8 ms·

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that'

by xupybd 8y ago

>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. That makes things horrible for these poor children. But how on earth does this get fixed? How does society change to provide enough support and training to these parents to give them the resources to handle these situations?

devoply 8y ago
Schools just sort of happened at the behest of industrialists. There isn't actually that much thought put into the concept of schools much less all that follows from them. They are simply taken as granted despite the fact that they are a relatively recent invention. "The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you." —John Updike, 1963
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  See also: the police. (Relevant book: The End of Policing)
- educationdata 8y ago
  School is not a recent invention. Public school is recent invention. Also, there is much thought put into schooling. Curriculum (what to teach), instruction (how to teach), school administration, etc. I am not saying schools are perfect, but claim schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t.
  - devoply 8y ago
    > school is not a recent invention https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808/brief-history-education https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808... In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. In my August 2 posting, I summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration. The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning. In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their willfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But certainly the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier. With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom. In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power assertive means are used to make children do that work. > schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t. Meant in jest. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." - Mark Twain
  - myhf 8y ago
    There was also much thought put into phlogiston and epicycles.
userbinator 8y ago
Whatever the solution is, it's definitely not to lower the standards further in an attempt to raise grades, because that just continues the cycle of decline.
derp_dee_derp 8y ago
Serious answer: love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. This will solve the problem on every level.
- geofft 8y ago
  I agree with that being the first and greatest commandment, but it's for individuals. What do we do as a society when other people do not keep that commandment—or more relevantly, the second, to love their neighbor as themselves? Where is the line where we intervene for the sake of others?
  - ngcc_hk 8y ago
    Very good comment. The difference left and right start here though. Sadly.
  - dataduck 8y ago
    Perhaps these problems can't be solved by society? The amount of misalignment of (putative) intent and effect in education I've seen, especially at the policy level, at least suggests this. If that's true, the question you should be asking is what should I do when other people do not keep that commandment.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Looking at the states still condoning corporal punishment, it seems those god-lovers spend all their love on god, and have only the stick and paddle left over for their neighbors and children.
notus 8y ago
I feel like we are kind of doing a disservice to children by even having grades K-8. I don't really see what the value is in having them. Parents over focus on it and seem to measure their own child's worth based on grades and children also seem to measure their own self worth based on grades. IMO there is no case where a child that young should be failing anything, if they are failing a class that young there is something seriously wrong going on with the child which needs to be addressed ASAP or there is something wrong with the teacher. (I'll also add that it could be something wrong with the pedagogy if the majority of the grade is determined by homework assignments but I still think that falls in the category of something going on with the child)
- Aloha 8y ago
  I think some feedback system is important, you need a mechanism to let the parents know Johnny is struggling and need something to help them. That said, letter grades are useless to gradeschoolers (K-5).
  - notus 8y ago
    I think if the feedback was more along the lines of the teacher getting in touch with the parent to discuss decline in performance or something it might go better for the child. There is something just really indifferent and also ambiguous about letter grades and more specifically the Unsatisfactory/Satisfactory/Outstanding rating system for younger children. I believe the age range they measured was children 5-11 so pretty young in this context.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Letter grades are largely useless as an educational tool, even in high school – they provide delayed, coarse, not very actionable feedback, while inflicting a lot of unnecessary emotional stress/pain which directly interferes with learning. The real purpose of letter grades is largely bureaucratic and they are designed for the convenience of teachers and school administrators. What they are good for is sorting and labeling the students, though as a side effect they are also quite effective at directing student effort toward gaming them rather than caring about the quality of their work. My primary school eschewed grades in favor of detailed written progress reports. These took a whole lot more work for the teachers to prepare, but were much more valuable. (In particular, knowing that they would need to write them caused teachers to pay attention to the progress of every student and take notes about it on a regular basis.)
