<p>JiffsMom, that was an interesting article and there was a report linked in the article that was interesting, too. I started a new thread with that link titled “The Achievement Gap”.</p>
<p>Going back to the original article, in the second paragraph, the author declares</p>
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<p>Since when did the average working American get four weeks of paid leave a year? After reading that, I felt that I had to discount any other statement presented as fact in this article.</p>
<p>It’s very easy to criticize the public school system, however in our experience, we have found excellent schools and magnet programs. In moving several times due to job relocations, my D has been in 5 different elementary schools. In 2 of the 3 areas, we found excellent public elementary schools which were much more like private schools. </p>
<p>In high school, my D was able to enroll in an excellent magnet program for international studies and take advantage of the many AP courses available. In many areas of the country, I believe there are excellent public schools available but one has to research where they are located and find out how to enroll there. In some instances this may require driving your children to and from school, since school buses are no longer available for magnet programs. But it’s well worth it!</p>
<p>In defense of all the hard wording underpaid teachers, let’s not forget that the schools can only do so much. If parents take a strong active role in their children’s education, anything is possible. My point is that there are good features of public schools but you have to be willing to spend the effort to find them. And then complement that with a lot of hard work guiding your children in the right direction. Believe me the payoff comes; our daughter is fortunate enough to go to Duke this fall.</p>
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<p>Maybe it includes 2 weeks of paid sick leave. I was never offered more than 2 weeks of vacation time per year at any of my 4 jobs.</p>
<p>How about holidays time off?</p>
<p>I am in complete agreement with this article. As a recent college grad who had spent fourteen years in the American school system, I am always amazed of how much free time my peers and I have–vacations, short school hours, etc. All the studies that claim students of this generation are spending more times on homework have always struck me as a little silly. It’s true that we are spending more times on homework, but the majority of those times are spent procrastinating with AIM, facebook, and endless other distractions. College is even worse. Classes are even shorter and homework even fewer. Internships and work do occupy a larger amount of times, but even with them a student’s average “work week” is barely 30 hours.</p>
<p>Reddune - I think you compare today’s American HS life with your HS life 14 years ago.
I believe today HS students in foreign countries spend time on AIM and facebook too. My experience with HS life outside of the US is different than yours. I did not study a lot like my kids. The only difference is I had to help my family to make a living.</p>
<p>As a home school parent, my opinion is that school is a colossal waste of time. My kids did no more than two or three hours a day of anything that looked like school, and were well educated by standard measures.
Re: you can’t do one-on-one in school like at home- they didn’t do one-on-one at home either. Once you can read and calculate, teaching is unnecessary. IMO, perhaps the most unchallenged belief in the secular religion called school is that teaching is important. NOT! For ballet, violin, or soccer- certainly. For English or Biology- nope. We have a massive leisure class called school teachers who love the schedule just as it is.
From the title of the article, I was hoping the focus would be about children not being given important things to do from a young age. This is a major problem. Kids know they don’t do and aren’t trusted with anything important until ages that, by historical standards, represent the midpoint of productive lives. I think binge drinking, bulimia and cutting are, as a mass phenomena, new.<br>
Thank you for posting the article.</p>
<p>Mandated Curriculum… Reads no child left behind where teachers taught to the tests. My kids school offers very few standardized tests (granted it’s private and they can do what they want, including accepting or not accepting students). </p>
<p>“Art” projects in academic courses: I do not mind a multitude of ways for children to show what they’ve learned. And creating a power point, poster board or some other creative way to show learning is not less valuable than some multiple choice or word bank test. And to this, some might not like group projects in the classroom either - God forbid their child would have to work with someone less academically inclined than their gifted child. IMO, I think this is a completely elitist mode of thought and not, quite frankly, how the real working world functions. Many jobs require presentations, reports with visual aids, group work and over all cooperation. Surprise surprise.</p>
<p>Sure there are discipline issues and for these, quite honestly, I blame parents more than teachers. If young children especially are disrupting the classroom, they are somehow getting the message that there are no consequences. And to be really forthcoming, my son at one point became disruptive in his 7th grade classroom, but once he was given the task of tutoring other kids who struggled with the math, he was busier, learned an incredibly valuable skill – teaching - and not only stopped being disruptive, but evolved into one of the classes best leaders. </p>
