6 ms·

At this point the evidence is pretty clear that is the case.. well maybe not "indoctrination" but for sure many many school systems do not share the value syst

by syshum 5y ago

At this point the evidence is pretty clear that is the case.. well maybe not "indoctrination" but for sure many many school systems do not share the value system of the parents sending their kids to the schools The question then becomes who's value system should "win", IMO it should be the parents, the parents should have the final say in their child's upbringing not the schools or "community".

thesuitonym 5y ago
I would rather my children go to a school that challenges our beliefs, because they may be wrong. I don't want the growing up parroting what I believe just because I believe it, they should come to their own conclusions.
- syshum 5y ago
  Good parents should do this, but from what I see this is not what is happening in modern schools. It was starting to change even when I was in public schools 30 years ago, and from what see it has only gotten worse. Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc. That is with out getting into any of the "culture war" topics
  - com2kid 5y ago
    > Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc. People have been saying this about schools since forever. FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority. One time we got new math books in that were horrible. Obvious errors everywhere. The teacher gave us extra credit for spending the day finding math errors in the book. 9th grade European History started off with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In 10th grade sex ed students got to vote on a movie. Nerds and Goths teamed up, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 3rd grade, a group of students opted stayed inside during recess and construct hot wheels courses (tracks and ramps) out of whatever classroom supplies we could find laying around. 10th grade parents day, my genetics teacher tricked parents into extracting frog sperm from a solution and playing with it. The students were nonplussed, we'd been working with DNA for quite a while by that time. 12th grade final report, I wrote a paper on the future of LED lighting, where I rewrired some incandescent flashlights into LED flashlights (obviously back before LED flashlights where a big thing). 8th grade final report, 30 page history of video games starting in 1970 and up until the mid 90s. 7th grade debate class, Rome VS Greece, on the side of Rome we argued that "Greece doesn't get to take credit for philosophers it had put to death." 8th grade math class, we just went and full on learned college level stats. 6th grade, I read the book Druids. For those not aware, it has sex in it. Quite as bit of sex in fact. Good bit of historical fiction though, I learned about the Romans invading England!
    - notriddle 5y ago
      > People have been saying this about schools since forever. It's been true since forever. > FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority. Those are the values that schoolteachers publicly espouse, but even if they want to live up to it, they can't. It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, and have to keep an overcrowded classroom from turning into a madhouse. > [the rest of the anecdotes] Yeah, I had cool teachers, too. It really doesn't take away from the extremely rigid structure of the environment. It helps make things bearable, but the best-learned lessons are the ones you experience, not the ones you read, and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do.
      - com2kid 5y ago
        > It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, IMHO we need to ditch the standardized tests. The more testing we add the worse education seems to get. Or rather, to rephrase that, the more tests we add the more homogenized education gets, which may very well be the point. Without teaching to the test, you have some teachers who don't do much teaching at all, and other teachings who do an amazing job teaching students 3x what the students would otherwise learn in a "normal" classroom. Teaching to a standardized tests ensures that everyone gets at least a basic education, but it also means some kids get a worse education. So that kind of sucks, but it may very well be a net positive measured in "number of gets who get at least a decent education." For society at large, we have to judge if it is worth giving some kids a 3x education and other kids a .5 education, or if we want everyone to get 1x education. Crappy choice honestly. > and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do. I never was much for "do what you're told". I do however support the idea that learning some things is just painful. The only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. The only way to get better at presenting is to present. The only way to get better at math is to solve equations. Practice does indeed make perfect. I would not be as good as presenting today if I hadn't been forced to do countless presentations in school, which I hated! Each and every one, I complained that they were a useless exercise and that we'd be better off studying from a book than listening to the poorly done presentation of our peers! But the presentations weren't so we could efficiently learn about the trials and tribulations of the Oregon trail, it was to make us learn how to prepare talking points, go through a topic in a reasonable manner, and speak clearly in front of a group. So, thanks teach. Thank you for making me do the thing that I really didn't want to do.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago
  I don't want school to teach my children anything about beliefs or what the teachers/admins believe. I want school to teach my child art and language and facts, and leave the beliefs to me.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    Serious question: do you feel that critical thinking is important and should be taught in schools? If so, consider how that itself is a "belief" that has at times been explicitly rejected by local political parties. In other words, there's no such thing as value-neutral education.
  - Inityx 5y ago
    "Facts can be effectively taught without incorporating beliefs" is a sentiment held by people egregiously unaware of their own biases
    - artificialLimbs 5y ago
      It's a good aim. It's not something you can necessarily encode in law.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Every environment teaches people implicit lessons about the people that create, run, and equally importantly populate the system. From my own experience in public school most of the life lessons on offer were kinda bad because the environment was defective and abusive and the people fucked up. The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.
    - artificialLimbs 5y ago
      It's true, but it's a good aim.
  - ertjaet 5y ago
    sure! facts like: - unfair power structures disproportionately harm those without power - including everyone in decisions about the allocation resources is an effective way to solve disparity - communities that form rules to govern themselves are more just and fair than communities where rules are formed by a minority
