Funny political pictures

[DanaC]

All depends on what is being taught and in what context. I was talking about reading. As a specific skill, reading isn't always something that can be taught by watching and copying, which is how most pre-industrial skills were taught.

[Gravdigr]

[BigV]

All parents teach their children. However. Not all the things the children learn are what the parents intended for them to learn. And OF COURSE parents play a major role in a child's literacy. It can be done without the parents and it can be done without professional teachers, sure. But it can be done better, much better with both of them supporting and reinforcing the work of the other.

As for history, yes, there have been countless generations that have grown from childhood to adulthood without the benefit of professional teachers. Today, here, literacy is infinitely more important than it was hundreds of years ago. I don't think it's a fair comparison. As you point out Dana, there are many many children today who are illiterate or barely literate. Like you, I would not want that for my children or the children around me. In my "world", literacy counts. Our society has a stake in the education of our children. It is that stake that makes it worthwhile for public teachers and free schooling.

[DanaC]

Well said V.

Looking back at the last 1000 years or so of history, I see those who cannot read at the mercy of those who can far more often than the other way around. Withotu the ability to read we are dependent upon those who can to interpret and filter through laws, holy texts, scientific ideas, political events etc.

Being unable to read, and to a slightly lesser extent, being unable to write, is a handicap in the world we live in. 20,000 years ago, it wasn't. 20,000 years ago being able to move quietly through the undergrowth was a much more useful skill. But the teaching of that is a whole other matter. Most of what we needed to learn then as humans could be learned pretty much by osmosis. Parents would show and guide, and by doing the children would learn.

Parents continue to show and guide children how to live and how to do the tasks they will need to do in their lives, but many of the skills we've developed as a species require a different kind of learning and a different kind of teaching. Hence the development of teaching specific professions. Which predate the more modern desire for comprehensively educated workers by many centuries.


[eta] there seems to be a tendency in both our cultures to devalue teaching as a profession and view it almost as a form of enhanced babysitting. There's also a tendency to devalue parenting and see it as 'natural'and instinctive and therefore unskilled. It is the devaluing of parenting that leads to the devaluing of teaching. At its core it is a devaluing of the act of raising children. Most probably because that has traditionally been seen as a female role. The level of respect shown to teachers in society seems to reduce the closer to infancy the children they teach sit.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Hence the development of teaching specific professions. Which predate the more modern desire for comprehensively educated workers by many centuries.

The profession predates government involvement by many centuries. The "modern desire" aligns quite nicely with government involvement.

[DanaC]

Well, yes. Because in order to effect mass education of the entire nation government is generally required to be involved.

I think it's really easy for us to question the necessity of mass education. But I also think it is important to remember that this was not simply imposed onto us from above. It is something which had to be fought for. The need for an educated workforce and the need for literacy as a life skill came before any serious government involvement. And when that involvement began it was highly controversial.

Speaking just for Britain, as I am less familiar with what was happening over in America at this time, the early moves to ensure educational opportunity to poorer families (education, incidently, being one of the areas that Adam Smith suggested was an appropriate place for government intervention and even if necessary provision) were something opposed by many on the right as being unnecessary, and likely to make for an unhappier (less obedient) and less settled workforce.

Polemic battles were fought against acts requiring parishes to ensure some sort of education provision was made available. Reading, it was suggested, bred insurrection and unhappiness in the lower orders. What need had they for such things? Theirs was not a world of literature, but of looms, ploughs, hammers and nails.

I have a lot of problems with the education system as it is. The idea of a massified and uniform approach to something as fluid and invidual as learning seems clunky and inadequate. And the insistence on attendance, coupled with sanctions against children and parents for non-compliance seems heavy handed. A one size fits all system is never going to answer the whole question of teaching and learning.

But. Wherever education is left to the private sector it fails or completely barrs the lowest economic strata. Where education is not mandated, gender inequality becomes much greater. It was only in my mother's generation that if a family had enough money to send one child to college and university they'd almost always choose the son, because girls left work when they got married. Without mandated education families forced to choose which children were educated would make a calculation based on many such factors. Such is the way of it in some countries now.

Parents are just people. They know their individual child better than anyone. But they are no more or less likely to make good decisions than anybody else.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I have a lot of problems with the education system as it is. The idea of a massified and uniform approach to something as fluid and invidual as learning seems clunky and inadequate. And the insistence on attendance, coupled with sanctions against children and parents for non-compliance seems heavy handed. A one size fits all system is never going to answer the whole question of teaching and learning.