<p>homeschooling: I know there is a lot of upside to homeschooling, but there are indeed some down sides too. If youre only teaching your child for an hour a day, what else are they doing with their time besides not learning cooperation and wildly necessary social skills? I know there are now larger cooperatives where they do EC’s even sports. But there is an intangible to “school” that you just don’t get at home. </p>
<p>I guess I am most amazed that there seems to be an argument in this thread, particularly with those who homeschool, that the only thing worth learning in school are academic subjects, of which I wholeheartedly disagree. You might see it as all drama, but you will never convince me that to watch my child graduate with his classmates was a wasted event. Prom? Even for a son, this is a pretty special rite of passage. Not saying you have to go or participate, but to not have the option I find somewhat unremarkable.</p>
<p>There are a lot of things to consider when discussing a school day and what one learns doing that day, but my daughter’s chinese teacher thinks she would have done so much better in school had she been given the opportunity to develop a LOVE of learning instead of having it crammed down your throat and determining from a very young age whether she would be educated for labor or skill. Really scary some of these other countries the way they throw away potential because it’s not on the same track. </p>
<p>Obviously, this is a subject where I have a lot of opinion.</p>
<p>The only thing you learn better in school is obedience.
Better to learn that on the job where the power relationships are more equal. What you do then is of value by the public virtue of getting paid for it. Rather than being paid in phony money called grades and needing to raise your hand for permission to move your bowels. How many of us adults would stand for that in the workplace?</p>
<p>echoing this…
This is, indeed, the real problem in education- not what actually goes on at school itself, but rather learning outside of school. I personally came from an “enriched” home- access to numerous books is a huge advantage over just watching TV all day. As the book, Outliers, shows, our educational system actually does well in educating students- the real problem is the disparity in advantages outside of school. Compounded over many summer vacations, this makes a huge, huge difference, and perhaps this disparity should be addressed, rather than forcing students to do more schoolwork.</p>
<p>Also, something has to be said for the innate desire of the child- my mom couldn’t have forced me to read encyclopedias and almanacs voraciously in second grade, but I did, and that helped me immensely- moreso than any forced schooling could accomplish.</p>
<p>Why does our education system, disregarding Florida and other select school systems, leave foreign language classes until high school? I read somewhere (I can’t remember the source) that the human mind loses its ability to easily learn new phonetics after approximately fourth grade. Other countries, in fact almost ever other developed nation, requires young students to begin a second or even third language - one of these normally being English. It is proven that learning other languages allows for a better understanding of the native tongue and these students (Latin students especially) do better on standardized tests, not that this is the goal. </p>
<p>I can easily see how a shorter day would actually be better - for instance, my senior AP English class really amounted to outside reading and essay writing with only discussions occurring in class. My art classes contained next to no instruction and it was plenty.</p>
<p>My experience in elementary school and then in middle school, math classes amounted to nothing more than memorization of methods and times tables, where more time should have been devoted to learning concepts. It is this inattention to the bigger picture that causes students to become disinterested in the subject matter. It is absolutely essential that these subjects tie into the student’s life. Silly crafts and word searches do nothing to promote learning, though this is not to say that I don’t support art classes (they need to focus more on technique and appreciation than craftiness).</p>
<p>Ultimately I would say that the problem lies with outdated (or maybe simply inefficient) curricula and teaching methods that arise from our top-down approach. Many of my teachers were tied down by paperwork and faulty administration. I was forced to remain in a decrepit building for almost eight hours when I easily could have accomplished the same in half of the time. </p>
<p>I attended a public magnet school that is one of the best in the nation (top 25 according to some publication) which was given considerable freedoms in its own operation. Inefficiencies and inane protocols were still rampant. Perhaps rather than having former teachers become administration in favor of businessmen (my econ. teacher was easily the most productive teachers I have ever had).</p>
<p>“Ultimately I would say that the problem lies with outdated (or maybe simply inefficient) curricula and teaching methods that arise from our top-down approach”</p>