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Teaching children does not attract the best and brightest, to be blunt. Some teachers are fantastic despite the lack of incentive, many are not, and the situation seems to be getting worse. >they should come to their own conclusions And if the problem with schooling is a decreasing ability to generate exactly this, what then? Children, people in general should be presented with a diverse set of views and morals (and not just the loudest A vs. B near, but at a small distance from extremists). I took a philosophy class with undergraduates and a few of them were vocally rather upset when confronted with the fact that there wasn't just a "truth" that could be learned and for each topic there were several opposing views. Those students had experienced so little of that in their 20-odd years of life that being presented with it really bothered them.
- creato 5y ago
  Anyone banning legos in the name of equity values creativity and intuitive understanding of the interactions between physical objects less than their ability to brainwash their students, and thus has no business teaching children. The problem here isn’t challenging your beliefs, it’s blatant stupidity. My guess is the reality here is the legos were a source of conflict and so they got taken away. Just like many has occurred for probably since toys and children existed. Justifying it with an equity argument is just rage bait attention seeking.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- devwastaken 5y ago
  School does not challenge beliefs. It teaches you not to do that at all, and to respect inefficient unreasonable government systems. U.S. schools don't even teach your basic constitutional rights. They intentionally block that because if people knew their 5th amendment rights the vast majority of policing wouldn't work. Public education, like many government pet projects, attract warm bodies, inefficiency, because there is no incentive to be efficient. It's free money to them.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    We absolutely covered constitutional rights, covered civil rights, and several shitty parts of America's and the worlds history. I don't know how you could possibly believe that teachers just show up for coffee club and free money. Many people even most want to do a good job at whatever it is they are doing because they are intrinsically motivated. Those who choose education are doing a job that requires substantial investment in education and ultimately in working time to earn a modicum of money. In general people interested in those terms have a greater than average chance of being there because of giving a damn. Your analysis is shallow in the extreme.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      Hell, I was in High School during 9/11 and my principal lost her son in the explosion... Social studies that year heavily featured discussions on the US's involvement in the middle east, opposition to the russian occupation of Afganistan and the constitutional complications of a lot of the laws we saw coming out to fight terrorism. I think I got an absolutely wonderful education on US governmental systems that year - it was just dry Jeffersonian dialogs.
    - devwastaken 5y ago
      Teachers become teachers not out of passion for teaching but because it is the easiest path to go through if you follow the designed education system. Highschool pushes university hard, university pushes teaching, and teaching is a default path if you're scared of getting skills in anything else. I have met very few teachers whom have life experience outside of being a teacher, and it makes them mindless drones that, yes, collect a paycheck and hand out assignments from Pearson or some other company. Teachers are now largely unnecessary, COVID made everything done online. It turns out in person teachers are largely ineffective and replaced with a YouTube video. Schooling simply has not kept up, and the unions want it that way.
- dmonitor 5y ago
  I don't think the goal of these teachers is to challenge their beliefs, unless they start enforcing right wing libertarianism on the left leaning kids
solveit 5y ago
More to the point, the parents will win. They'll send their children somewhere else.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Not poor parents; they'll have no choice.
- Talanes 5y ago
  The town I grew up in was small enough you needed to be rich enough for boarding school to have a "somewhere else" to send them.
jeromegv 5y ago
What if the parents believe in god's creation of the universe and the science teachers want to teach evolution? Or vice-versa?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Quillbert182 5y ago
  This is slightly off-topic, but I would like to point out that the belief that God created the universe and belief in evolution are not mutually exclusive. I believe what you mean is Creationism, which is the belief that God placed everything exactly as it currently is and that creation will never change.
- syshum 5y ago
  You can list 100's of topic for which people will disagree with each other on how children should be educated. I still believe it should be in the parents corner. That is not to say the parents should direct what the schools teach on a individual level that is however to say I believe in 2 main principles for schools. First and foremost schools should be completely transparent, all parents should have access to copy's of every lesson plan, workbook, assignment, paper, etc. Second I believe in "Backpack" school funding, meaning funding for schools is not done on a geographic area, it is done by enrollment, and parent can choose to enroll their child in the public schools, or a private school or yes even a religious school at which point that school would get the funding for that student.
Layke1123 5y ago
As a child of parents who did no have my best interests at heart, I'm going to whole heartedly disagree. I learned much better how to be from school than I ever did my parents.
throw__away7391 5y ago
Even as someone who was put into an extremely strict religious school specifically to be indoctrinated with views that I now detest, and who generally takes a dim view of parents' knowledge and ability, I'm inclined to agree with this. I think there is significant value for children to share the value system of their parents while they are growing up, even if they later reject those values. Parents are more likely than teachers to have their children's best interests in mind.
majormajor 5y ago
In the places I've lived, those school systems have locally-elected folks running them. It should be an easy matter of local politics, not media hysteria and state-level laws... Or in the case of my own upbringing, my first ten years of school was at a school was run by a church and my parents had every opportunity to be aware of the church's beliefs. A decade or so later, they apologized for me, they told me they hadn't realized how extreme some of the religious aspects of the curriculum were, but had found out more slowly over the years... I don't understand how/why parents let themselves be suddenly surprised by things, seems like you should pay attention from day 1!

