School shouldn't be primarily about experiencing social interaction. It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society. You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic. Admittedly, none of them function as daycare...
School should be (and used to be) about learning to learn, building mental discipline and a base of knowledge sufficient to bootstrap whatever other studies appeal to the student, even more so than memorizing a particular list of facts. But it seems that that position has been largely abandoned.
In any case, we homeschool.
I haven't really considered how to improve schooling at scale (particularly in an affordable way), but my proposal would be to introduce a _lot_ more granularity to schooling by eliminating the idea of grades and classes and focusing more on individual assessment.
Obviously this is likely cost prohibitive, but perhaps promoting and subsidizing homeschooling and homeschool co-ops is a good start in that direction, and could give rise to more cost-effective solutions over time. Not all parents are equipped to homeschool, but homeschooling does make use of resources which could be improved and which others could leverage as well.
In any case, the problematic schooling model that persists to this day was introduced around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which predates your references.
You could read more in my book: https://www.wyclifsdust.com.
Student A: Went to College X and majored in Y. Finished all XXX number of credits and graduated with Bachelor's Degree
Student B: Went to same College X and majored in same Y. Finished all XXX-1 number of credits so is 1 credit short and never got a degree.
Student B is worthless even though she/he learned exactly the same thing as Student A. School (especially in USA) never was and never will be about learning ...
In your example, I would argue you haven't taken my position to its required logical extent. I don't believe in the value of college degrees at all, the way things are currently structured, and I would discourage my kids from going to college unless they had a very specific career path in mind for which the degree is required. The measurement of learning has become the goal of learning, unfortunately.
What settings are those?
Notably, this is largely an American problem, since America is built around cars, which given the capitalist nature of American society proves to be antithetical to establishing local communities.
European and other countries, whose layouts and culture were established in pedestrian days, are much better off in this regard.
I would say it's quite similar.
For my own kids, you really see the differences at 11 to become more profound in their classroom, where some are running behind while others excel. So I saw that 12 is indeed the age where a split is necessary.
You don't have that?
Edit: After some Wikipeding, I see you really don't have that. Wow, that is crazy in my opinion. I have no clue how you could ever organize those differences among students. Here is the system of Belgium: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Belgium.
For example my daughter is 12 and she is in a class "STEM and moderns languages". Very focussed on programming, science, math, and they also get Dutch, French and English. Some of her classmates at the end of the schooyear had to switch because their grades weren't good enough.
So in Belgium, there are even different schools for different tracks.
Let's divide it into kids that like to learn vs kids that like to work with their hands. The 2nd group would learn how to work with metal, wood, .... Way more practical stuff, very little theory. The other group is the reverse of course.
At 16, some kids are really tired of sitting in a classroom. For example plumber track would have these 16 year olds already doing an internship with real plumbers. At 18 they can start their own company already.
It's also no secret that a 16 year old in Belgium learns math that in US you would only see at higher education.
I think it works great, and what I saw with my 2 oldest is that last year when they are all still together at age 11, the learning differences really start to show. It's neither fun for the smart ones nor for the slower ones.
The same person as a student, gets tons of chances before maybe having to leave. Depending on what they’re doing, you could just be stuck with them for north of a decade. No escape.
I mean, we can joke about how actually such people still exist at work, but it’s a far less widespread problem and manifests differently.
You can look for other jobs if you want out of a bad work environment. Probably, you’ll be able to find somewhere else to go. Getting out of a bad class is way harder.
There’s a couple huge differences.
And to be honest, I have no idea how you can make the US system work, so I probably agree with you. Come to Belgium and let your kids study here :D.
I wonder if there’s literature analyzing Belgian academic outcomes alongside American academic outcomes.
Just a nitpick that school enforcing memorizing particular list of facts or memorizing poems - is indeed teaching people how to learn, because how else will you explain to a child or an adult "hey you know if you read this thing 10 times and then try to repeat it another 20 times from memory - guess what !!! that is one trick to learn to memorize something."
But if they spend time on finding out how to memorize hand picked for them stuff and how to perform on exams on limited and picked topics - that sounds like they will be able to learn anything but still too many don't realize what the real lesson there is.
Knowing how to memorize is occasionally useful depending on one’s profession, but I don’t think it deserves such a heavy emphasis. People naturally remember what is interesting and useful to them. Force-feeding facts or dates or speeches or poems into memory is not fun and has very little educational value. That time and energy would be much better spent on projects that use and integrate the knowledge.
Whoa there, society functions like a school environment.
You have cliches, bullies, enforcers, popular kids, the weirdos, etc.
What are our political parties other than massive cliches?
Bullies you can meet on the road, in stores, and nearly any other place you go.
Enforcers are police, detention centers, and fines.
Popular kids you need look no further than influencers, movie stares, etc.
The weirdos are anyone that doesn’t fit into our cliches.
Also, Foucault would have a few words with you as society is also an artificial environment.
The drama of daily life that plays out just happens in a larger more chaotic scale, but when we left highschool, highschool never left us.
Also, I think the biggest thing that present in school environments but missing from other environments is the forced segregation by age range, which prevents the more organic tribal self-organizational practices to which humans have adapted over tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
And I would also add that there are degrees of artificiality and what really matters is not so much whether we have constructed our environments so much as whether or not they have stood the test of time, and adapted to us as much as we’ve adapted to them.
It did. You didn't pay attention. You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?". My school taught us how to interpret a "source", how to write well defended arguments (even if I don't always rise to that level), how to calculate mortgage interest rates and payments etc etc etc.
But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important"
because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!
The primary problem with education in america today is that a huge proportion of parents do not give a fuck about education, see school as just a thing you have to do instead of a constant opportunity. When a kid sees their parent complaining about education being "Liberal brain washing" every other day, why would they pay attention in class?
Education requires emotional and ideological buy in from parents and students for best results.
It didn't. I specifically remember the hole where my class should've explained what a court case actually determines, how the process runs, because I noticed things were missing / being swept under the carpet (we did some mock jury stuff but without the right context for it to teach us anything).
> You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?"
Nope. I specifically remember watching movie "making of" videos and my teacher saying "write this down!" about irrelevant technical details that distracted from the more important stuff the director was saying.
> But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important"
> because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!
Nope. I was an engaged, attentive student (indeed a kind of star pupil). I still learnt more in spite of school than because of it. Indeed some of the stuff that's most important for my education and career is stuff I was actively punished for doing at school (poking at the computers to see how they worked). Schools, at least the standard-ish state school that I went to (which had good official ratings) teach the wrong things and teach them badly.
We mainly teach either boring material or outright lies about how life works. Because we try to put our education on rails, teaching students that that's how life and education works, that's why it's a complete failure. The fact that students in COVID didn't respond to remote lessons is partly because they weren't even engaged prior to COVID.
We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to collaborate.
Montessori schools do. Wish they were more common.
And as a result, your experience is mostly limited to kids who are forced to be where they don't want to be. That's a hugely biased data set.
> School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority.
And yet it does a worse job at it than those who are home schooled, as most studies show.
In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya.
The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really care about education. A few do, and they get great grades. Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just surviving the jungle that is school.
School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority. You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here that are not working in whatever they majored at.