Quote:
Originally Posted by Wes Mantooth
Fugly I think he's saying that the market for educated professionals is over saturated and a degree no longer carries the weight it once did because its everyone has one.
I've often wondered if part of the problem isn't our modern view of childhood. We've extended adolescence well into our early 20's and encourage our young to stay that way for as long as possible. Kids aren't expected to work hard and help provide for the family anymore instead they should be playing and enjoying childhood with little to no worries, sheltered from the harshness of the real world. Perhaps that slow immersion into the real world was crucial towards developing adult who understood responsibility and hard work. Have we in our desire to build the perfect world for our children created a society full of adults who were never taught how to be adults?
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I think this actually stems from our increasing knowledge of the human brain. The fact is, development of the frontal lobe, including executive function, isn't complete until around age 25. There has to be a balance between teaching those under 25 responsibility and doing it in such a way that they learn it without lasting, permanent consequences (such as a criminal record/serious incarceration). I bring up that latter example because one of the saddest things I see us doing to ourselves as a country is punishing juveniles as adults. Also, I know plenty of people who did work as teens and young adults--but because of the recession, those jobs have largely dried up, and if you're 16 and looking for work right now, good luck.
I think one of the things that might address the root of this issue is parenting classes. Despite what others might think, learning to parent is not entirely about fuzzy, warm feelings. A good chunk of any class on parenting is about positive discipline--how to teach your child to behave so that they understand why they need to behave that way, and how to do it in a way that solves the problem directly. Further, it teaches parents how to teach things like responsibility to their children.
One thing I see a lot is that parents expect the public school system to teach their child everything they need to know--they expect their child to be taught social norms alongside everything academic. The problem with this is that teaching social norms and socializing a child is intense work--I know because this is what I do every day, working in early childhood education, and I have to be able to work one-on-one with each student for a period of time to correct behavior and explain why we don't do that (see positive discipline above). In public school classrooms, this is next to impossible because of larger class sizes, and it's crucial, especially as students start dragging things like Facebook into the classroom. During adolescence in particular, kids have to relearn how to socialize because of their changing bodies and changing relationships.
While I know parents around here have pretty reasonable expectations of what a school can and cannot do, other parents do not. This is just one thing we're struggling with. This is another reason why assessment as it stands is faulty--there are factors beyond the control of the teacher that play out in assessment. If a parent isn't supporting their child at home appropriately, or if that child hasn't eaten breakfast the day of the test, that shows up in the scores. Does the parent get blamed for that? No, of course not.
Baraka: The lack of competition is why most schools end up with multiple valedictorians.
And iliftrocks: in the various schools I've worked in in recent years, the school with the highest scores on standardized tests was the school that focused on teaching students in unit-based lessons instead of teaching to the test. I think teachers and schools alike are shooting themselves in the foot by teaching to the test.