RoR: Forum

I went with 0. I understand and appreciate the criticisms. Also, when being challenging myself, I will suggest that kids should learn their 3Rs by working and earning money so that when they get to late adulthood they can retire and go to school. That said, we learn fastest youngest and K-12 underchallenges kids. They should be learning Chinese and Arabic as well as English from the beginning. Calculus and physics are within their grasp, if it is done right. But it still seems to take years of repetition to sink in. In firearms training we learn that you need 10,000 repetitions to create muscle memory. Verb declensions and geometric constructions are like that, too: repetitio est mater studorium.

So, as much as it is done wrong by socialist institutions, K-12 is still the only mode we know --- and in a perfect Objectivist utopia might look much as it does today, with children in school preparing for adulthood.

Post 1

Saturday, July 23, 2011 - 8:14pm

I went with 0. The poll is introduced as "Traditional" k-12 school and I know that the school my parents and grandparents attended taught the core subjects needed - the 3 r's.

As to keeping kids off the streets... well, not necessarily anything wrong with that unless parents are neglectful and are using schools in that way, like putting them in front of the TV, or the Game Boy - but that is about parents, not schools.

As to teaching coercion... I don't see that as a key component in k-12 curricula, teaching conformity is a very reasonable criticism but as poll choice it didn't seem as important as learning to read and write - core subjects.

As to a waste of time and effort - compared to what? If the kid learns to read and write it wasn't a waste until compared to something else that accomplished the same thing in a better way.

Post 2

Sunday, July 24, 2011 - 3:32am

As contrasted against Montessori, I selected "is a waste of time & resources, teaches coercion is OK, and results in sheeple." The "traditional" method abuses children as empty vessels to fill with knowledge in a factory setting. The Montessori method respects children as active learners eager to master new skills at their own pace in their own unique ways.

EDIT: I know too little about the Sudbury model to comment on it as a standard but from what little I know, its "free-for-all" approach to learning sounds as abusive in a "neglectful" way as the "coercive" method of abuse I just criticized.

References

Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 7/24, 8:16am)

Post 3

Monday, July 25, 2011 - 4:36am

Coercive due to how traditional K-12 school is funded: taxes.

English, math, science, and history are not as important as people make it out to be. Learning a bunch of facts and problem solving methods that are unrelated to the tasks one is going to perform is a waste of time. Hence I'd propose that traditional K-12 education is largely useless and a waste of time. Formal education doesn't make you smarter in important things, it fills your brain with useless garbage. Get to work! Doing stuff makes you smarter.

Might I propose that instead of this education system, we adopt a more dynamic education system: If a person runs into a problem they would like to solve for which they do not have the dependency knowledge and problem solving methods, they then ask experts in that area what they need to learn, and then they learn it.

College education is a much better system. You can get a degree in a specific field, or you can take specific courses on subjects you would like to learn about.

Post 4

Monday, July 25, 2011 - 8:42am

Traditional private schools too often mimic the methods of government schools as they relate to coercing children. Sometimes they are even worse. Search the archives here for harrowing stories of beatings in Catholic schools, for example.

One profound benefit of separating school and state would involve much greater flexibility in how parents can approach the sacred subject of conferring knowledge to their children. A market approach would abandon the current "one size fits all" mentality. I think much of the felt "coercion" would melt away with that abandonment.

Post 5

Monday, July 25, 2011 - 3:20pm

I definitely agree that going to an entirely free-market K-12 system is the way to go and would eventually eliminate all of the problems.

The idea of a K-12 education is a good one... when done right. Kids need to learn, first and foremost, how to think. They need to learn the art of critical thinking. They are too young to study that as a science - epistemology and the theory of logic is beyond their years and would need to come later. But they need to be guided in correct approaches to content and told when they are not thinking correctly, "Tommy, two wrongs don't make a right, do they?" "Sally, because you don't like a person doesn't mean they aren't right in what they say." Stuff like that.

And they need to learn the basics of communication - grammar, reading, writing. They need to learn the basic math skills and to acquire all the categories of knowledge - as an outline. An introduction to the sciences and the humanities. History can be taught to kids in a way that opens their minds to a past where things were different and an understanding that there is a future and our role as a society that has evolved and will evolve - not just dates and events. All of the content is the material upon which they get to practice critical thinking and can learn the art of learning things while also seeing, in a general and introductory way what there is to be learned.

Done right way, this takes a well trained professional teacher - we don't have many of those thanks to unions and government's inept way of managing schools - both of those work against the competition that would grow a large number of competent teachers.

I disagree with Dean on History, science and especially English - grammar, when taught correctly is one of the best ways to learn how to think clearly. Each sentence is an expression of a complete thought and each part of the sentence has a correspondence to the logic of that that thought. Being taught to read well is extremely important because those who have difficulty with reading become cut off from so much of the world of knowledge.

Post 6

Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - 9:06pm

We seem to be sharing different aspects of the same basic agreements. It is one thing to have been a child, but another to have raised one. As far as I know, I am the only parent so far.

Our daughter went to two different Montessori schools. I did not see any qualitative improvements. One of them was Christian, and that led to a problem for me eventually, when, after a hard day at school, my five-year old announced that she wished she was dead so she could be in heaven with Jesus. Montessori is not McDonalds: the menu can be very different.

On the other hand, her last two years of high school - 12th grade and 12th grade again - were in a "community" school that ran a non-traditional curriculum in a traditional way. All the kids were delinquents, so discipline was constant and consistent. However, the teachers were progressive in their understanding of the needs of teens to explore their limits. When the school was created, the first classes enrolled were brought to the building to paint it and clean it up ahead of the school year. All of the teachers were psychologically strong, dominating the teens, yet it was not unknown for a teacher to go off property with a kid to smoke a cigarette and talk things through, if that was what was needed. Otherwise, it was 3Rs, and lots of it.

The problems of pedogogy are much like the "spontaneous order" of Hayek: you cannot mandate a one-size-fits -all.

One clue for us here, when I started working in adult ed, I taught as I had been taught K-12 and I never felt successful. Then, I discovered that in the library, the books on Training are nowhere near the books on Education. Performance based training has a practical and proven paradigm because trainers are paid for results. A typical example is the people who pay a couple hundred dollars to prepare for a licensing examination. My wife just signed up for some multi-thousand dollar training for yet another computer security certification. It is a different mode and modality than K-12.

Granted that children are not adults, only wide-open markets will bring the multiplicity of experiments, successes, and failures that bring innovation.

In 100 years we have gone from the steamship to the spaceship, but education still consists of a person in front of a board lecturing to a passive array of listeners. On the other hand, I have taken computer classes in which the computer system was modeled on a computer. You taught yourself interactively ... or more appropriately, perhaps, the system programmed you to use it well. Now, how would that work for arithmetic or English?

Post 7

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 - 3:16am

MEM asked:

"You taught yourself interactively ... or more appropriately, perhaps, the system programmed you to use it well. Now, how would that work for arithmetic or English?"

Visit Pearson Higher Ed eLearning Products to learn how to do this today for these and a wide range of other subjects.

Post 8

Thursday, July 28, 2011 - 7:00pm