11 things really wrong with public school

Would you let a child TRY school . . . if they want to?

 No.

In my opinion school is not benign. 

The school system is actively damaging, particularly to children's self-esteem and natural confidence in the intrinsic rewards of learning.

If a supervisor could accompany the kids to school the whole time they were 'trying,' it might be possible for a child to have an experience that was neutral, or even educational. 

But alone in that self-referential, detrimental system... no. 

When they're very young, absolutely no. When they're young teens, at a time when they're going through major brain development and having a hard time even driving their usual lives with balance and ease, also definitely no. 

What if the child could handle it?

While it might be possible, sometimes, for a stable, confident child to deftly handle some of what happens within that system --a direct conflict, say. 

But how many a day? Two before the bell, 2 before lunchtime, 3 more during lunch and 3 in the afternoon? Let's pretend there won't be more after the bell in the hallways or on the grounds...just because it's an easy day.

Because then there is All Of The Rest. Most of which is never handled, never addressed at all as it is, within the system, seen as normal. All kids when they first go into the system (at any age, even if that's before they're able to speak) have to figure out what to do about all of that: 

Do they stand up to the teacher about the bullying? Every single instance of it, or is there some scale of 'that's not bad enough to comment on'? What about the sexual assault? What about the child who is utterly ignored? What about the one getting a disproportion of the school's or teacher's attention, whether because of higher needs or just worse behaviour? What do they do about the kids who are left to flail, or sit dully until their aid comes back tomorrow? Nothing? Anything?

What about the lack of respect for the humanity, body wisdom and personal pace of everyone except the strongest willed and most confident? 

It was not lost on me while I was in the system that I, alone, was allowed to wander the halls during class time, get up and leave a lecture while the teacher was speaking (without a murmur of reproach) or completely fail to hand in any portion of an assignment without it negatively affecting my grade. 

Somehow, I managed to import a sense that 'Linda's doing something else that's important' into teacher's heads --or I was far more trouble to deal with than I was worth-- or both, so I was respected (or at least not stomped on) when I felt the need to move around, or believed I knew enough about this subject already, or whatever provoked me to routinely leave the classroom to do important Linda things, like having a smoke. I was marked present for classes I spent at the orthodontist.

11 Real Things Really Wrong with Public School

1. The teacher being repeatedly distracted from teaching by kids' needs, and by conflicts among the children, a simple function of being vastly outnumbered
2. The quiet, seat-to-seat nastiness that the teacher sees but doesn't address (because: outnumbered)
3. All of what the teacher doesn't see (still outnumbered)
4. What we all know happens to kids who point out (tattling / ratting) what the teacher didn't see (because snitches are also outnumbered)
5. The teachers who are bullies, from tactics used to control the classroom (outnumbered) to what happens to kids the teacher doesn't like or whose parents demand better care of their children 
6. The casual violence in the halls and grounds
7. The tremendous energy used resisting the system: being late, devaluing intelligence and high marks, forgetting (homework, instructions, what the teacher just said,)  talking back and refusal to comply
8. The basic lack of civility and respect toward (and, consequently, among) the children
9. The errors in textbooks and answer keys, and outdated information kids can easily check on their phones (and what happens to children who correct teachers in public)
10. Teachers who hate kids, their jobs, or the subjects they teach
11. The clowning, distractions and utter disrespect for the teachers and material taught

Read Michael 1952's story at https://bit.ly/2zuUZYP

All of this, without even talking about the pace, quality or composition of the curriculum, or its relevance in today's world (much less the world 20 years from today), the subjectiveness of grading, the unnecessarily contrived competition, the propaganda, the unnecessary-yet-intentional age-segregation, and the sexism inherent in the system.

Why not let a child try school, if the child wants to? 

Because school is not a benign environment, and few adults who lived through it understand the ramifications of even a short indoctrination into that system, for kids who have never had to live it.

No Touching–a desert of affection

 

Seriously.

Have you read about this? A ban on touching (from roughhousing to holding hands, all inclusive) in an elementary school in British Columbia once again proves just how thoroughly out of touch with reality –and basic human needs—too many people working in the school system are.

In his seminal work, Touching, the Human Significance of Skin, Ashley Montague provides decades of scientific research on the benefits of touching and the strange world of what happens to human beings (and, cruelly, monkeys) in the absence of physical affection. Published in 1986, surely at least one person working in the school system, who has studied anything to do with what human offspring need to thrive, has encountered at least the foundation research?

