School is a Prison

Public or private? Both, mostly private with religious basis.

Enjoyable or drudgery? Mostly drudgery.

Would you have described it as prison? No.

Do you feel a fundamental shift in our basic educational processes should take place? Yes.

If so, how? Cater to the best and brightest as much as the lowest common denominator. Give students the ability to excel.

Do you think homeschooling, unschooling, or democratic education are good options for many people? Many maybe, most definately not. If I were unschooled odds are I'd be so narrowly focused that I'd be something of an idiot in most subjects. Sometimes you need to be forced to learn things you don't enjoy.

What kind of education would you like to / did you provide for your children? They are attending public schooling but get additional education from my wife and I.

I think its great to say one type of education doesn't fit all, but I think its fool hearty to put too much trust in children to lead their own education in any form, and unfortunately the parents as well. Home schooling sounds great, when you have heavily involved, educated (classically) parents with very high IQ's and a love of learning themselves. This does not describe most people.

 

Yesterday CBS Sunday Morning did a lengthy piece on Common Core. I only caught the very end of it.

CBS Sunday Morning for September 21

 

Describe your childhood education experience.

Interesting and worthwhile until High School, bored to tears after.

Public or private?

Public

Enjoyable or drudgery?

Drudgery after the age of 15 or so.

Would you have described it as prison?

No, just a boring, waste of time.

What kind of education would you like to / did you provide for your children?

Public, though I shopped around for schools and sent them to the High School where my parents reside.

I was bored throughout High School. I smoked pot, skipped class, worked full time, showed up for tests and pulled A's. I had the opportunity to go to college at 16 and should have taken it, rather than waste several years.

 

Public.

85% Drudgery after 8th grade.

Prison, no. Unpaid job, yes.


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From K-8th grade, the public school system did a good job. They could have focused more on friendships and communication. Making education more enjoyable and letting the kids explore what interests them occasionally would have been good too. But, overall, I have no complaints. My public school was in a decent middle class city with no competition from private schools, internet schools, or homeschooling. There were no 'rich' kids, broken home kids, or really poor kids either.

Now, from 8th grade to 12th grade (high school), I'm not sure how much has changed, but there has to be a much better way. Let's take foreign language. I think I would have gotten much more out of spending 3 months backpacking around France, using Rosetta Stone, and learning some of the basics out of a book. Maybe this has changed, but my method of trying to memorize words and translate in my head was not the correct way to learn a language and school didn't fix that.

I think that unschooling with some 'structure' would have been best for me. Go to the library, but research what you want type of thing. Have a way for kids to choose different 'events' to attend that other unschooled kids would be interested in put on by teachers. Instead of going to 5 or 6 different classes for 1 hour a day, spend the whole day focused on one topic, spend the whole weekend building something cool and engineering improvements. Meet these other kids and learn how to socialize. Figure out how to organize and improve your own life... Create a start-up with other kids who are interested in business and computers in the 90s and see what happens. Travel more and see different ways of doing things. Get real world experience and learn how companies work. Learn about money, economics, and personal finance. Figure out the path you want to go down and what the best topics to study are in order to do well in a job or college.

I don't have the answers, as every kid is different. But, I'm not sure we are very close to the type of education that would have been best for me.

College was fun, but I would like to have done some different things there too. But, that was on me. I wish that I would have taken a year off, and then worked a year or two before going to college (just for some $$$ and to know what the real world was like). I also wish I could have been on a 6-7 year plan from the start with fewer classes and more activities/engineering competitions. etc...

 

Thought this article was relevant.

The completely different worlds that students live in these days is staggering.

Teacher: I see the difference in educational privilege every day. I live it. I am disgusted by it. - The Washington Post

 

I have great nieces & nephews who miss a lot of school. To be honest some of it is definately 'teenager attitude,' but much of it is having a mother who's parenting skills are almost nonexistant while her fertility is abnormally high. They live in a relatively small town where the distance between schools is considerable, and the school bus service doesn't cover all areas (why assign a kid to a certain school when their home address isn't covered by the bus service?).


