Yesterday, the Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee put the interests of the tourism industry ahead of the needs of students by voting to kill three bills that would allow school boards to set their own calendar. The bills would have overturned the so called Kings Dominion Law, named for the amusement park in Doswell, Virginia. The law currently prohibits schools from starting before Labor Day, in an effort to boost late season tourism revenue.The liberals over at ThinkProgress muse on this horror:
A long summer vacation is particularly detrimental to low-income children who don’t have access to engaging programming during the summer. [Yes, the summer sports camps middle-class suburban kids go to are so mentally enriching.]I hate to regurgitate a cliche here - but just follow the money. Like so many other institutions, Organized Education is one big racket. Continuing, the article makes this seemingly incontrovertible statement:
Speaking at an event at the Center for American Progress last year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made clear that it is time for students to spend more time — not less — in school. “We know that far too many of our nation’s young people get to a certain point by June, thanks to their teachers hard work and commitment, and they come back in September further behind than when they left, and we just have to do something about it,” he said.
It’s a no brainer that kids will learn more in school than they will riding a rollercoaster.The dirty little secret of education: annoying little Johnny complaining "when will I ever use this" is actually exactly right. What's more important - keeping kids in stuffy rooms banging them over the heads with spelling words and worksheets, or freeing them to actually enjoy their childhood? I don't know if liberals were either losers who never had any friends or are wily individuals who understand the potency of scholastic indoctrination. I'd wager both.
I'd actually like to cut school time significantly, as schools exist more as daycares and, later, as hormonal battlefields rather than learning environments. Unfortunately though, we no longer have a societal structure that would allow that. We have less parental oversight due to women leaving the home (ironically to raise other people's children), more ways for rambunctious teens to act out, and a society increasingly made up of strangers with little social sanction to discipline youth.
Ideally, students until middle school would spend most of their time in some sort of active environment, even one with an educational bent. At middle school, we'd have rather rigid tracking and so forth until College, which will blow itself up soon enough anyway. But in the end, children don't need to know long division and what's a participle; they really only need to learn discipline, respect, and responsibility. Yet with an educational environment like the one shown below, the "progressive" notion that we must speak to children's sensibilities rather than mold them with moderately tough love, that's not really happening: [I feel sort of bad posting the video because the teacher seems like a really nice guy who's just trying his best. I post it as an indictment of our culture, not the actual guy.]
36 comments:
This is the kind of stuff Steve Sailer is referring to when he predicts that in X years people will be talking about the 'Stolen Generation' of African-American children.
So you can't drop out and no more summer vacation? If you're not school oriented ur teen years are gonna be complete hell. Madness.
I hate to regurgitate a cliche here - but just follow the money. Like so many other institutions, Organized Education is one big racket.
It's nice to know how well my property tax is being spent - "Disgraced teacher is worth $10M, makes $100,000 a year, does nothing, & refuses to leave" and can't be fired.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/dud_of_the_class_V94XccuHkAS9OKOVaTtWMK
More school time would help if children were being educated. Public schools are about indoctrination, not education and the less time children spend in school the better.
What would fix schools, in no particular order is #1) changing the curriculum. We went to space with old math, what have we done with “new” math? #2) restore male leadership in schools, #3) stop wasting resources on blacks and mexicans.
I am sure that the Asian-American community would love to have a program where all of the white kids go outside the play while the asian kids work on academic advancement.
I doubt that one of the problems that middle class white kids have it that they spend to much time in library and not enough time playing sports.
Education in this country started going down hill steadily around 1970 or thereabout. We've been in free-fall for over 40 years. We're undoubtedly the laughing stock of the free industrialized world.
China graduates many more engineering students than we. We're having to import our scientists from India and China. It seems that Asia, Scandinavia and most other industrial nations are doing education right, perhaps we should mimic their system.
My thought is that in our multi-cultural hell hole of an education system, that would be damned near impossible to do at this point.
I used to be a college teacher. I could not watch this to the end. I was so ashamed for the teacher. The degradation of this poor man was so extreme and actually self-imposed I am surprised he hasn't quit or committed suicide. How can one live like this?