by syshum 5y ago

thesuitonym 5y ago

I would rather my children go to a school that challenges our beliefs, because they may be wrong. I don't want the growing up parroting what I believe just because I believe it, they should come to their own conclusions.

syshum 5y ago
Good parents should do this, but from what I see this is not what is happening in modern schools. It was starting to change even when I was in public schools 30 years ago, and from what see it has only gotten worse. Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc. That is with out getting into any of the "culture war" topics
- com2kid 5y ago
  > Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc. People have been saying this about schools since forever. FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority. One time we got new math books in that were horrible. Obvious errors everywhere. The teacher gave us extra credit for spending the day finding math errors in the book. 9th grade European History started off with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In 10th grade sex ed students got to vote on a movie. Nerds and Goths teamed up, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 3rd grade, a group of students opted stayed inside during recess and construct hot wheels courses (tracks and ramps) out of whatever classroom supplies we could find laying around. 10th grade parents day, my genetics teacher tricked parents into extracting frog sperm from a solution and playing with it. The students were nonplussed, we'd been working with DNA for quite a while by that time. 12th grade final report, I wrote a paper on the future of LED lighting, where I rewrired some incandescent flashlights into LED flashlights (obviously back before LED flashlights where a big thing). 8th grade final report, 30 page history of video games starting in 1970 and up until the mid 90s. 7th grade debate class, Rome VS Greece, on the side of Rome we argued that "Greece doesn't get to take credit for philosophers it had put to death." 8th grade math class, we just went and full on learned college level stats. 6th grade, I read the book Druids. For those not aware, it has sex in it. Quite as bit of sex in fact. Good bit of historical fiction though, I learned about the Romans invading England!
  - notriddle 5y ago
    > People have been saying this about schools since forever. It's been true since forever. > FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority. Those are the values that schoolteachers publicly espouse, but even if they want to live up to it, they can't. It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, and have to keep an overcrowded classroom from turning into a madhouse. > [the rest of the anecdotes] Yeah, I had cool teachers, too. It really doesn't take away from the extremely rigid structure of the environment. It helps make things bearable, but the best-learned lessons are the ones you experience, not the ones you read, and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do.
    - com2kid 5y ago
      > It's impossible in an environment where they have to train kids to perform standardized tests, IMHO we need to ditch the standardized tests. The more testing we add the worse education seems to get. Or rather, to rephrase that, the more tests we add the more homogenized education gets, which may very well be the point. Without teaching to the test, you have some teachers who don't do much teaching at all, and other teachings who do an amazing job teaching students 3x what the students would otherwise learn in a "normal" classroom. Teaching to a standardized tests ensures that everyone gets at least a basic education, but it also means some kids get a worse education. So that kind of sucks, but it may very well be a net positive measured in "number of gets who get at least a decent education." For society at large, we have to judge if it is worth giving some kids a 3x education and other kids a .5 education, or if we want everyone to get 1x education. Crappy choice honestly. > and what you learn in school is sitting in a desk, doing what you're told, giving your input only when prompted, and that the authority figure standing in front of you has to do things they don't want to do just like you do. I never was much for "do what you're told". I do however support the idea that learning some things is just painful. The only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. The only way to get better at presenting is to present. The only way to get better at math is to solve equations. Practice does indeed make perfect. I would not be as good as presenting today if I hadn't been forced to do countless presentations in school, which I hated! Each and every one, I complained that they were a useless exercise and that we'd be better off studying from a book than listening to the poorly done presentation of our peers! But the presentations weren't so we could efficiently learn about the trials and tribulations of the Oregon trail, it was to make us learn how to prepare talking points, go through a topic in a reasonable manner, and speak clearly in front of a group. So, thanks teach. Thank you for making me do the thing that I really didn't want to do.
artificialLimbs 5y ago