But. Wherever education is left to the private sector it fails or completely barrs the lowest economic strata. Where education is not mandated, gender inequality becomes much greater. It was only in my mother's generation that if a family had enough money to send one child to college and university they'd almost always choose the son, because girls left work when they got married. Without mandated education families forced to choose which children were educated would make a calculation based on many such factors. Such is the way of it in some countries now.

Heartily agree.

Parents are just people. They know their individual child better than anyone. But they are no more or less likely to make good decisions than anybody else.

Heartily disagree. The say 10-20% of children our system fails today have those parents but they rest do not. Those kids were uneducated before and remain uneducated. Public ed gives them the opportunity but few take it.

The system as it is is inadequate for the needs of modern society. Its inflexibility is increasing at just the wrong time. I am in no way arguing for less funding, but I am arguing for more of an open system with more choice.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Griff

The system as it is is inadequate for the needs of modern society. Its inflexibility is increasing at just the wrong time. I am in no way arguing for less funding, but I am arguing for more of an open system with more choice.

What good is more choice? How to separate the failing schools from the better ones? Almost every time, the schools with the greatest problems have the most empty parking spaces on Parents-Teacher night.

85% of all problems are, without doubt, directly traceable to top management. That is the parents.

You can often predict the problem students. Observe their parents. Attitude and knowledge comes from top management.

[Clodfobble]

More choice allows the good students not to be saddled with policies targeted at the bad students. I did not, for example, need seminar after seminar on not using drugs, staying out of gangs, and avoiding pregnancy. On the flip side, many of the students in my school did not have any use for calculus, and could have done much better in a school that provided them with realistic vocational skills. When kids are taught things that actually apply to them, sometimes they even pay attention.

[DanaC]

The difficulty comes with how that choice is made and by whom. There's a lot of talk over here about increasing vocational courses for students who are not academically suited or driven. The problem is that translates to certain schools specialising in vocational skills. In reality that means that children in one area are being streamed towards academic subjects and children in another area to vocational subjects.

I'll leave you to guess what demographic the academic schools serve and which the vocational.

[Undertoad]

The ones who want the best chance at a good career for life, with high pay and remarkable chance at advancement? Vocational.

[DanaC]

Maybe your vocational courses are different to ours. Ours seem more focused on filtering kids through to be plumbers and hairdressers.

Nowt wrong with that of course. But it should be based on who wants and can do what, not on where someone lives and whether the powers that be have decided they are likely to want academic education.

One of the problems as I see it is this: all the ideas about increasing choice and not foisting academia onto kids who won't get anything from it, and recognising the value of vocational skills and other types of intelligence, sound great until they get filtered through the system. At which point they stream kids from the middle class towards academic subjects, leading to college, university and an entry point to high skilled professions, and working-class kids towards vocational subjects which will be best suited to producing good plumbers, builders, electricians and factory workers.

Again, nowt wrong with any of those jobs, and nowt wrong with kids choosing to go down that path. But there is something wrong, in my opinion, in choosing for them to not experience those things based on assumptions made by other people about their aptitude.

Even when it isn't so blatantly class based as a system, and the choice is genuinely made by the child...parents influence that choice. And if parents don't value academic pursuits then what chance the child will either value those things, or if they do, successfully go against their family culture in order to follow them?

State schools get a ot of stuff wrong. And no doubt with massified schooling in the west a large part of school structure is centred around getting kids out from under their parents' feet so they can work, whilst shaping a future workforce. But...I suspect most people got their first introduction to many wonderful things through school as well. I have a literate family who value academic pursuits, but it was my secondary school lit classes that introduced me to the poems of Wilfred Owen. The one and only time I ever went to see ballet it was with my school.

I got to do all sorts of things through my secondary school that I just never would have done otherwise. Now, I don't much like ballet. But I know that I don't like it based on having seen it. I also know that I really like the poems of Wilfred Owen and also Philip Larkin.

[Griff]

Around here there is some competition to get those vocational slots and plumbers make Wall Street money.

[Undertoad]

Griff has my point.

And I forgot that I moved this thread to Politics and therefore I must depart.

[DanaC]

Oh I got the point. I just think there are dangers in streaming kids to or away from academic subjects, particularly when that in practice falls along class lines.