I cannot over emphasize the importance I place on this section. It is the most individual issue each person experiences, and the basis of all things an individual will percieve and build of the life and relationships they encounter throughout their days. I am well aware of the unwise nature of depicting a national institution as obsolete and beyond reform; especially in provocative, even mildly shocking language. It is the nature of this work to express my perceptions concisely, not wasteing time or words to dilute my thought or soften its expression, if doing so creates false perception in my readers minds.
Miss Peach Teacher/Apprentice: Blurred Distinctions
Learning is a task of a lifetime if we see it as such. There is a window in our lives when learning is completely natural and easy. As our brain develops by the stimulation of learning from infancy to early adulthood learning is physically part of our brain’s formation. We are only limited by the form our education takes.
Our system of primary through college education in the United States is an obsolete structure, serving primarily to baby sit the nations children until they can be charged a fortune to attend their choice of credential mills. We waste vast amounts on the antiquated industrial model of education we have evolved; when the understanding and ability exists to impart a vastly superior education to all at a cost that is comparatively nil. Viewed objectively, how can expecting all young people of the same age to learn the same thing at the same time by a curriculum that is set and approved by crackpots and politicians be seen as even possible?
The role of teachers as authority figures in today’s common culture is a laughing stock. The adversarial nature of a teacher leading a class of 20-30 or more students in subjects isolated from their function in the world is not relevant to today’s young students. Any valuable learning imparted in today’s schools is eclipsed by the torrent of popular culture’s almost-knowledge that sparks the illusion of experience and makes school feel to them as a waste of their time.
We hold that to find a good job an applicant must have certain credentials to be hired for any given position in academia, government, finance or business. As is an unqualified person cannot pay and receive any credentials; or a very qualified person without credentials could not fill a position perfectly well. In either case the truth is soon evident. A person without credentials is simply shown the door, while one with paid credentials is often shifted from place to place hoping he will fit in or resign. This structure of credentials is a remnant of a time when an education was more isolated from a society that was forced to work and scrape to earn a daily living. Only with tremendous dedication and labor could an ordinary person attend night classes over years to attain a college credential. Unless themselves the legacy of a wealthy family, or recipient of some sort of scholarship.
The entire purpose of education in the United States, from kindergarten to graduate school is to spend huge amounts of money to support a crumbling bureaucracy which cannot provide any education at all that a student cannot find for herself for practically nothing. In fact she could be better educated without any monetized school. The first consideration parents should have is do they want their students babysat or do they want them educated? Unless the parents directly participate in and insist that their student be educated, it is unlikely this will take place in today’s public schools. Valuable years in which their children may learn advanced and complex subjects easily and with little effort are wasted texting each other about their boredom.
School curriculum is misguided in not recognizing the great mental capacity of young person’s minds. It isolates subjects arbitrarily so that it is difficult for children to see their relevance to the world. Any group of flat-earth zealots who organize to influence politicians in one or two major textbook markets can force the texts to be oblique or simply wrong about important subjects. It is only slightly mysterious why students still have textbooks at all, with portable reader devices available for a fraction of the cost of their books. It is partly because so many pocket paychecks from the present system of printing, distributing, selling and reselling them. Make no mistake though, a part of the reason for printed textbooks of great expense is political; so that special interests can exert pressure (contributions) to censor and otherwise control their content. If text content publishers could compose, edit, deliver and revise their product digitally it will become both vastly more useful and cheaper for students and more profitable for publishers. The power politicians and third parties have over content derives solely from the great cost of buying and handling physical printed textbooks.
In considering the structure of public schools one is dismayed to follow how the money is spent. Administrators earn enormous salaries, and then must justify them in some document-able way. So they institute ineffective measures that complicate the tasks of teachers, wasting their precious time and creating busy work that does not benefit the students at all. The teachers are exhausted and frustrated by wasted efforts; and their student’s sense this resentment and mistakenly feel it is directed at them. This causes ill feeling towards the teachers and is the source of much bad behavior. The concept of Charter Schools has merit, but in practice they are required to be essentially the same as regular public schools. So effectively they are only a monetary shell game. Any type of innovation must always be only slightly incremental.
Learning is a physical process of the combination of what is in our brain and what is coming in next. One’s attitude towards learning is almost entirely the function of one’s past experience with the process. In infancy it is entirely a matter of growing synapses reacting to exterior stimuli. This start continues naturally forming a neurological network as a basis for all future thought and learning.
Unfortunately for far too many persons, their experience with learning in school is so negative that they resolve to never pick up a book again. By steeping in popular culture, avoiding any sort of challenging or complex thoughts, they become fully occupied with earning a living, and have no time to investigate or authenticate the news bytes that convey to them all their information about the world around them. Once our cerebral cortex is fully formed we lose much of the resilience that allows us to learn so effortlessly in youth. This is not to say learning is always very difficult or impossible for persons after this point, but if we do not work at it continuously it becomes more and more laborious to learn new things.
The words learning and fun could be, should be, and in fact are interchangeable if the fun is not murdered in the process of our schooling. Young persons want to learn and be entertained doing so. This is a perfectly reasonable on their part, but under our present political education structures the idea is preposterous. The way of our future educational salvation is to shift the responsibilities from inequitable taxpayer schemes and political whims to the parents and students themselves.
The age groupings of elementary students are essentially valid, and young children tend to do well in larger classes with a firm structure. However they are capable of being much more challenged, especially in subjects including mathematics and languages. These students may be immersed in complex subjects, and their brain chemistry allows them to take in a great deal more information than they are yet able to express. Being exposed to strong structure of English and other languages make physical changes in young brains that prepare them for more easy learning in years to come. Standardized testing as is common in our schools is not useful at this stage of development. More useful are games, contests and tournaments treated as low stakes, where all students are praised for participating. Of course there are winners that are rewarded and winning is made attractive, but made a natural thing any student may achieve.
Middle school age students really almost have no business in a classroom at all. Their young growing bodies are exploding inside of them, and their brains are producing new cells so quickly that most will die off for lack of use. Their emerging hormones drive their energies almost exclusively to socialization. All this makes it torture for them to sit in a classroom for long hours and concentrate on static subjects taught at a snail’s pace. Social pressures to conform or suffer ridicule retard teaching efforts. Teaching these students is certainly possible, but methods of a sort of guerilla nature may prove most effective. Structured activities that allow movement and preoccupation open the way to convey surprisingly complex information that students can absorb nearly effortlessly, if such is not immediately apparent. It is a mistake of conventional schooling to teach and test in linier fashion. In the best of conditions we must have space to process data of new and complex nature.
Many difficulties students experience in high school are the result of deficits in areas described above. Without the natural neural networks that can but largely are not formed in early life, and useful socialization naturally acquired in middle school, students founder in high school grades were they should be learning to function and socialize as adults. Instead high schools are filled with students exhibiting adolescent behavior and requiring remedial teaching. The capacity of the majority of still capable students to be well educated in this system is diminished by the distraction and the many resources spent correcting the poor behavior of students unprepared for an education.