Suburban flight, which is no longer exclusive to whites, has killed urban schools. I experienced it to a certain extent (the beginning of what became known as White Flight) when I attended public schools. HISD, a shameful mess, does make some attempts to offer a better education to gifted students, but overall the general student population receives a questionable 'education.' If they manage to stay in school; HISD has been nailed many times for falsifying attendance records.

I absolutely do not support vouchers. Parents don't want their kids to attend public schools because of the poor quality. They receive a school tax break for sending their kids to private school. The public schools then has even less money to work with, which lowers the quality of education even more. Which causes more parents to opt for private education using tax breaks. Eventually many people with high income and clout will fight like hell not to pay taxes for public schools. Most of the people left in public schools, and supporting them by paying taxes, are poor people.

 

I went to a private school-- an Orthodox Jewish day school-- through fifth grade. I hated it. HATED. It was oppressive, anxiety-inducing, and traumatic. Not because of the religious aspect, for the most part-- I was raised Orthodox, albeit more Modern than the school. But they had no decent pedagogy, no sense of student needs or even how to evaluate student needs, no creativity or flexibility of either thought or instruction. There were mountains of exercise work-- drilling, rote memorization, filling out simple worksheets-- starting from Grade 1. They had zero facility for dealing with gifted kids, and I would indeed have described it as a prison.

From fifth through eighth grades, I switched to public school, to the Open School programs that were flourishing in Minneapolis, MN at that time. They were wonderful, and I enjoyed my time there very much. I learned a lot, and was given a lot of room to grow. I didn't feel at all imprisoned, I felt it was a really good place to be.

Ninth grade was a mix-- public junior high in Los Angeles, BTW. I had a couple of wonderful teachers who really taught me stuff and helped me discover both new talents and deepen old interests into something more sophisticated. I had a couple of teachers who were just nightmares. My math teacher couldn't teach a thing, and I ended up having to repeat Algebra in summer school. My English teacher was a control freak with very little facility with literature, though she could diagram the shit out of a sentence, I will give her that. I got a D in English, which is ludicrous-- I live and breath literature and writing.

High School was good, though-- also public. I had a phenomenal English and Humanities teacher, and a brilliant Drama teacher, and some other pretty decent teachers. I was given a lot of room to grow, a lot of support, and a truly remarkable amount of patience with my smart-assery. I had a great time, overall, and I know I am the better for it. Not at all prison-like, though by then I was of course old enough to begin to see and comprehend a lot of the problems with our public education system.

I should add, I have worked at a number of private schools and supplementary educational programs as a teacher, too, now. A couple of the Hebrew Schools I worked at were horrific, and I had to quit because it was not only a waste of my time, it was a waste of the kids' time. But I've worked at a couple of Jewish day schools that are absolutely excellent. Good pedagogy, flexible and innovative, sensitive to the needs of different students, and a pretty open hand to teachers to be innovative and creative, up to and including altering or rewriting curricula, or even mostly substituting original curricula, given proper approval and oversight, of course.

I'll leave aside the problems of Jewish education right now, as many of them are only tangential to the issues at hand. But some are common to any private school experience, as are some of the benefits. I always think there's a certain amount of caveat emptor at work in picking a private school to send your kids to: you need to do detailed research, and to weigh benefits and flaws carefully. A private school is private, and thus has completely free rein to adhere to any educational philosophy it wishes, any agenda of culture or socialization it wishes, and to shape its own school culture in any way it pleases. It does little good to ignore that or pretend otherwise. Which means that a parent needs to be quite sure that a given private school will be a good place for their kid-- something which goes way beyond checking test scores and college entrance rates.