What happens to people when they’re banned from social physical contact has been well-established . . . .

Already living without the most important people in their world, for most of their waking day, now children are not allowed to do the most human of all social activities: bond emotionally with others.

As if the behaviour problems in schools were not already bad enough, with children needing (and not getting) a strong sense of stability and security, with children needing (and not being allowed) to eat when they’re hungry or have silence when they’re overwhelmed or social contact when it’s inconvenient for the teachers, now they’re not allowed to touch a friend… at all.

What cruel world of impersonal body segregation are we working toward, here?

Hey, hang on! Isn’t school supposed to be where kids go to learn to be ‘properly socialized’?!?

Why Not 'Let' A Child 'Try' School ... if the child wants to?

Because, in my opinion, school is not benign. School are actively damaging, particularly (but not solely) to self-esteem and natural confidence in the intrinsic rewards of learning.

If I could accompany my kids to school the whole time they were 'trying' it, I think it might be possible at all to have them experience that in a way that was neutral or even educational. But left alone in that overwhelmingly persistent and pervasively indoctrinated system... particularly at a time when they're going through major brain development and having a hard time even driving their usual lives with balance and ease. 

Going into that system alone might make it so that some of what happens there is handled beautifully --a direct conflict, say. But then there is All Of The Rest. Most of which is never handled, never addressed and is very rapidly seen as 'normal.' Or perhaps 'inevitable.'

• The seat-to-seat nastiness that the teacher sees but doesn't address (because, really, who has time, and they're sitting quietly). 
• Or all of what the teacher doesn't see. 
• There is the teacher-down bullying that is directed at the kids the teacher doesn't like (which is no biggie for the kids who are likeable...unless they're sensitive to the struggles of others).
• There is the casual and ongoing violence in the halls and grounds. 
• The tremendous energy of resistance to the system itself that is sometimes just 'forgetting' and inertia, but is often outright rebellion --where does that observation go? 
• The basic lack of civility which (it has been my observation) homeschoolers are used to and expect --how to handle that, how to see it without it affecting the collective of 'this is how I behave in the world' a child's already gained. 
• What to do about the errors in the textbook the teacher is marking based on the incorrect answer key? 
• How to approach the subject that's being taught by the teacher who doesn't understand it or visibly dislikes it?
• What about the clowning, distractions and utter disrespect for the teacher --notably more pronounced when teachers are insecure or incompetent? Do we sit quietly while the struggling teacher is being tormented? Do we laugh? Do we try to moderate it? Model more respectful approaches?

Do you stand up to the teacher about the bullying seen but not addressed? Every single instance of it or is there some scale of 'that's not bad enough to comment on'? What about the sexual assault? What about the child who is utterly ignored? What about the one getting a disproportion of the school's or teacher's attention? What do we do about the kids who are left to flail about, or sit dully until their aid comes back tomorrow? Nothing? Anything?

What about the lack of respect for the humanity, body wisdom and personal pace of everyone except the strongest willed and most confident? 

It was not lost on me in the system that affected me deeply, and for years, that I alone was allowed to wander the halls during class time, get up and leave a lecture while the teacher was speaking (without a murmur of reproach) or completely fail to hand in any portion of an assignment without it negatively affecting my grade. Somehow, I managed to import a sense that 'Linda's doing something else that's important' into teacher's heads --or I was far more trouble to deal with than I was worth-- or both, so I was respected (or at least not stomped on) when I felt the need to move around, or believed I knew enough about this subject already, or whatever provoked me to routinely leave the classroom and, say, go have a smoke. I was marked present for classes I spent at the orthodontist.


All of this, without even talking about the quality or composition of the curriuculum, its relevance in today's world, the subjectiveness of grading, the pervasive and contrived competition, the propaganda, the age-segregation and sexism inherent in the system.

Why not let a child try school, if the child wants to? Because school is not benign environment, and few adults understand the ramifications of even a short indoctrination into that system.

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photo Classroom Panorama by grampymoose, used with permission (Creative Commons, attrib/share alike)

Dated and Irrelevant Schools: Sundaes Made of Meatballs

Editor's Note: This post contains affiliate links. Linda Clement only ever shares links to books she has read and believes are of value. No authors have been harmed in the sharing of these recommendations...

