> What is actually happening is that the students have > horrific home lives characterized by neglect, > bad-influences, and utter chaos. Neglect is the op

> What is actually happening is that the students have > horrific home lives characterized by neglect, > bad-influences, and utter chaos. Neglect is the opposite > of "spoon-feeding". Students come to school with such > deep unfillable needs that just keeping the classrooms > from erupting into mayhem is an achievement in itself > for the instructors. Agreed. In London what I've heard to as referred to as 'spoon-feeding' is the need to break down each lesson into short games/exercises (keyword quizzes, etc), the need to keep children after school for unpaid 'intervention' lessons due to lack of engagement in class/homework, and teacher's providing so much help to kids doing coursework that in many cases when they actually get to marking it they realise that they effectively wrote it. This is incentivised through the previous teacher needing to set a high predicted grade in order to get a good evaluation, and the next teacher needing to ensure that they reach this unless they want to be scrutinised heavily (and given a needs-to-improve). Apparently "the dropout rate from UK higher education institutions has increased for the first time in four years [...] The dropout rate for young students from disadvantaged backgrounds was rising even more rapidly. It stood at 8.2 per cent for the 2013-14 cohort, up 0.5 percentage point year-on-year." [0]. That might not be connected to student autonomy, but it could be... [0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/rise-uk-university-dropout-rate-disappointing https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/rise-uk-university...