As for public education, while I am a big fan of compulsory education, I do think we need massive revision of how we operate our public schools. This is not just as simple as adequately funding them, adequately maintaining them, and paying teachers and staff decently-- especially in impoverished and/or minority areas-- although those are all of critical importace, certainly. But we need more decentralized authority, more authority and flexibility over curricula, educational philosophy, school structuring, and so forth, given to principals and teachers and PTAs, and less to large school district administrations or State and Federal institutions. Most especially, teachers have got to be empowered to be able to teach-- not just to follow a curriculum set in stone long ago, or a set of standardized guidelines made by a far-away bureaucrat. But that also means making teaching a reasonable goal: which means not only paying teachers well, and giving them ample (and cheap or free) opportunities for continuing education, it also means reducing class size dramatically. It is absolutely unreasonable to expect anyone to teach well to a room of 30 or 35 children. It is not even particularly reasonable to expect it in a room of 25 children. It just starts to become reasonable at 20, and ideally should top out at 16 or 18.

Maybe more than anything else, this obsession with standardized testing has got to go. I don't think there's anything wrong with the occasional standardized test: say, one at the completion of grade school, one at the completion of middle school, and one at the completion of high school. I'm not even necessarily opposed to the one at the end of high school being a gatekeeper, which a student must pass in order to graduate-- although I think the test would need to be much better composed than any that we currently have, and provisions would have to be made for the reality that some students simply don't have equal or even remotely similar levels of skill in all areas (for example, when I took the SATs, back in the day when it was just two parts totalling 1600, I got a 760 Verbal score, but could never hit 500 in Math-- I tried three times; likewise, I knew a guy in college who barely hit 500 on Verbal: dude could barely write a coherent paper-- but he'd hit 800 on Math, and got into grad level physics classes as a sophomore). But constant standardized tests-- especially poorly constructed ones, that ultimately measure best how well one takes a standardized test-- are a mammoth waste of time.

There needs to be much more support for interdisciplinary teaching. This is just beginning to really work its way into public education, though its been understood in theory if not always supported in practice in private schools for a while now. But it is really critical. Not only because it is helpful to students who have differing interests and thus can be energized by seeing something they may feel less interested in connected to something they feel very interested in, but also because it teaches that everything is interrelated-- which is the truth. No data, no information, no system, exists in a vacuum.

There are other issues, too. Teachers not having sufficient disciplinary authority, or schools having adequate programs and systems for dealing with kids who are discipline problems. Lack of parent involvement and support. Not to mention the fairly consistent lack of integrating curricula for meta-education, like teaching conflict resolution, tolerance, media literacy, and other skills which can be absolutely vital to successful and effective living in our complex and crowded world.

But even so, I think it is incredibly important to regard this as a series of problems with our school systems that need to be fixed, and can be fixed. Not a single problem with compulsory education and school attendance, or with classroom schooling as a whole. (And, as mentioned at least a couple times in this thread already, some of the most serious impediments to the effectiveness of the educational system here are not actually in the educational sytem per se, but in the rampant poverty and near-poverty in the community as a whole, and in the communities of minorities especially.)

Going to school is important. Not only for education-- which, as we all know, can have flaws as presented by any given school or district-- but for socialization, for opportunities to make friends, for giving kids independent time away from their parents and homes, and even for gaining experience dealing with real world problems-- which might be bullies or assholes (since we don't stop encountering either after high school is over), dealing with bureacratic bullshit, dealing with idiots who think they know better, dealing with not being understood or having one's needs ignored, or other such negative experiences which are ultimately universal. And when I say these experiences are important, it's not that I think we should just throw our kids into the machine and let them learn hard lessons, but that we as parents, as teachers, as community members, should be there to help and support the kids, to have their backs, so that they can learn the arts of dealing with the shit that life throws us all without ending up grossly traumatized or broken by it, but rather to become patient where necessary, clever and resourceful where necessary, and willing to stand up for oneself, even to authority, where necessary.

I am not a fan of homeschooling as a movement. I'm not saying it can't work. It can, and sometimes works brilliantly. But I think the idea of proposing it as a large-scale alternative to classroom schooling is ludicrous. The few people I've known who have been successfully home-schooled either had truly unique opportunities (child of an archaeologist and an anthropologist, spent his whole childhood off on digs and cultural explorations, two brilliant parents taught him a ton, plus everyone he met was brilliant), or their parents were wealthy enough that one of them didn't have to work, and could stay home full time to be the teacher-- to say nothing of that parent being a brilliant polymath, able to teach a vast range of subjects and ideas successfully, or their parent-teacher was lacking, but the person themselves was so extraordinarily gifted and such an intuitive learner that they were able to make up for their parent-teacher's lacks with autodidacticism.