I don't want school to teach my children anything about beliefs or what the teachers/admins believe. I want school to teach my child art and language and facts, and leave the beliefs to me.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Serious question: do you feel that critical thinking is important and should be taught in schools? If so, consider how that itself is a "belief" that has at times been explicitly rejected by local political parties. In other words, there's no such thing as value-neutral education.
- Inityx 5y ago
  "Facts can be effectively taught without incorporating beliefs" is a sentiment held by people egregiously unaware of their own biases
  - artificialLimbs 5y ago
    It's a good aim. It's not something you can necessarily encode in law.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Every environment teaches people implicit lessons about the people that create, run, and equally importantly populate the system. From my own experience in public school most of the life lessons on offer were kinda bad because the environment was defective and abusive and the people fucked up. The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.
  - artificialLimbs 5y ago
    It's true, but it's a good aim.
- ertjaet 5y ago
  sure! facts like: - unfair power structures disproportionately harm those without power - including everyone in decisions about the allocation resources is an effective way to solve disparity - communities that form rules to govern themselves are more just and fair than communities where rules are formed by a minority
colechristensen 5y ago
Teaching children does not attract the best and brightest, to be blunt. Some teachers are fantastic despite the lack of incentive, many are not, and the situation seems to be getting worse. >they should come to their own conclusions And if the problem with schooling is a decreasing ability to generate exactly this, what then? Children, people in general should be presented with a diverse set of views and morals (and not just the loudest A vs. B near, but at a small distance from extremists). I took a philosophy class with undergraduates and a few of them were vocally rather upset when confronted with the fact that there wasn't just a "truth" that could be learned and for each topic there were several opposing views. Those students had experienced so little of that in their 20-odd years of life that being presented with it really bothered them.
creato 5y ago
Anyone banning legos in the name of equity values creativity and intuitive understanding of the interactions between physical objects less than their ability to brainwash their students, and thus has no business teaching children. The problem here isn’t challenging your beliefs, it’s blatant stupidity. My guess is the reality here is the legos were a source of conflict and so they got taken away. Just like many has occurred for probably since toys and children existed. Justifying it with an equity argument is just rage bait attention seeking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
devwastaken 5y ago
School does not challenge beliefs. It teaches you not to do that at all, and to respect inefficient unreasonable government systems. U.S. schools don't even teach your basic constitutional rights. They intentionally block that because if people knew their 5th amendment rights the vast majority of policing wouldn't work. Public education, like many government pet projects, attract warm bodies, inefficiency, because there is no incentive to be efficient. It's free money to them.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  We absolutely covered constitutional rights, covered civil rights, and several shitty parts of America's and the worlds history. I don't know how you could possibly believe that teachers just show up for coffee club and free money. Many people even most want to do a good job at whatever it is they are doing because they are intrinsically motivated. Those who choose education are doing a job that requires substantial investment in education and ultimately in working time to earn a modicum of money. In general people interested in those terms have a greater than average chance of being there because of giving a damn. Your analysis is shallow in the extreme.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Hell, I was in High School during 9/11 and my principal lost her son in the explosion... Social studies that year heavily featured discussions on the US's involvement in the middle east, opposition to the russian occupation of Afganistan and the constitutional complications of a lot of the laws we saw coming out to fight terrorism. I think I got an absolutely wonderful education on US governmental systems that year - it was just dry Jeffersonian dialogs.
  - devwastaken 5y ago
    Teachers become teachers not out of passion for teaching but because it is the easiest path to go through if you follow the designed education system. Highschool pushes university hard, university pushes teaching, and teaching is a default path if you're scared of getting skills in anything else. I have met very few teachers whom have life experience outside of being a teacher, and it makes them mindless drones that, yes, collect a paycheck and hand out assignments from Pearson or some other company. Teachers are now largely unnecessary, COVID made everything done online. It turns out in person teachers are largely ineffective and replaced with a YouTube video. Schooling simply has not kept up, and the unions want it that way.
dmonitor 5y ago
I don't think the goal of these teachers is to challenge their beliefs, unless they start enforcing right wing libertarianism on the left leaning kids

