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One of the biggest source of bad ideas in education is that people think it would be better if it catered to the kind of person they thought they were when they

by wisty 5y ago

One of the biggest source of bad ideas in education is that people think it would be better if it catered to the kind of person they thought they were when they went to school. "Imagine if, instead of wasting time on phonics, we inspired white upper middle class students like myself by giving them real literature!" "Imagine if they inspired students with the kind of problems I think I would have found interesting!" "Imagine if they taught to my learning style" (learning styles are mostly bunk, but everyone thinks they would have done better if only the teacher catered to them better). "Imagine if a class of 20+ kids who are forced to be there was managed the way a team of 5 adult professionals was managed!"

DarylZero 5y ago
It's not just a "kind of person" who wants personal relevance to what they're learning. It's human nature for learning to take place naturally and effortlessly when there is a felt purpose and relevance. For all humans. The problem with this in schools, is that you can't actually generate this sense of purpose (which is a feeling, emotional) for arbitrary subject-student pairings. What do when it fails? The strategy is, they TRY to generate the sense of purpose (maybe not try that hard, after years of failure and burnout), but fall back to the emotion of fear as primary coordinator/motivator for everything. They make students afraid to look stupid in the short term, and afraid of an abstract "bad future" ("flipping burgers") in the long term. They introduce the system of grades for 3 whole years of middle school, when the grades serve no purpose (they're not used by colleges) but to generate the fear-based emotional economy of the school. Fear is the primary emotional mechanism of the school. For every kind of person, this is worse educationally than felt purposeful engagement.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
I was taught stuff at Primary School which I then got taught at Secondary school. Admittedly I moved around due to parents jobs but you could not get a consistence curriculum in the UK. AQA the main exam board was setup because private schools sat their pupils with exams from the easiest exam boards unlike state schools who just went with exam boards that suited them. From an employers perspective, a private school pupil with an A was like a state school C, but that's the sort of privilege having money can buy you and is perhaps why Uni's and some employers here in the UK are now waking up too. The class system in the UK is a very repressive system of control that infects every aspect of life to the detriment of the UK and the wider world.

by wisty 5y ago

DarylZero 5y ago

It's not just a "kind of person" who wants personal relevance to what they're learning. It's human nature for learning to take place naturally and effortlessly when there is a felt purpose and relevance. For all humans. The problem with this in schools, is that you can't actually generate this sense of purpose (which is a feeling, emotional) for arbitrary subject-student pairings. What do when it fails? The strategy is, they TRY to generate the sense of purpose (maybe not try that hard, after years of failure and burnout), but fall back to the emotion of fear as primary coordinator/motivator for everything. They make students afraid to look stupid in the short term, and afraid of an abstract "bad future" ("flipping burgers") in the long term. They introduce the system of grades for 3 whole years of middle school, when the grades serve no purpose (they're not used by colleges) but to generate the fear-based emotional economy of the school. Fear is the primary emotional mechanism of the school. For every kind of person, this is worse educationally than felt purposeful engagement.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

I was taught stuff at Primary School which I then got taught at Secondary school. Admittedly I moved around due to parents jobs but you could not get a consistence curriculum in the UK. AQA the main exam board was setup because private schools sat their pupils with exams from the easiest exam boards unlike state schools who just went with exam boards that suited them. From an employers perspective, a private school pupil with an A was like a state school C, but that's the sort of privilege having money can buy you and is perhaps why Uni's and some employers here in the UK are now waking up too. The class system in the UK is a very repressive system of control that infects every aspect of life to the detriment of the UK and the wider world.