Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Switchboard >

We don't need no education!

23:42 / 27.07.02

I hated school. I guess junior school was important for basic reading, writing and math, however I really don't see what the point of comprehensive was. I don't remember any of the shit that I learnt. No physics, no chemistry, no math, no music, no french. No geograpy.

So, what the hell was the point? Other than teaching a kid to stand up straight and obey the rules. I think the school system needs to be radacalised - Make it more empowering for a student, and let them learn about what interests them - not the other way round.

There's this whole school/prison analogy thing going around in my head. You obey set times, you are forced to sit and learn - you are conditioned for working life.

It takes a lot of deprogramming too. What do you guys think? School - Draconian as fuck or important for the future of society?

How could we make it better? Are there any articles on radically improving our education system about?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

10:12 / 28.07.02

I tend to waver between it being a Government tool to create little robots and a necessary thing to give people a grounding in the the basics from which they can then go on and do what they want, just so long as they're middle class and can afford it of course.

There are lots of things that are less than ideal about the system of course, though I'm not necessarily sure what can be done about that. In your average setup there is lots of contradictory information coming from both pupil and teacher which can cause one to behave badly towards the other, which then feeds back, then multiply that by the number of teachers and number of pupils.

Knowing a number of teachers I do know that the amount of paperwork they have to do is ridiculous but I don't know yet of one fulfilled promise by those in power to remove the burden from teachers (or anyone for that matter).

What's the name of that school where the pupils get to choose what they learn and when? The DfEE or whatever they are now has all their OFSTED reports online in .PDF so you could look at that.

Harold Washington died for you

14:32 / 28.07.02

Draconian as fuck. Boring, useless, in some cases emotionally and physically violent. School, especially high school, can be fun with the chance to fuck with girls and get cheap drugs. And of course there are those special teachers, that while you may not learn a lot of concrete info from them, you will learn a love of knowledge and that is priceless. The rest is utter shit.

In the interest of disclosure I dropped out of high school in my last year, mainly because I was bored and had better things (read as college-level mischief). I did get my GED and I am in college now, because school is, of course, necessary for any of the careers I want to follow.

16:06 / 28.07.02

It all depends on how motivated your teachers and your fellow students are. I attended a United World College (www.uwc.org) for the last two years of my secondary school education, and it made up for all the years of boring, draconian, unmotivated teaching I'd had to endure before that. This was mostly due to the fact that we were taught to think creatively and world-aware, by teachers who believed in what they were doing. Combined with the social service we were all required to do it was an ideal situation really...

With the possible exception of the draconian standards set by the International Baccaleaureate organisation which had us all close to slitting our wrists come exam time. But hey, every silver lining has a cloud, and in this case it was a case of really big silver lining around rather small cloud.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

01:43 / 29.07.02

I think school itself is incredibly important, because without it, most people wouldn't be motivated to learn. When I worked in a bookstore/newsstand, I was amazed at how many people didn't read anything buta newspaper or magazine once in a while.

Yesh, it DOES do a lot of mental programming (training people to do mindless busywork for hours on end), but a good teacher can open a new way of thinking...whereas parents tend to just teach what they know.

The most important thing I learned in college was to find my own answers and how to think scientifically rather than emotionally.

10:20 / 29.07.02

Panda says: Make it more empowering for a student, and let them learn about what interests them - not the other way round.

The trouble with that is, where do you start? To a great extent, teachers are in a better position to judge what's relevant and useful than students are, at least until those students have more experience of the world. (Of course, teachers aren't universally motivated and don't get to set the curricula anyway - the contents of which seem to be mostly motivated by politics rather than educational goals.)

That solitaire rose chick says: The most important thing I learned in college was to find my own answers and how to think scientifically rather than emotionally.

Yes. I think education should concentrate more on giving people mental tools to learn with, in the same way as learning to read, write and count, which at the moment you have to get as a by-product of rote learning. The ability to research, and knowing where to go to do so. Rational argument. Evaluating and comparing evidence.

11:52 / 29.07.02

Funny, the most important thing I learned in college was to think emotionally instead of scientifically.

Actually school was easy for me, if I didn't want to go I didn't have to, I could just sit up in the Special Needs Department and do nothing.

And best of all, I never had to do PE once.

I had some really fantastic English teachers though.

13:22 / 29.07.02

fridge says:
The trouble with that is, where do you start? To a great extent, teachers are in a better position to judge what's relevant and useful than students are, at least until those students have more experience of the world. (Of course, teachers aren't universally motivated and don't get to set the curricula anyway - the contents of which seem to be mostly motivated by politics rather than educational goals.)

I think the first thing that needs to be done is improving the situation for teachers. Not sure about life outside of the US, but in the US, to often the teachers are underpayed and over worked. This breaks the spirits of the people who do become teachers and pushes other people who would have become teachers away from the profession.