Kuzutsukake 8y ago
I'm thinking report cards released on Friday increase parent-child interaction across the board, both good and bad;that a child is more likely to be encouraged for good grades, disciplined for bad ones, or simply asked how their day was.
1000units 8y ago
Offering incentives for the poor to not breed would have a huge impact. Currently we do the opposite.
- matte_black 8y ago
  We need to do a better job of providing subsidized birth control. Half the kids in school these days have no reason to exist given their parents situation.
bordercases 8y ago
Weren't you a kid?
mberning 8y ago
This reminds me of ads they ran in the UK about domestic violence going up when a team lost a football match. I’m not sure what to make of it. Are we going to have an ad for any and every generic stressor in this life? If a report card or sporting event is enough to induce a physical beating there are some more serious problems going on. https://hyperallergic.com/450815/uk-national-centre-for-domestic-violence-world-cup-ads/ https://hyperallergic.com/450815/uk-national-centre-for-dome...
- baq 8y ago
  If there’s a fire, you don’t try to put it out with gasoline. The proposal makes perfect sense.
geofft 8y ago
> If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. I think that's starting from a mistaken premise. Why expect parents to cope? Parenting takes an amount of empathy and patience and care that many people simply do not have and will not have. In pre-modern society the nuclear family made sense, but at what point do we say, being someone's biological source gives you no particular right to control their life and the task of guarding and raising children should actually be given to those who can do so humanely? Why try to retrain inhumane parents instead of just not subjecting kids to them in the first place? If you look at the much bigger picture—children who are gay or trans, children who date outside their race, children born into cults or to antivaxxers, children born with disabilities that expect particularly uncommon levels of support from parents, etc. etc.—the problem is simply that we assue that your physiological ability to engage in tbe reproductive act means that you're fit to be a parent. There's zero reason to believe that.
- ngcc_hk 8y ago
  The nuclear family is born in industrial modern society. In city in fact. Remember the one to be jailed - it takes a village. No. Not sure in western society but in the old village (even to this day all those chinese has a village in their passport marked), you have a place where the punishment to be held. Come on. Treating kid well is a modern concept. Whilst I think parent could be and should be lovely. It is not so in history and around the world. So is not your social environment. If a minor deed like Friday the best no report card, please do.
  - paradoxparalax 8y ago
    Just to clarify a bit here, when it reads "all those chinese has a village in their passport marked", you are probably talking about the Hukou system. Well, everyone in the world has his place of birth in his passport, but, ok, the Hukou system is more then that, but is at risk of being misunderstood here, It's primary reason of existence has nothing to do with punishments, note that physical punishment at schools is currently forbidden, hated and smashed and scorched by social media and news and by the majority of parents in China. The very Hukou system itself has it's Demise "announced" by the Chinese lawmakers for years now, they are handling the update of a huge Legacy society organization and citizen identification System update and this system has already suffered many minor cuts and shut-downs of collateral ancient, obsolete regulations. To add some anedacta: I was a guest of a certain facility for a couple months in China. Any kind of physical punishment by the enforcement or the crew or the guests themselves was impossible. dozen cameras 24 h a day, no milimeter out of the Written Law. And the law doesn't predict physical punishment there, besides of the Death Penalty, that is exactly the top of the scale of Ancient physical punishment, off course. :edit adding some bit to the anedacta, I was the only non-chinese there, among hundreds.
TravelTechGuy 8y ago
If that's the approach they're taking, why not just cancel the day Friday all together? Seriously, instead of finding and fighting the root causes of the problems, they treat the symptoms. Reminds me of the old Jewish folk tale/joke: when people in the town of Chelem complained to the city council that many people fall off the broken town's bridge, the council got together, deliberated for a week, and decided to build a new hospital under the bridge.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. And they strike their children because they can't cope? If they can't cope without striking their children, well, then, maybe they shouldn't have any. That'd be best for their children, and for the parents also. The children won't grow up damaged (and having learned that this is the way to raise children) and the parents won't have to experience such pressure that they absolutely have to strike someone to make it better.
- ido 8y ago
  Sometimes you find out too late.
_password 8y ago
Person 1: That miserable bastard shot 20 people. Person 2: Oh man, the problem is *guns!* Hint: maybe the problem is miserable bastards. Maybe the problem is people being driven to their breaking point, over and over again, by an increasingly brittle and rigid social order, to the point that psychotic plots are a highly visible statistical anomaly, that resonates with far too many people as a conclusion to draw from the circumstances they face.