Most of the homeschooled folks I've encountered weren't them, though. They're usually deeply lacking in fundamental skills (I met one kid who was like ten, and could barely read, but his mother felt that he was learning "so many practical lessons just from life"), lacking in social skills (and I don't mean basic politeness, they're usually very polite, but in knowing how to talk to people they don't know already, and how to interact with people very different from themselves), and often have gaping holes in their knowledge, usually linked to the philosophy that kept them home schooled (e.g., Christian fundamentalist kids who knew next to nothing about biology and ancient history, but also children of anarchist hippie types, who knew next to nothing about hard sciences, math, and Western religions as an academic/historical subject). I've met some that were basically okay, just with odd lacunae in their knowledge and some occasional social awkwardness, and some that were just...unschooled, in the most classic sense of the term, and even in some ways kind of desocialized.

I have huge problems with "unschooling." Among the chief of those is the idea that a child shouldn't be forced to try and learn anything that doesn't interest them. That, to me, is lunacy. You can't force a kid to be interested in something they're not interested in, and you shouldn't try to make a kid be a brilliant master of a subject that either bores them or for which they have minimal talent. But everyone should know certain things, should be able to do certain things even if only at need. Sooner or later, a kid is going to have to learn something they're not interested in, and that is valuable. Just as a kid who isn't inclined to a lot of running around needs to get exercise, or a kid who doesn't like veggies has to learn to eat them at least a little and at least sometimes, or a kid who only loves sports and outdoorsy stuff needs to learn to sit still and read, or a kid who doesn't want to take medicine or go to the dentist has to learn those things just need to be done, even if disagreeable.

Likewise, while I certainly approve of letting a child guide his or her educational path to some degree, letting the kid really fully determine what they're going to learn or not, how they're going to learn it or not, just isn't realistic or sustainable. Part of parenting is to have an agenda. To make choices to help your kid, or on your kid's behalf-- even if in the moment they might disagree-- in order to help them become more knowledgeable, to gain experience, to become socialized, and to become acculturated to whatever culture their family belongs. The former two goals help them become more independent, the latter two goals assure that they have connections to others and a place in the world. And while I certainly approve of helping your child have a fun and joyful life, in order for them to have an effective life, there must be at least a little utility amidst the fun and joy.

While I don't support full-on homeschooling, I am a big advocate for parents being deeply involved with their kids' educational experiences, and for parents supplementing their kids' education at home. This is not only in the sense of taking them to museums, theater, dance performances, symphony, and other institutions of culture, but also in the sense of cultivating a love of reading in them-- which is done not only by constantly reading to them from babyhood, but from them seeing their parents read a lot and enjoy it, among other things-- in telling them stories about family history, about people in history that their parents admire, and about events that shaped the world they live in, and in their parents being interested in a lot of things and constantly talking to them about the world and life and how to ask questions about everything around them.

We plan to send our kids to Jewish day school at least through elementary, and probably through middle school. We want them to learn to live a Jewish life outside the home as well as inside it, and to learn Hebrew, and to have Jewish experiences with other young Jews. But at the end of middle school, we plan to offer them the choice of whether to go to a Jewish day school for high school, or whether to go to public school, since at that point, they will have been well grounded in their Jewish skills and experiences, and will be old enough to have a say in whether they want more diverse experiences right away, or are willing to wait until college. We're planning on focusing extracurricular activities outside the school, in part so that they will be exposed to a greater diversity of people. And we definitely plan to supplement everything they get at school with guidance and learning at home, to expand on what they get taught, to enrich the context and quality of the subjects they learn, to offer more perspectives, to correct what we think is ill-taught, to help them deal with difficult situations both with other kids and with teachers or administration, and to learn how to navigate the complexities of the world.

 

Levite, stop holding back .

