s just an intelligent animal because his/her parents have no boundaries or dire consequences (aka ass slapping) when they F up. The grief these kids bestow upon you makes you not give two shits about them. Luckily, the ones in my class who are like that are above-level readers so I can just condemn then to the corners of the room for the rest of the year if I need to and not worry about their grades.
My main point is that it’s a cross between education’s numerous failed social experiments and ineffective modern parenting that adds to even more social experiments in education. There was nothing wrong with the education system that most of us 40-year-olds and older got in the 70s or before, since most of us, and my colleagues at work, are from that same generation. But now it’s constantly changing and all I see is failure after failure. A lot of it is just PC bullshit, too.
I had a Classroom Management course that finished last week, and we made posters for classroom rules and consequences to hang in our classrooms at school. The instructor loved my consequences poster, but at the last minute said that the font I chose, which is all caps, makes it seem like it’s shouting at the kids. She made me change fonts and style so I wasn’t “shouting” anymore. This is how retarded things have become.
Thank you so much for using the mighty Schoolhouse Rock, Floyd. Couldn’t have been more excited when back in Ohio last week and my 9-year-old niece expressed a full-on love affair with the soundtrack to my Hanna Barbera-watching cartoon years. Christmas presents could not be easier this year, for her or my 7-year-old nephew. 2-year-old nephew? Loves books and being read to, so also easy.
I don’t want to brag, but any parent would be thrilled to have the grades and standardized test scores of the only one of the Little Fireflies to, as yet, attend High School. He attends an inner-city, Jesuit school where the only kids using computers are the kids taking electives in programming. He can translate Homer and Julius Caesar from the original texts and is conversant in the English spoken by Shakespeare and Chauser. Except for a few novels, his list of required texts could be identical to what the school used in the ’50’s; perhaps even in the 1880’s.
His teachers are subject matter experts. By and large they are men, and his school is not Co-Ed. He is taught by men, and he and his peers are taught to be men. Discipline is strict. You might get two strikes but you don’t get three. Community service is mandatory. They are taught that they are damn lucky to have the opportunities they have and they are taught to help others who do not have those opportunities. Boys who do not dress appropriately or mind their instructors are often pinned against a locker by an instructor when the incident happens. Very few boys fail to learn the lesson by their first offense. In other words, it’s an old fashioned school. This school has churned out leaders in every generation of American society almost since their has been an America and I’m confident the digital revolution will not make their methods obsolete any more than all the other revolutions of the past 150 years.
In other words, “it ain’t rocket science,” and, to all the educators who are convinced we are living in a new era, “this too shall pass.”
Are we wrong to believe the goal of education is to produce an educated person?
John T. Gatto has persuasively argued that the system’s goal is to produce a “schooled” person, something quite different from an educated one.
Are any of us in this discussion teachers? I just feel like we need to include at least one as a reality check. Speaking as a fairly smart kid who was a fairly poor student, if I were to list the things I felt my teachers did wrong, I think I’d probably end up with a very different list than what my teachers themselves felt they did wrong. I’ve actually talked to a few of my friends who’ve gone on to be teachers in different states over the years on this very subject, and they have massive complaints about the system, about the method, about the material, about the politics, but they’re not the ones I would have thought of on the receiving end.