by xupybd 8y ago

devoply 8y ago

Schools just sort of happened at the behest of industrialists. There isn't actually that much thought put into the concept of schools much less all that follows from them. They are simply taken as granted despite the fact that they are a relatively recent invention. "The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you." —John Updike, 1963

InclinedPlane 8y ago
See also: the police. (Relevant book: The End of Policing)
educationdata 8y ago
School is not a recent invention. Public school is recent invention. Also, there is much thought put into schooling. Curriculum (what to teach), instruction (how to teach), school administration, etc. I am not saying schools are perfect, but claim schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t.
- devoply 8y ago
  > school is not a recent invention https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808/brief-history-education https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-learn/200808... In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. In my August 2 posting, I summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration. The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning. In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their willfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But certainly the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier. With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom. In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power assertive means are used to make children do that work. > schools are the same as jails, education is the same as torture, it's just bullsh*t. Meant in jest. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." - Mark Twain
- myhf 8y ago
  There was also much thought put into phlogiston and epicycles.

userbinator 8y ago

Whatever the solution is, it's definitely not to lower the standards further in an attempt to raise grades, because that just continues the cycle of decline.

derp_dee_derp 8y ago

Serious answer: love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. This will solve the problem on every level.

geofft 8y ago
I agree with that being the first and greatest commandment, but it's for individuals. What do we do as a society when other people do not keep that commandment—or more relevantly, the second, to love their neighbor as themselves? Where is the line where we intervene for the sake of others?
- ngcc_hk 8y ago
  Very good comment. The difference left and right start here though. Sadly.
- dataduck 8y ago
  Perhaps these problems can't be solved by society? The amount of misalignment of (putative) intent and effect in education I've seen, especially at the policy level, at least suggests this. If that's true, the question you should be asking is what should I do when other people do not keep that commandment.
matt4077 8y ago
Looking at the states still condoning corporal punishment, it seems those god-lovers spend all their love on god, and have only the stick and paddle left over for their neighbors and children.

notus 8y ago

I feel like we are kind of doing a disservice to children by even having grades K-8. I don't really see what the value is in having them. Parents over focus on it and seem to measure their own child's worth based on grades and children also seem to measure their own self worth based on grades. IMO there is no case where a child that young should be failing anything, if they are failing a class that young there is something seriously wrong going on with the child which needs to be addressed ASAP or there is something wrong with the teacher. (I'll also add that it could be something wrong with the pedagogy if the majority of the grade is determined by homework assignments but I still think that falls in the category of something going on with the child)

Aloha 8y ago
I think some feedback system is important, you need a mechanism to let the parents know Johnny is struggling and need something to help them. That said, letter grades are useless to gradeschoolers (K-5).
- notus 8y ago
  I think if the feedback was more along the lines of the teacher getting in touch with the parent to discuss decline in performance or something it might go better for the child. There is something just really indifferent and also ambiguous about letter grades and more specifically the Unsatisfactory/Satisfactory/Outstanding rating system for younger children. I believe the age range they measured was children 5-11 so pretty young in this context.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Letter grades are largely useless as an educational tool, even in high school – they provide delayed, coarse, not very actionable feedback, while inflicting a lot of unnecessary emotional stress/pain which directly interferes with learning. The real purpose of letter grades is largely bureaucratic and they are designed for the convenience of teachers and school administrators. What they are good for is sorting and labeling the students, though as a side effect they are also quite effective at directing student effort toward gaming them rather than caring about the quality of their work. My primary school eschewed grades in favor of detailed written progress reports. These took a whole lot more work for the teachers to prepare, but were much more valuable. (In particular, knowing that they would need to write them caused teachers to pay attention to the progress of every student and take notes about it on a regular basis.)

Kuzutsukake 8y ago

I'm thinking report cards released on Friday increase parent-child interaction across the board, both good and bad;that a child is more likely to be encouraged for good grades, disciplined for bad ones, or simply asked how their day was.