A talented marketing writer, possibly named Seth...something... Rogen is probably not right... 

oh, it's Godin-- wrote a book called Meatball Sundaes, a work about marketing in the new reality of social networks, the 'long tail', and the loss of the ability of major corporations mass-marketing not-very-well-made 'necessities' to the bulge in the middle of the market. 

Essentially this was done, in 1951, by dressing up meatballs to make them look 'special' -- make a sundae with them, because chocolate sauce and whipped cream and a pretty little cherry will make them look better and then they'll not be boring old meatballs anymore...

What has this got to do with anything?

Further to the last idea (schools can --or even should-- hold back the tide of technological advancement), school systems and their conventional supporters (everyone from governments happy about the idea of installing propaganda into the majority of minors' heads, to parents happy to have someone else responsible for the poor output at 18) are locked to into the same crisis-creating past-attached disastrous thinking that got GM, Chrysler, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Ford where they are today:

the world is changing but we are right-- our past tactics succeeded because we 

are right and the changes that have happened in the world are anomalies that we

are confident won't last, don't matter and can't affect us because we are too 

big, too right and successful because of divine right and the correct way of the 

world. This is a temporary set-back caused by a minor misalignment of unrelated 

and ultimately irrelevant stars.

Haha ha.

So... my point is that school systems operate on the cusp of

we do things the right, natural, necessary and modern way

arguing that they serve the real needs of the future adults they teach while dismissing technological and economical advances as if they don't matter at all --not to them, not to the system, not to the children, not to the adults those children will become and not to society.

Because embracing emerging technology is expensive and the schools already own all the obsolete technology, they feel secure and the simple position: we need not adapt. Now that 'knowing' is irrelevant in the face of 'finding out' and fact-gathering is the job of

webcrawlers, not people, it becomes more and more ridiculous to 'teach' facts and insist on kids--or anyone--not using the readily-available tools to answer the questions.

The 'regurgitate what I told you' form of education was poor and flawed half a century ago. Today it is not just poor and flawed, it's irrelevant.

When a system is faced with a massive advance in cheap, portable technology, readily available to the average 10 year old, it has two choices: adapt to the technology or go to war with reality. It's sad to watch a whole system engage in a fruitless war when Sun Tzu,

a thousand years ago, knew that the dumbest war to engage in is the one that cannot be won. 

No system in the history of the world has won the fight against reality. 

As my mum quips: mother nature rolls last. 

If the school system was a tyrant, it could have foreseen the troubles it would have with cell phones and stopped them becoming widely available. 

As much as the system and the people in it would like to be The Tyrant, that is not the way of the world --even if it seems, from here, that once it was.

It isn't. Now:

adapt or suffer

Does it seem ironic to anyone other than me that it is the most educated, the most expert on learning, who cannot conceive of a successful way to use the advances of cellphones to enhance the education, to incorporate them the way books have been, the way inexpensive paper has been, the way large numbers of same-age students have been, the way video, public address systems and even computers have been? 

It amazes me that no one in the system sees the technology as a wonder, a marvel--a boon to the potential of engaging students. Nope... it's all meatball sundaes: 
we did it right in 1951 and that right way will remain right for all time because we have this big system already in place, that's why.

Jammin' Cellphones, Schools Prove They are Lost in the Past

Am I the only dinosaur who remembers calculators being confiscated in classrooms? 

The controversy over a cell phone jammer at a Vancouver Island school reminds me once again about how fantastically-long it takes the school system to adapt to reality.

An utterly-convinced teacher told me, "you won't always have access to a calculator," which, in the age of solar cells and microchips, sounds like he'd never made it out of the era of slide rules. 

I've seen a slide rule. At an auction. 

My mom had to learn how to use one. My kids can't guess what field the term applies to... maybe playground design?

And so we move on...

With nano-technology coming -- soon-- it seems to me the schools (and the people in them) can use the upcoming years to see if they can catch up to Y2K, so maybe by the time the internet is accessible by blinking or something at least they can deal with a cell phone the size of a deck of cards.

One day in the not-to-distant-past, it will become possible for students to access more-information in 5 minutes than the school library can hold, on a piece of hardware that can be readily concealed in a bikini. 

The idea that the people in a school should live as-if this is not the every day reality at life is.. naive. Do I mean 'naive'? Maybe I mean 'ludicrous'? Or 'massively delusional'?

The idea that the school system can hold back the tide is... pervasive.