By the way, another victory for smart phones. However, the students need to be careful. In Oklahoma, a ninth-grader snapped a photo of a snoozing substitute with a cellphone last Friday at Mustang Mid-High School. The student was later suspended.
Dissident: not 1970. 1954.
What would help education?
Stop age-sorted cohorts and allow kids of different ages to mix with each other. Kids do learn well from each other, and younger kids will want to emulate the knowledge and skill of older kids.
Rote learning works well for very young kids, which is when the rules of counting, sorting, phonics, and spelling need to be emphasized, but it does not need to be boring. If you've ever read a book to a toddler 25 times a day for a month straight, you know how much they enjoy it (even as you go nuts) and they memorize the story. This eventually leads to connecting the printed words to the story, and to reading. But by about 4th or 5th grade, worksheets and rote is useless. The brain is changing and needs a different tactic.
Forcing the unwilling is useless, and school is all about forcing the unwilling and underserving the highly capable.
Ja'Quavious J. Jackson sez:
YO! Dem some dope-azz, fly-mutha beats! White boy be gettin' hiz jam on, nomesane? An da kidz be LERNIN', 2!
Dis wut Im talkin' bout. I'm finna go git me a m&*%$#@in' maff degree like TOMORROW an sheeyit. Word. Peace out.
I feel embarrassed both by and for that poor teacher.
This is the kind of stuff we are taught, as future teachers, to do, in order to make the material relevant to our students. Teachers are taught to become more culturally literate about teens, to keep everything on their level. I took the unspoken part of this message as "don't bother trying to raise them up to a real level of understanding."
I taught English and History, and several of my PD and staff meetings dealt with how to incorporate rap, graphic "novels," and music videos into our lessons, even when it felt like a real reach for me to do so.
http://unfaircampaign.org/
FINALLY white privilege is being discussed
Virginia has some of the highest achieving students in the country and the school year is not short compared to other states. The school year starts after Labor Day and ends the last week of June. I assume a certain demographic is incapable of filling their free time on their own.
Much can be learned at King's Dominion as well, they have a replica of the Eiffel Tower and Yogi Bear lives there in a wacky cave.
Long summer vacations are detrimental to "low-income" students? Well that settles it; everything must revolve around the so-called "low-income" folks. Transparently, it's just a euphemism for the black and brown masses out there but that polite white middle-class types don't want to come out and say it like that. Of course, these types believe they are the ones to decide whats best for those deemed as belonging to the benighted classes, all for their own good.
I confess I never went to any summer camp, but just hit the beaches and parks with other kids, swimming and bike riding. Getting out from under the control of adults was a big plus for us. Most teachers were goofs and control freaks; who needed more of that? Anyway, what do these do-good dictators have up their sleeves when their plans don't pan out? Leg irons chaining kids to their desks?
Education is a bottomless pit for money with diminishing returns past some point. It uses children as a front whilst grabbing more money for the adults who are in the business.
Dave, you engaged in an argument with Olave d'Entienne a few weeks ago on a thread called "Angry Liberals" or something similar. It was about HBD being a necessary thing to study and acknowledge publicly.
That was a discussion you both treated seriously, taking it beyond snark and soundbites. Do you concede that argument to Olave?
Down here in Atlanta at a 90% black school the dance instructor had her students do a stripper-style lap dance routine during school basketball games:
http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhEPX70vbLGQrHtqWJ
She was removed as dance instructor, but she didn't see anything wrong with her routines.
If blacks were left to their own devices they'd certainly be OK with this sort of thing. It's only when the white folks in the media start making a ruckus that the black school administrators start to feel the pressure to put a stop to this.
The education I wish I'd had would be the Charlotte Mason method. She said, instead of children being confined to classrooms all day, let them spend time outdoors being active and exploring, read real books instead of dry boring textbooks, enjoy art and music, engage in lots of free play, and encourage understanding ideas and engaging in independent thought rather than rote memorization. I think this would be much better for children than what's dished out in the government public schools.