1000units 8y ago

Offering incentives for the poor to not breed would have a huge impact. Currently we do the opposite.

matte_black 8y ago
We need to do a better job of providing subsidized birth control. Half the kids in school these days have no reason to exist given their parents situation.

bordercases 8y ago

Weren't you a kid?

mberning 8y ago

This reminds me of ads they ran in the UK about domestic violence going up when a team lost a football match. I’m not sure what to make of it. Are we going to have an ad for any and every generic stressor in this life? If a report card or sporting event is enough to induce a physical beating there are some more serious problems going on. https://hyperallergic.com/450815/uk-national-centre-for-domestic-violence-world-cup-ads/ https://hyperallergic.com/450815/uk-national-centre-for-dome...

baq 8y ago
If there’s a fire, you don’t try to put it out with gasoline. The proposal makes perfect sense.

geofft 8y ago

> If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. I think that's starting from a mistaken premise. Why expect parents to cope? Parenting takes an amount of empathy and patience and care that many people simply do not have and will not have. In pre-modern society the nuclear family made sense, but at what point do we say, being someone's biological source gives you no particular right to control their life and the task of guarding and raising children should actually be given to those who can do so humanely? Why try to retrain inhumane parents instead of just not subjecting kids to them in the first place? If you look at the much bigger picture—children who are gay or trans, children who date outside their race, children born into cults or to antivaxxers, children born with disabilities that expect particularly uncommon levels of support from parents, etc. etc.—the problem is simply that we assue that your physiological ability to engage in tbe reproductive act means that you're fit to be a parent. There's zero reason to believe that.

ngcc_hk 8y ago
The nuclear family is born in industrial modern society. In city in fact. Remember the one to be jailed - it takes a village. No. Not sure in western society but in the old village (even to this day all those chinese has a village in their passport marked), you have a place where the punishment to be held. Come on. Treating kid well is a modern concept. Whilst I think parent could be and should be lovely. It is not so in history and around the world. So is not your social environment. If a minor deed like Friday the best no report card, please do.
- paradoxparalax 8y ago
  Just to clarify a bit here, when it reads "all those chinese has a village in their passport marked", you are probably talking about the Hukou system. Well, everyone in the world has his place of birth in his passport, but, ok, the Hukou system is more then that, but is at risk of being misunderstood here, It's primary reason of existence has nothing to do with punishments, note that physical punishment at schools is currently forbidden, hated and smashed and scorched by social media and news and by the majority of parents in China. The very Hukou system itself has it's Demise "announced" by the Chinese lawmakers for years now, they are handling the update of a huge Legacy society organization and citizen identification System update and this system has already suffered many minor cuts and shut-downs of collateral ancient, obsolete regulations. To add some anedacta: I was a guest of a certain facility for a couple months in China. Any kind of physical punishment by the enforcement or the crew or the guests themselves was impossible. dozen cameras 24 h a day, no milimeter out of the Written Law. And the law doesn't predict physical punishment there, besides of the Death Penalty, that is exactly the top of the scale of Ancient physical punishment, off course. :edit adding some bit to the anedacta, I was the only non-chinese there, among hundreds.

TravelTechGuy 8y ago

If that's the approach they're taking, why not just cancel the day Friday all together? Seriously, instead of finding and fighting the root causes of the problems, they treat the symptoms. Reminds me of the old Jewish folk tale/joke: when people in the town of Chelem complained to the city council that many people fall off the broken town's bridge, the council got together, deliberated for a week, and decided to build a new hospital under the bridge.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. And they strike their children because they can't cope? If they can't cope without striking their children, well, then, maybe they shouldn't have any. That'd be best for their children, and for the parents also. The children won't grow up damaged (and having learned that this is the way to raise children) and the parents won't have to experience such pressure that they absolutely have to strike someone to make it better.

ido 8y ago
Sometimes you find out too late.

_password 8y ago

Person 1: That miserable bastard shot 20 people. Person 2: Oh man, the problem is *guns!* Hint: maybe the problem is miserable bastards. Maybe the problem is people being driven to their breaking point, over and over again, by an increasingly brittle and rigid social order, to the point that psychotic plots are a highly visible statistical anomaly, that resonates with far too many people as a conclusion to draw from the circumstances they face.