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The preschool my kids go to is starting to implement more school readiness content and I am adamantly opposed to it. Unfortunately, all the other parents are pr

• soared 9y ago
  > Forcing young children to learn specific topics can only lead to one outcome: a destruction of man's natural desire to learn about the world through association of learning with pain. Wow, op, please take a step back and relax. Every American spends 10+ years in a classroom, sitting at a desk for 6+ hours a day (post-kindergarten). Man's natural desire has yet to see this inevitable destruction. I thought the article was a bit fear monger-y, but you've stepped us up to pure clickbait.
  • pavel_lishin 9y ago
    OP's point is that it's shitty in high school, too, and that it kills your intrinsic motivation to learn, by associating "learning" with "memorizing boring, rote information without any particular reason to ever apply it". And you can lighten up on the ad-hominem attacks and the clickbait cry-foul.
  • otakucode 9y ago
    You're wrong. Watch the two documentaries called 'High School' and 'High School 2'. The way schools are structured absolutely do kill, in almost all cases, any persons desire to learn, along with their general spirit and enjoyment of living. One of the documentaries, I honestly forget which, is of a school that decided to try instead centering every single class on critical thinking. Instead of teaching by fiat, the teachers gave the students the tools to question them and encountered them as intellectual equals, two thinking human beings one of whom simply had more knowledge in an arena than another. When they didn't know the answer to a question, they'd admit it and try to figure it out with the student. It took a poor Latino neighborhood school and created the class that set the record for number of students to go on to receive a college degree - across any school in the country. But it's hard to teach if you have to treat the students like people, and teachers for the most part go into it because they were very good at manipulating the arbitrary meaningless systems of rules at schools when growing up, then got scared by the whole 'you have to have reasons' part of reality so fled back into the school system as teachers where no reason was needed. No hats indoors? Sure! It's law! No shorts? Or maybe mandatory shorts? Whatever, nothing matters, they're just kids you can restrict and regulate them all you want to make your own life easier, no one will stand up for them!
    • MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
      I like where you were going with the first half, but disagree with your detour towards blaming teachers for the authoritarianism of the educational system. Not that I have any a priori love for authoritarian systems or individuals, but I do think there are enough good reasons to justify maintaining authoritarian control in primary/secondary educational settings, and while yes it unfortunately attracts some "bad apple" authoritarian teachers, they're not the root cause of the problem. The real problem, which you seemed to be getting at in the first half of your post, is standardized testing becoming the be all end all of educational goals and outcomes. Which is exactly why OP was not being alarmist and GP is being foolishly dismissive. Extending this faulty pedagogical regime to even earlier points in children's educations will undoubtedly have the effect of further degrading the population's desire to learn for learnings sake. I graduated high school 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to a good public school and learn from some great teachers who didn't only teach to the test to the exclusion of teaching critical thinking. Even so, you know what I came out of high school feeling like I was genuinely good at? Taking standardized tests. I was proud of how good I had become at gaming the testing system (even though I already understood this to be somewhat perverse, I also couldn't help it). But you know what? If I hadn't been a high percentile achiever, I'm certain it would have severely impacted my sense of self-worth and my desire and willingness to continue to higher education. Using test scores as a proxy measure for the educational attainment of a population is a similar fallacy to using GDP as a proxy for a the wellbeing of a nation's populace. Like the GDP, outsized gains at the top will cover up stagnancy in the middle and bottom, and encourage further macro level policies that continue this trend.
      • otakucode 9y ago
        I graduated in 96, before standardized testing 'took over' apparently. We had standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, they were easy and I don't think the school played much of a role in preparing kids for it. I mean, those tests were the first place in my life I'd ever seen constructions like "apple is to checkerboards as zombies are to what?" and similar. The math was largely the same I suppose, no actual mathematics and just rote computation (which is not the same thing, but I didn't know that until long after leaving school). I graduated right before Columbine. I know that there have to be people who went to my high school who think "we barely got out alive". About a half dozen of my friends would wear pin-stripe suits on Fridays and people called them the 'pin-stripe mafia'. I wore a floor-length green military trenchcoat most of the time. At one point I wore an empty 9mm pistol shoulder holster on top of a loud Hawaiian shirt. I and my friends were basically the incarnation of every "warnings signs" list produced after Columbine. I've never been in a fight. Neither have most of my friends. Only 1 or 2 even tried anything illegal substance-wise. We produced 3 out of the 5 top students in our graduating class, including the Valedictorian. We were the freaks and weirdos, and utterly harmless. And one thing they ignored about Columbine when putting together their warning signs: Columbine was a new school. It had metal detectors on the doors. It had surveillance cameras inside and outside. It had police that periodically patroled. It required students to carry a badge and tracked their movements around the building. It was an authoritarians wet dream. And, as far as I am concerned, the people who built that school are responsible for all the deaths and trauma. If you build a prison, whoever you put in it will act like prisoners. Control is poison. Both for the person being controlled and also for the person made to do the controlling. It is in fundamental conflict with our nature and biology, and it harms both sides. Peoples responses to it are really predictable on a large scale. They exert control over themselves (tattoos in prisons, wearing edgy shit in high school), they form alternative power structures (cliques in high school, gangs in prison), they engage in conflict interpersonally (fights), they engage in inter-group conflict (gang fights), and eventually they will go to war against the system controlling them (prison riots, revolutions, etc). This is not because the people involved are bad. It's because the people are put in a system which MAKES them bad by making them do things that, little by little, poison them. I will eat my hat if neuroscience doesn't verify this within the next 20 years, there's already a bunch of very suggestive evidence in that direction. Prison guards really shouldn't have one of the highest suicide rates of all professions you wouldn't think. I'm sure standardized tests do not help, but the fact we know what actually WORKS and we simply aren't willing to make teachers put in the effort to DO it is stunningly sad. Everywhere that the solution is education and empowerment, whether its schooling, child abuse prevention, drug abuse prevention, wherever, nobody wants to hear it. They're comfortable with control and want it even if it is transparently ineffective.