While I bash the US education system, we're still probably one of the best, if not the best, in the world.
It seems that Asia, Scandinavia and most other industrial nations are doing education right, perhaps we should mimic their system.
This is more anti-American liberal garbage. If you split up scores by race, you see how great of an education system we have.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k
For standardized testing, Asian-Americans are 2nd in the world. White Americans are 7th. And our black and Hispanics score better than their racial peers anywhere in the world.
Of course, if you take everyone together, the US is lagging. But that's because we have so many NAMs deflating our scores. It's also why liberals can keep complaining about the US education system as if its an achievable goal to reduce that darn racial gap that hasn't gone away for centuries.
Homeschool
uhhh
the reason why our eductaion systme sucks is BECAUSE of the raical gap
why should white students score better than People of Color?
" #3) stop wasting resources on blacks and mexicans."
End of problems right there.
Education in this country started going down hill steadily around 1970 or thereabout.
You should read Raymond Chandler's letters some time. According to him American education was a joke in 1958.
the reason why our eductaion systme sucks is BECAUSE of the raical gap
why should white students score better than People of Color?
But whites don't score better than one particular "People" of Color - Asians. Maybe white racist voodoo doesn't work on Asians.
But whites don't score better than one particular "People" of Color - Asians. Maybe white racist voodoo doesn't work on Asians.
Asians outscore whites in a system designed by whites because Asians are racist and therefore our system sucks.
And if you believe that, you are insane.
I grew up in the countryside (rural) outside of a very small college town.
Every summer:
1) Vacation Bible School (at not the church we attended).
2) Summer Reading is Fun (a one or two week long program that was done in WV in the late 70s and 80s - not sure if they still do it as I don't think teachers volunteer to do anything anymore).
Point was learning in the summer can be fun, learning shouldn't stop, and summer shouldn't be a complete blowoff.
Both were completely voluntary though, and very few children attended either. I bet you'd have even worse voluntary attendance of any summer educational program in a city except by the excelling students, with the percentage participation going down as the city's percent white went down and then back up as the percent white went further lower (as escape), an inverted Bell Curve.
There's a lot of YouTube videos showing teachers acting like clowns (the guy in the post is not a clown; he seems genuinely well-meaning).
Here's on particularly bad one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs4GjoUho5k&feature=related
in the middle of tenth grade i was forced to switch from private jewish school to a philadelphia public school, and not even one of the worst ones at all. it was like going from graduate school to kindergarten. the white students were no geniuses but the black students were clearly and observably borderline retarded.
baby boomers still love blacks and it will always be 1964 to them, nothing is going to unstick this country from the amber theyve frozen us in until they all die or completely retire
There is no reason to keep to the schedule that was invented when most students had to return to the farm to do chores after school and work the fields in the summer and fall.
That said, school doesn't need to be like jail all day. China has school for much longer, but, students have study periods and things to break the day up. They're not just sitting there listening to a teacher drone on.
The Superbowl half-time show has always been gay. I never watched it until after Janet's wardrobe malfunction when they dropped anything edgy. The only good one ever, was The Who.
"Education in this country started going down hill steadily around 1970 or thereabout. We've been in free-fall for over 40 years. We're undoubtedly the laughing stock of the free industrialized world. :
I have seen stats on HBD sites where if you only counted whited kids, they stack up well with other countries.
Sorry, I didn't read the comments before I posted. Onestdv already beat me to it on the whites only scores.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k
You know what is really amazing about this chart? That Asians need to study 12 hours a day to score a 20-30 point advantage over whites.
Dissident: not 1970. 1954.
The decline in education started in 1890, when they threw Greek and Latin out of high school. It has only accelerated.
When Look-Say reading was started in the 1920s, the vocabulary was high and by the 1940s, it had declined to just over 200 words.
Read John Taylor Gatto's, "The Underground History of American Education" free online at Johntaylorgatto.com
The American educational system teaches present orientation, not future orientation. Future oriented people build society, present oriented people destroy it.