The second thing, in my opinion, is to empower the teacher. Give them more room to move, and personalize their lessons to fit their classes. If not remove the whole class system and replace it with something that allows for more of a one on one approach. Perhaps a situation where the school day is a combination of group classes (made up of people at similiar levels and mind sets) and individual, one on one, classes which allow the teacher to give personalized assignments and instruction to the students.

Also, when I first got out of highschool, I went to a community college. Almost all of the teachers there fit into one of two groups, either young people who were working in the field and teaching at night to get an extra bit of cash. Or people who had recently retired from the field and were teaching to fill thier days. This made all the difference for me. Teachers that weren't just reciting facts, but relaying real life experiences or passion for the subject. Something similiar to this should be implemented. May be a kind of reserves for teachers. For every three or four years of industry work, you do a year or two of teaching. Granted though, this will likely work best at the highschool level.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

13:26 / 29.07.02

Hong Kong Cavalier Solitaire Rose saith; I think school itself is incredibly important, because without it, most people wouldn't be motivated to learn.

But I don't think my school (or, if I'm misunderstanding your meaning, the experience of being at school) did motivate me to learn. Quite the opposite. I went through the education system because I knew that I wouldn't be able to get a decent job without it. It was only once I left the education system that I began to think what I would like to learn.

I'll be interested to see if GM can actually come up with some 'mutant' approaches to learning for the X-Men or whether that was just some cool dialogue for the White Queen to say.

Are there any alternative teaching methods out there that don't really on the pupil necessarily being cooled and chilled and really wanting to learn?

15:05 / 29.07.02

My Misheard Lada of the Flowers:
Are there any alternative teaching methods out there that don't really on the pupil necessarily being cooled and chilled and really wanting to learn?

Personally, I think a lot of the 'I hate school' mentality has to do with the enviroment. The education system, at least in the US, is built to enforce memorization over learning. I know personally, I found most of my classes extremly boring. On the other hand, I looked forward to the classes where the teacher mixed things up, and put a stronger emphasis on learning over straight memorization.
So the theory would be, change the enviroment to more challenge the student's abilities, and you'll see an increase in those who want to learn.

And for those that really just don't want to learn? Force enough on them so that they can function in society, and then let them choose if they want to slug it out

Irony of Ironies

22:55 / 29.07.02

I got lucky with school. I spent a year when I was, oh, about 13 avoiding the place, got told that my parents would get put in prison by some stupid social workers. Got preached at by some stupid teachers. Then got lucky, got to see a psychiatrist who diagnosed me as school phobic and (the important bit) gave me the choice of whether, where, and when I wanted to go. Of course, as soon as the choice was mine, I wanted to go - I liked learning, I liked finding things out.

Recently I read about a case where a diagnosed school phobic kid nearly ended up in care. That's progress for you.

05:48 / 30.07.02

My daughter has all kinds of poetry memorized--not to mention entire episodes of Monty Python sketches--and so I'm going to stand up for memorization. It's a great human skill that actually gets taught very little.

In fact, most of the time it's "in your own words, explain the 6 steps of the scientific method." So it's a kind of memorization, but not exactly . . . and not exactly "thinking" either.

What is "thinking"? Any ideas out there? Is "scientific" thinking really not emotional? (Having spent way too much time on the science/feminism thread, which got very emotional, I'd also like to play around with that distinction. But then I'm a lit person so what ya gonna do?)

To me the most valuable thing I've taken from school is learning to think historically, genealogically.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

13:20 / 30.07.02

But one of the main failings of the GCSE examination system is that up to that point it's all learning by rote and memorising facts. I always felt that school was teaching me to remember but not how to think. I too can remember all the verses to The Lumberjack Song and can recite in length about the plotlines of Babylon 5. But analytical thinking seemed to be considered a skill that we would develop automatically and so we were not taught it at school and it was certainly one of the reasons I did so badly on my A Level exams.
Even now my analytical skills are extremely poor which is, of course, why I loathe and am envious of the theorybitches.

16:46 / 30.07.02

alas:
My daughter has all kinds of poetry memorized--not to mention entire episodes of Monty Python sketches--and so I'm going to stand up for memorization. It's a great human skill that actually gets taught very little.

My problems with the focus on memorization is mostly two points:

1. Most people forget it soon after taking the test.

2. It only helps you in a situation that you've learned about. When the focus is on memorization over application, then modifing ideas to fit the situation at hand becomes more difficult. This might be more of a personal matter. I've recently learned that I think as a system engineer. If I learn the system underneath the facts, then I can deduce any specifics that I need to know, or at least know exactly where to look. If I'm just faced with a list of facts with no understanding of the underlining system then I'm completly lost.

NOTE: My problem is with the focus on memorization, not that memorization is taught. I just think that the focus needs to be more balanced between memorizing facts, and learning how to figure the facts out for yourself.