solveit 5y ago

More to the point, the parents will win. They'll send their children somewhere else.

akvadrako 5y ago
Not poor parents; they'll have no choice.
Talanes 5y ago
The town I grew up in was small enough you needed to be rich enough for boarding school to have a "somewhere else" to send them.

jeromegv 5y ago

What if the parents believe in god's creation of the universe and the science teachers want to teach evolution? Or vice-versa?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Quillbert182 5y ago
This is slightly off-topic, but I would like to point out that the belief that God created the universe and belief in evolution are not mutually exclusive. I believe what you mean is Creationism, which is the belief that God placed everything exactly as it currently is and that creation will never change.
syshum 5y ago
You can list 100's of topic for which people will disagree with each other on how children should be educated. I still believe it should be in the parents corner. That is not to say the parents should direct what the schools teach on a individual level that is however to say I believe in 2 main principles for schools. First and foremost schools should be completely transparent, all parents should have access to copy's of every lesson plan, workbook, assignment, paper, etc. Second I believe in "Backpack" school funding, meaning funding for schools is not done on a geographic area, it is done by enrollment, and parent can choose to enroll their child in the public schools, or a private school or yes even a religious school at which point that school would get the funding for that student.

Layke1123 5y ago

As a child of parents who did no have my best interests at heart, I'm going to whole heartedly disagree. I learned much better how to be from school than I ever did my parents.

throw__away7391 5y ago

Even as someone who was put into an extremely strict religious school specifically to be indoctrinated with views that I now detest, and who generally takes a dim view of parents' knowledge and ability, I'm inclined to agree with this. I think there is significant value for children to share the value system of their parents while they are growing up, even if they later reject those values. Parents are more likely than teachers to have their children's best interests in mind.

majormajor 5y ago

In the places I've lived, those school systems have locally-elected folks running them. It should be an easy matter of local politics, not media hysteria and state-level laws... Or in the case of my own upbringing, my first ten years of school was at a school was run by a church and my parents had every opportunity to be aware of the church's beliefs. A decade or so later, they apologized for me, they told me they hadn't realized how extreme some of the religious aspects of the curriculum were, but had found out more slowly over the years... I don't understand how/why parents let themselves be suddenly surprised by things, seems like you should pay attention from day 1!