"Why do we have to learn this." Education should be about how to learn. Something schools do not teach any more
Like OneSTDV and JohnR I think the school system does need reforms namely building character. To that end discipline and future time orientation are critical.
I'm also a big believer in school uniforms. Clothing is a form of status and the 3rd world schools correctly recognize that it brings undesirable elements into schooling. School uniforms would go a LONG way to making the public school system (including bad schools) much better.
Separating the sexes would go a long ways in addition to allowing whites and East Asians the ability to escape brown dysfunction without the worry of having to relocate to "good schools" every decade or so. The reason there is no learning is because there is no discipline and the reason there is no discipline is because teachers have to be PC (i.e. cater to the lowest common denominator) all while managing a state subsidized dating service.
We need to stop catering to the lousy bourgeois sensibilities of dingbat parents. Yes, it's not just poor parents that are screwing the system up.
Finally, we need to redefine what a teacher is within our society. I decided against being a teacher after my whole "training" focused on "pedagogy" (i.e. glorified babysitting techniques). If the child is bored with my classroom, tough banana. The "real world" is not going to be any kinder. We might as well weed out the dummies and the uninterested as soon as we can so we can cultivate the geniuses who really contribute.
"Finally, we need to redefine what a teacher is within our society. I decided against being a teacher after my whole "training" focused on "pedagogy" (i.e. glorified babysitting techniques). If the child is bored with my classroom, tough banana. The "real world" is not going to be any kinder. We might as well weed out the dummies and the uninterested as soon as we can so we can cultivate the geniuses who really contribute."
I fully agree with that statement ----- and I'm equally concerned with both those undeserved budding geniuses AND those overly babied, underability kids wasting space.
My short answer for the latter: military academy-style primary education followed by life-skills classes and vocational education.
As for the former? Stop punishing them! I big gripe of mine that i rarely mention here is how public-school districts almost have or outright act punitively upon the academically gifted: it's like their special abilities are acknowledged and valued ----- but don't you dare think you're special or let it go to your head in any way whatsoever.
At the few 'gifted' schools in my big-city district and many other comparable ones, the kids in those classes are FORCED into doing all these egalitarian-reinforcing tasks: mandatory tutoring of regular and special-ed students; mandatory volunteering at school and non-school-oriented events at underperforming K-5th grade schools in the same district. There exists a subtle but clearly evident attitude by teachers and administrators toward any kid who's bright AND aware of that fact to never let him flex his ego and abilities too much and quickly knock him back to earth if he or she dares to recognize their distinction in any way. It's almost as if certain teachers and administrators have a slight envy and resentment in play when interacting with and setting policy for these kids ----- yet they need 'em, come time when the school is evaluated for its cumulative test scores, which plays out in terms of next-year's budget and in innumerable other ways, etc.
It's really sort of sickly and sometimes gets WAY out of hand, yet there's still very little candor about this, probably because the district is overwhelmed by more immediate traumas and crises.
Arne Duncan and Barack Obama (and the Bushes, Cheneys, Gores, and the Clintons) sent their kids to private schools.
Notice anything?
Elites are wont to see the underlcass heaped upon the clueless middle. This will impede competition for their own offspring because the mental and cultural development of the talented children of the lower and middle classes will be damaged by the noise, the drama, and the influence of the underclass.
One of the commenters above noted that segregating the kids by sex might help. This would be a tremendous help to boys in my opinion. Girls from roughly the 7th to 10th grades are already pretty, and the young males dont have the mental discipline to stop thinking about them long enough to concentrate on their studies between those ages. They are literally "crazy" about girls at that age. Girls go through a short "boy crazy" stage themselves, but it seems to end a little earlier. Showing off to raise one's status as a boy at that age is something that every teacher in every class probably sees 2 or 3 young males damage their own educations with on a daily basis.
Meanwhile many of our elites not only send their kids to private schools, but single sex private schools, while they attempt to "reform" education for the masses by heaping the underlcass upon the middle. Its pretty obvious when its looked at in this way.
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