 

It's possible I might have strong feelings on the subject. It could also be a bit of a button for me. Maybe. Possibly.

 

So you "HATED" it, but will send your kids there too?

I'm not saying that other options would be better and you have valid reasons for spending your kids there, but after reading it all, I thought it was funny.

I think my public high school was very rigid and tried to put you on a path quickly. Not necessarily what you were the best at, or enjoyed doing however. There was a bunch of wasted time that could have been spent on class subjects that would have benefited me more.

I do wonder what private schools are like, and why they might* produce better students. (*I have no statistics to back that up) Is it the rules, is it the teachers, is it how they relate to students, is it smaller class sizes, is it better techniques to teaching subject material?

This is the basis behind how unschooling is supposed to work. Back when I was in school, the geeky kids knew more about the computers and networks then the teachers did. I worked for the city schools in high school because of that. I was interested in it, and taught myself. But, if the other classes were related to it, for example Technical Writing instead of English Lit, Computer Graphic Arts instead of Theater, and C++ instead of French, I might have been more prepared for the college classes I ended up taking a few years later.

It would be nice if there was a class where those types of things were taught... instead of having 5 minutes to make it to your next class, and not seeing most of the other kids outside of school. Although Facebook didn't exist when I was in school, it did at my last high school reunion, and it was very interesting to see who the people I thought I knew in High School turned out.

My parents are a mix of hippie, scientist, and Christian. And they helped me with math and science. But, there are other resources out there like museums, libraries, and private music lessons that will help teach subjects my parents didn't know.

But, I went to public school and I had no social skills when I graduated High School. I didn't even know what eye contact was until I was 24.

While I agree that every student needs the basics. The middle school and high school years are where I think a mix of public school and unschooling would have been the best for me. And it would be unschooling towards a goal or project to complete. Yes, the parents should be an adviser and you could find groups or people to mentor the student on the subject they are interested in and passionate about.

Like I said up above, that the topics can be tailored to the students more now with on-line classes and even community college classes if let's say they want to be a doctor, they could take Latin instead of Spanish, German, or French.

Maybe I'm biased towards unschooling because I am an engineer. Since all the homework I had to do in school interfered with doing projects that I would have enjoyed and learned a lot from doing. I never had time to build robots for example. That is the type of homework I would have enjoyed doing. (I did build and launch rockets though, but there was no science or math behind it. No extra education from NASA or PBS on how actual rockets work. No group of kids who were also interested in rockets to socialize with and build with...)

 

I was sent to a very Orthodox day school. I will not and would not send my kids to an Orthodox school, because I am not Orthodox anymore, and I have issues with Orthodox education that have nothing to do with pedagogy or educational philosophy or systems. And Orthodox school is not my only Jewish option, as it was for my parents at the time and place we lived when I was a kid. There are many non-Orthodox day schools that are very good-- I have taught at several such.

To be fair, it's also the case that I went to school in the 1970s and early 1980s, in a very small city. Even Orthodox education has improved very significantly in the intervening 30-odd years, and even in smaller cities. Jewish day school education in general, and especially in larger and more cosmopolitan areas, is far better than it ever was in my youth. Good Jewish day schools have been compared favorably to some of the best secular private schools.

What I plan for my kids will not resemble my experience in any way, educationally or socially, and will even be very different religiously.

What I hated about my day school experience wasn't that it was Jewish, it was that it was a bad school.

 

Also, can I just note that every time I see the thread title "School is a Prison," it makes me think of "Love is a Battlefield?"

 

Heartache to heartache

 

Come on folks, if school is a prison........

 

Those songs were part of the soundtrack to my High School experience. Sports and Prom were the only real memorable part of it.

Well, other than using naphtha cleaner for my hands in shop class and smelling like a gas station for the next two hours. I am surprised I didn't get kicked out of class for smelling bad. Luckily I was done with high school before Columbine and 9/11. I'm sure things changed after that.

Anyways, I guess the one issue I had was that while I got to pick the classes I wanted to take and the major I took in college. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted to learn. Or what interested me. And then what businesses were making money doing these things and what were they looking for in job applicants.