a) OBSERVE what the school day looks like in other countries,

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740...

b) analyze textbooks and teaching practices that produce superior results

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

c) take careful note of classroom practices that respect learners and help learners learn deeply and not just superficially,

http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study

and

d) systematically train teachers in effective teaching techniques.

http://teachlikeachampion.com/

Boys and girls, all over the world, are exposed to many different kinds of school schedules and school practices, and it is the basic procedure of educational science to carefully observe the different combinations of home, societal, and school influences on children and try to figure out what helps learners have the best results.

(How I envied my Finnish cousins when I saw that they got to take an hour or two of nature class every week and sometimes they went home at 1 pm and sometimes they went home at 2:30... depending on the class schedule, which repeated weekly but was different every day!)

The article's suggestions for instructional activities that benefit boys outline projects that also benefit girls. The reason boys are disciplined more than girls when both are bored half to death is that many boys hit each other and run around while many girls are "nice" and just write notes, doodle, or sleep, staying in their seats as required. I say this as a woman who brought a pillow to class in high school and was seen as a stellar student.

A good example of bored boy behavior vs. bored girl behavior: one time in a personal finance management class, we played BINGO with elbow macaroni as markers. (The questions were really simple so the game was neither fun nor educational.) Quite a few guys in the class took to stomping on their macaroni and finding other creative ways to crush it. I was busy getting them all to stand up as little arches and looking for interesting ways to arrange them. I was just as bored but less disruptive.

I think unstructured learning time is hugely lacking in the traditional school setting.

wow. Epiphany

That doesn't mean that others should be stigmatized, but it's not like this is impossible and unprecedented.

Second, much of this is unprecedented. When my parents were children, they didn't attend Kindergarten, and first grade was a half day. When my parents younger siblings were children, Kindergarten was a half day. When I was a child, I didn't attend preschool.

In 3 generations we've added more than 2 years of education for every child, and that education is qualitatively quite different, even from what I experienced (Kindergarten 23 years ago)

When I was in kindergarten the majority of the day was playtime, we had 30 minutes of recess, 45 minutes of mostly freeform PE, 30 minutes of naptime, and a few hours of structured playtime (drawing, making crafts etc...).

From friends of mine who are teachers, since no child left behind, all of that has been removed or severely restricted. Recess is now 15 minutes, PE is more structured and not every day, no more naptime, and they don't have time for freeform activities because the curriculum is so dense.

In Kindergarten we spent almost the whole year learning the Alphabet. Now the curriculum assumes that children already know it.

Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education.

Or else until about 100 years ago there was no economic benefit to educating the great mass of humanity, and industrialization created a type of work for which literacy and numeracy helped.

"Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker."

The education of the children--sons, mostly--of the well off always involved a lot of monotonous boredom. Orders were enforced with a stick.

But indeed kindergarten was a half day in my day. The extension of schooling to younger ages is at least partly a result of the need for day care, with more and more mothers in the work force.

"Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education."

Quite so.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Nations_And_Nationalism....

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Nationalism-Second-Perspective...

http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/nation...

Actually it is the inverse. The higher classes (from rich upper class families to wealthy lawyers, doctors, scientists etc) were those that sat down and studied without much fuss, in quite demanding schools. Those classes had a high respect for education, and very demanding curriculums.

It's the working classes (factory workers then, office drones to McDonald burger flippers now) that did and still get by with laxer schooling, less "boring stuff", and more "creativity".

Most of the factory workers in days past didn't even get to go to school, or stopped very early. That they learned "to handle monotonous labour" and "obey orders" at school is a myth. They learned it by necessity at the factory. It was either that or not getting to eat at all.

Creativity is inherently good. It's literally what brought us from the plains fighting large animals to making monolithic structures that battle the elements. We can harness the power of the electron to post, critique and posture ideas in nanoseconds because of extremely creative people. The "boring" stuff matters just as much as the "non-boring" stuff. What kills me is that the STEM and liberal arts side of the education debate are arguing from extremes - and both sides sound like morons when it comes to creativity. Creativity is harnessed by two things: a wealth of experience and knowledge (ie learning Calculus is good, just like skipping rocks on the river), and treating idea generation like play and not like work. Obviously it's a little bit more nuanced than that, but that's the distillation and the point remains. The boring stuff matters. The non-boring stuff matters. Everything is relevant and we should be creating a culture of education that not only understands that, but actually does something about it.

I disagree with this common trope. The benefits of mass literacy are extremely obvious; consider that countries where agriculture was and is more important than industry also adopted universal education.

And at the same time, higher classes attended highly demanding schools, with very high discipline and demanding curriculums.

Plus, on the 20th century, mass education was adopted by almost all countries (including agriculture based ones), and it had produced people working mostly in office and service sector jobs, not rote factory assembly lines.

So if anything, it's the inverse of the "old wives tale".

(See, we can also agree on some things!).

And? You can teach the average 9 year old to read in 50 contact hours. Quadruple that so they can learn arithmetic (200) and and quadruple that to account for the fact that all school hours can't be contact and you have 800 hours. That's 20 work weeks. Whatever school may be about it's a hell of a lot more than literacy.

Here's the thread, the idea gets debunked pretty hard http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hbezd/was_th...

Rockefeller's General Education Board wrote the following in 1906:

  "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our 
  molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our 
  minds, and unhampered by
  tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive
  folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children
  into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not
  to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of
  letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters,
  musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen,
  of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is
  very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a
  perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an
  imperfect way."

President Woodrow Wilson (one of our most academic presidents) said this to a gathering of industrial leaders:

  "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class,
  a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a
  liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

I suspect that factory owners and other bosses would have been scared of a new class of worker that could read and write. In fact I tend to think more education means less docile and easily manipulated people - then and now.