  • abtinf 9y ago
    You raise a reasonable point: we look around, and it doesn't quite look like the world is on fire, people aren't walking around like zombies, so what is the big deal? The destruction of man's mind will not be witnessed as an explosion. It will be a quiet kind of wasting away. The factory that isn't built. The breakthrough that isn't discovered. The rise of a culture that isn't based on ideas, but on pure emotion. As you say, most Americans spend 10+ years in a classroom, sitting at a desk for 6+ hours per day. This has gone on for decades. And the result? Trump. Post-truth. A culture in which most people can't rationally debate ideas without resorting to emotional attacks. A nation that formerly accepted immigrants by the millions, confident that our greatest days awaited us if we would only reach and work for them... to a nation focused on building walls, terrified of the unknown, and fearful of ideas. Cultural change is slow, until it isn't: 30 years ago, Venezuela was the wealthiest country in South America, now there are no more dogs left to eat. We are more fortunate because past generations created a culture of achievement, science, liberty. But the overall trajectory is unmistakable and we are running on borrowed time. A radical shift in education is the fundamental challenge of our time. Fix education - teach children to think, use reason, and to know that they can shape the world through dedicated focus and effort - and everything else is easy.
  • zaptheimpaler 9y ago
    This kind of reasoning is why society waits until an idea/system completely explodes and causes huge/irreversible damage before people finally change something. Lets just relax and not worry about global warming until a few hundred cities are flooded. Lets just relax and not worry about antibiotic resistance until all antibiotics are useless and a few million people die of common infections. Lets just relax and not worry about the financial system until a crisis like 2008 hits. Fuck it, don't worry, be happy, the world will automatically take care of itself right? How about being proactive in shaping the world and fixing things BEFORE somethings on fire?
  • pizza 9y ago
    Are classrooms really the best we can do and that innocuous? this was an example once used by rd laing to show that from as early in our lives as preschool, much of the "nice" things we do because we care about others can still cause them to feel great distress - teacher asks her students "which one of you nice children knows what 2 + 3 is?" & many children go "I do!" and raise their hands - teacher pretends to not notice the ones who have their hands raised and instead gives her attention to a boy she thinks has not been participating very much as of late - says "Billy, can you tell me what it is?". he dreads the embarrassment of being laughed at for making a mistake. he also doesn't like it when other students would immediately jump on the opportunity to demonstrate they could tell the teacher what they were supposed to tell her. - after a silence following the teacher's question intended to encourage him, Billy answers "um 4?". the comedic effect of the long silence while the classroom waited watching billy answer ended by a meek mistake unfortunately proves hilarious to some of the students. others yet raise their hands even higher than they already were, restlessly trying to get the teacher's attention. would it be fairly common for preschool children to personally feel they disappointed the teacher when they can't perform what the teacher asks? if Billy is doubtful he can make the teacher proud and Billy wants to move the unwanted attention onto a student who wants the visibility (and grows restless without it), then Billy's subject to irreconcilable demands. Of course it's possible he'd grow petrified because he would associate "the opportunity to learn something I didn't know" with being singled out according to the demands of everyone else in the room.
• gnahckire 9y ago
  I went to Montessori schools from preschool to 2nd grade. I has a really positive experience since I was able to pick and choose what interests to explore without a whole lot of structure. I loved it and switching to a public school in 3rd grade was an interesting change of pace. I hate how educators are attempting to force standardization of learning at such an early age.
  • monodeldiablo 9y ago
    The educators, by and large, aren't. It's the parents and politicians leading these ridiculous charges, over the objections of teachers.
  • mkempe 9y ago
    My daughters have been going to Montessori school. I wish I had had that kind of education. I generally describe modern schools as the assembly-line for obedient workers who shall live in factories -- hence a need for "unschooling".
• pault 9y ago
  I've been shocked and a little disgusted reading Facebook posts by some ex-coworkers in NY City obsessing over their daughter getting accepted into pre-k. Like she'll be flipping burgers for the rest of her life if she doesn't start an exclusive academic career at age 4. It's insane.