<p>Interesting explanation. My generation learned from these outdated techniques and for some reason learned reading, writing and math -something that this generation has difficulty doing. What I see is the problem is the attempt to teach using glitzy umproven methods.</p>
<p>DocT has it right, IMO. The currently trendy education methods actually make it harder to learn because they overload and overwhelm working memory, making the transfer of knowledge to long-term memory impossible.</p>
<p>More on this:
Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching
<a href=“http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf[/url]”>http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf</a></p>
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<p>Completely disagree. Yes, there are rules, but are there not rules for home schooling? Mostly I think it depends on the school (whereas the catholic school my kids attended until 5th grade for the youngest, 8th for the oldest was very much about obedience and the private school S recently graduated from is all about creating independent and critical thinkers). Again, there are standards, but if you have to go to the bathroom, you merely get up and leave. The classes are interesting and challenging enough that typically a student gets back to class as soon as possible. Granted, it’s not public school and the expectation is that everyone is there to truly learn and has as a priority, education.</p>
<p>coolweather, I graduated high school in 2005 and college in 2009. I don’t understand the graduating high school “fourteen years ago” part of your comment. I began school in the U.S. in third grade, which means I have spent fourteen years in the American school system, from elementary to college.</p>
<p>I don’t believe my generation is intellectually lazy, but we are easily distracted. God knows I have spent countless hours on CC instead of doing my papers. Procrastination and the lack of discipline are terrible problems plaguing my generation. We only appear to be more productive because we have the internet to help us get our homework done. Let’s not forget grade inflation to make all of us feel better about ourselves. </p>
<p>For example, a friend of mine, who graduated last year from one of the top engineering schools in the nation, spent most of his time playing Starcraft with me. Back in high school, when he was supposed to be doing his homework, he would turn down the volume of his computer and continue playing game. When his mom went to check up on him, he clicked alt+tab to quickly get out of the game. He had some math problems on Studywork to make it look like he was doing work. I know of countless other examples of students, my own included, procrastinating and yet still earn top grades and graduate from top colleges.</p>
<p>The mystique that this generation of Americans is working harder than the previous ones is the greatest deception we have ever pulled on our parents.</p>
<p>Personally, as a student, I can see that this is a major issue of today’s educational system in America. I can roughly say two thirds of students attend school, only half-way pay attention, leave, do their homework and have fun the rest of the day… Little or no learning involved. The other 1/3 is roughly honors kids who somewhat pay attention, only getting A’s because our system is based off of “effort-based progress” and not “results-based progress” and can basically slack off because they have the intelligence to get by. But a very small majority is actually concerned about learning something and is interested in the world around us. </p>
<p>We need to figure out a way to make school more productive rather than longer. Today, school is a “holding-pen” for kids and serving as “crowd-control”. We need to turn that around.</p>
<p>Then these methods are inefficient rather than outdated, I don’t know the history of these methods simply that they do not work. Nevertheless I feel that the administration of our schools wastes an inordinate amount of class time, from my own experience in an urban, Southern school system that consistently underfunded and failing. I suppose that I am in effect advocating for charter schools. Furthermore, I am not sure which generation you are referring to, but I find that the schools in my area have failed almost every generation. Regardless of the time period many schools have had a similar dropout rate and have been failing for decades. I am simply saying that the comprehensive high school has failed to educate the masses.</p>
<p>Reddune - Sorry I misread some part of your post. I thought you graduated from a foreign country then came to the US. But I still disagree with you about short school hours.</p>
<p>This is anecdotal but…my kids went to a private school for K-8. They somehow had time for instruction in Hebrew and Jewish studies as well as all the subjects the public schools taught. These kids go on to public HS and are ahead of their peers.</p>
<p>This tells me there is a lot of wasted time in the public school day. Of course, these kids all had parents who made sure they did their homework and projects. In some cases it was “I can’t teach you Hebrew–you have to pay attention in school!” And they did.</p>
<p>So I am not saying teachers can work in a vacuum without strong parental support. And not every child is equally-able. But the current public school system lets an awful lot of kids graduate with a meaningless diploma, not to mention the horribly high percentage who drop out.</p>
<p>And I second the poster who thinks foreign langs should be taught at a younger age.</p>