As a Southern European, I find that idea hilarious. Drunkenness is far more pervasive and culturally ingrained in Northern Europe and in America than in Southern Europe. If all you've ever known is America, you may find it hard to understand just how ridiculously obsessed with getting drunk your culture appears from outside.

Later waves of immigration were not so Puritan, but the upper classes were still very much associated with those sects well into the 20th century.

And yes, I don't think it's a coincidence that a society founded by Puritans has a binge drinking problem.

How about instead calling it -- teach everyone the same; teach to the bottom of the class, even if they still aren't learning anything; and no child is permitted to get ahead?

But now finally, at last, we have true, 100%, coveted, equality and social justice!!

Similarly, the average high schooler was better back then because the average person stopped their education at the eighth grade, if not sooner.

(Note to non-Americans: In the US, high school runs from ninth to twelfth grade, usually named freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years.)

This is true, you know. Or are you saying only Americans can do arithmetic?

I'm not sure I understand your point. Please quantify this. Historically many, many people haven't been felons, but we still have a criminal justice system.

I think the schools, and the teachers, are very aware of their "half babysitting" role. The public schools, in the US, are paid based on heads-per-day, with some restrictions on minimum days and test scores (depending on the state). They get money for providing services to the children. So, as with all incentive plans, the system gets gamed.

> What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day?

The ones society wants to succeed in school. Like sports, not everyone has the ability required to succeed at higher levels. If someone hadn't forced me to stop watching TV when I was young, I would be in front of it right now. This says nothing about their ability in reality, just in playing the school game.

> The ones society wants to succeed in school.

So, the malleable, obedient ones should succeed. I'm sure that will be convenient for someone.

Individual action and group inaction can have the same result. A conspiracy is not required.

I went to primary school in the 80ies (Austria) and had only female teachers.

Which completely sucks as those women do. not. understand. young boys. Any natural behavior by young girls is good, any natural behavior by boys is distracting. You can't do that ad nauseum.

My step-son, 10years, had a male teacher for 3 years. What an amazing difference that makes. It's a mixture of laissez faire (I don't give a shit if they are beating each other with sticks) to quick and decisive aggressiveness (immediate consequence, not hour long conversations, nagging, etc.). The girls could not cope with this style so well.

I once had a male teacher when I was 12 or something like that, he managed to engage both male and female students with pure awesomeness.

Also when male students had a problem, this teacher was the automatic go-to one.

Later during the end years of the school, I went to a elite one focused to get people into university no matter what (yet in my year 90% failed, while all previous years they had a 90% of success, and the only change is that on my year affirmative action went into effect), then I had balanced male and female teachers, usually the male teachers were way more popular (sometimes too much... ie: one of them got fired multiple times for having sex with female students, and then hired back because students demanded him back...), maybe because as you said, they tended to allow people do random shit (in fact, sometimes they joined the fray too, one teacher destroyed a lamp by accident after throwing a shoe across the room), but were also hard to crack down if needed (the sex with students teachers only once threw people out of the class in about 15 years of career, two female students that insisted in chatting REALLY LOUD and after it bothered him too much, he said: "Ugly near the fat, you two, out", after the news of that incident spread few people ever bothered in challenging him again, since it was quite clear he was ruthless if he wanted to).

The appearance of working hard and actually working hard/effectively are two different things. Don't be fooled by cultures with endemic corruption.

Germany obviously excluded.

This is wrong. Sure there are stories of Chinese students, parents and teachers cheating the system, but keep in mind that China is a country of whopping 1.3 billion people.

As currently designed, the five basic functions of public school are sorting, socialization, warehousing, training, and FRPL. They tend to be pretty aware of all of these.

I know this is highly anecdotical in nature, but perhaps there's some useful information to it :-).

I'm part of the "global workforce"; I don't live in the US, but I have done some contract work with US employers as an independent consultant. I was born and currently live in Europe.

Funny thing is, while I absolutely loved learning and still do -- to the extent that an important factor in my choice of avoiding large corporations (after getting burned twice) was that a job there would leave me too little time for history, philosophy and programming of my own -- I didn't go to school that much. I was one of the top students in the class (I even unintentionally ended up as a valedictorian, so besides my BSc in Instrumentation Engineering they also handed me a badge of nerd shame or something), but I was regularly getting into trouble for skipping classes, faking illnesses and, every once in a while, challenging the professors' authority.

Fortunately, I actually had my parents behind me on this, and both of them are teachers (high school and university level, respectively). I'd literally tell my dad I was too hung over to go to school this morning, he'd shrug and tell me that as long as I think it's best to stay at home, I can stay at home.

And it was ok. I'm not starving -- I'm actually quite well off -- I have a job that I love, I do what I like and what I am best at. Despite my trouble with authority, my academic credentials are fairly good (to the extent that I am a published author -- my work ended up in IEEE journals -- but that was before I got my BSc, and I didn't push for an MSc after that).

Quite frankly, I'm horrified at the amount of work we put children to. I managed to dodge it because the system in my home country is shaggy enough that, as long as you're blunt and cunning enough, you can get away with anything. The sheer thought of actually having gone to school all that time is simply unrealistic, I'd have broken down.

I think this is a typical case of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". No one bothers to think what the problem is, and appears to put it strictly in terms of MOAR SCHOOL MY LITTLE MINIONS! This is woefully unproductive. I swear, if I'll ever have kids of my own, I'll do just like my dad did with me -- encourage them to think for themselves and learn what's interesting for them, treating school as the necessary diploma-producing evil it seems to have ended up in our days.

I also observed that people who get great grades at school usually can't get anything serious done on their own.

I'm perfectly happy being average in school.

Luckily, most parents are looking for good education.

My school will be different, and America doesn't deserve it.