OUR OPINION: From K-12 to K-16
September 20, 2010 at 9:30 pm in Grand Forks Herald
it’s time to ‘bridge the gap’ or ‘tear down the wall’ that separates the K-12 and higher education systems. Continue Reading
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Maybe if educators would just focus on mastering the basics instead of all the extras we wouldn’t have this problem.
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Umm..as an educator, I tend to agree with you. Herein lies the dilemma–what shall we do about the pressing social needs that kids come with that get worse every five years? Said it before, I’ll say it again: It’s not education that is broken–it is society.
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Parents need to take charge of their children’s education and not leave it up to strangers, to government officials to raise and give their children what they need to survive.
Parents should shut off the screens in the house, better yet, throw them out. Read like crazy all the time. Play guitar and sing with your kids, and other instruments. Without screens in the house, suddenly everything becomes a learning, and fun thing. Just cooking together in the kitchen you’ll pick up math. fractions when cutting pie and pizza and so on.
theteachingcompany.com has fantastic videos without all those tests and worksheets that has nothing to do with good learning and just teaches your kid their either dumb or smart wich in my mind is abuse. Yes, government schools abuse your kids. There are private music lessons you can give your kids. Take your kids to the museum. And so much more. Take charge of your kids who you love so much and let them get a real education out side of boring, abusive schools.
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While I don’t think schools are abusive, they ARE mostly a one-size-fits-all approach; and were never meant to replace good parenting. But I think the problem goes much deeper: The middle class is falling behind. So, It takes two wage earners just to make ends meet, leaving less less time for parenting during kids’ formative years. That doesn’t leave parents off the hook, but it does offer a possible explanation.
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More money needs to be spent on education. Not necessarily higher salaries but more teachers to lower class size. The U.S. ranks about 16th in expenditures. It’s only 1st if you include post-secondary spending.
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Read,
“Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto
“The Teenage Liberation Handbook” by Grace Llewellyn
Go to:
http://www.freedomofeducation.net
allianceofseparationofschoolandstate.com
It only takes a peson a hundred hours to learn to read, but it has to happen when they are ready, not when the govenment tells you they’re ready.
Government factory modeled schools are about control, control of the masses and social engineering.
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YNTBE, I’ve read Gatto long ago & have even met & spoken with him. He is right but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to spend more on education, i.e. more teachers to lower class size. Schools are too large & their industrial model is bad but that is not the the teachers fault. Citizens are the funders of education (property taxes) but don’t see the need to spend more money on them because the corporate state propagandizes them about bad public ed. to avoid paying property taxes on their huge corporate campuses.
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North Dakota is #1 in the nation in the number of people working more than one job to make ends meet. A growing number of households are working 2-3 jobs on top of parenting. My point: modern parenting is tough enough without nameless, faceless posters telling us we’re doing it wrong. Simple solutions come from simple minds. To the topic at hand: I would rather see more attention paid to co-curricular and elective classes than to continue to cultivate the “every child must go to college” mantra. Rather than expanding to a K-16 (who graduates in four years anymore) concept, let’s take a closer look at what’s offered in 9-12.
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I have no respect for parents who leave their children’s education up to strangers and the government. Parents don’t even care what happens to their kids in institutional schools. Its just free daycare to them.
I would never turn my children over to the government to be raised for twelve years.
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Free daycare? You mean they don’t pay for it with their property taxes? BTW, YNTBE, you are the govt. and you elect a schoolboard, could be you in fact if you got involved instead of just sitting typing away & complaining. Only 7% of a schools funding comes from the Fed. You have local control over your schoolboard so use it.
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I find it offensive when people don’t get involved in their children’s education and then blame the “system” or “government” for failing our kids. Guess what? We ARE the government.
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Guess what Scott B.S., you can put your kid in school, and they’ll put them in a slow readers group which tells you and your kid they are dumb. This was done to me, and siblings. Guess what? None of us are dumb. But it took us a long time to get that out of our heads after the schools shredded us in everyway possible, a kind of thought rape. Several of us went on to college as older adults and graduated. Several of us went on to start business’s and become successful. But it was no thanks to government schools. If as you say, we are the government, then here I am Scott B.S., practicing my freedom of speech and telling everyone not to trust the government with their kids. Its a mistake your kids might not survive in one form or another.
“I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.”–Winston Churchill
“Almost all education has a political motive; it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.”–Bertrand Russell
“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”–Steven Biko
“My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.”–Margaret Mead, anthropologist
Please check out
http://www.freedomofeducation.net
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Spearman, the government, the school board you’re referring to, wouldn’t like it if I went in there and told them this is all bogus and we need to shut these prison school institutions down and let parents take care of their own. Its the law, its compulsory that you have to send your kids to school, and you are forced to pay for institutions you don’t believe in, even if you choose to homeschool. And its not right. It should not be law that your child has to go to school, anymore than government dictates if you want a religion or not. I would argue its even more important to have separation of school and state, than it is to have separation of church and state.
http://www.freedomofeducation.net
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YNTBE, You had a bad experience I guess. Maybe if the U.S. spent more on education your education may have been better suited to your needs, i.e. smaller classes for starters and then like in Japan teachers with less time in classrooms so they have time to correct student work. European and Japanese teachers can’t believe how hard American teachers have to work. Foreign teachers don’t take work home to correct because they are given time during the work day to do it. That means more teachers are needed to cover all the classes and the classes are also smaller which also costs more too. They’re federal budgets so it is easier to legislate the costs to be covered. In the U.S. each school district only spends what local property taxes can bear so we end up with economies of scale to make it cheaper.
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How bout Spearman, we save everyone the money, and homeschool.
Its how it was the first hundred, hundred fifty years in this country, and it was the greatest time ever in the U.S. The freest time.
Everyone I know had a bad time in school, and more money will never make it better. Its designed to do exactly what it was meant to do, school is already perfect.
Read, “Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto
“Teenage Liberation Handbook” by Grace Llewellyn.
http://www.allianceforseparationofschoolandstate.com
http://www.freedomofeducation.net
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Let’s see now YNTBE, If a parent has to give up their $30-40k job to stay at home to home school it seems the cost would be greater than the $10,000 per pupil that it costs in the public school. Did you do the math or do you know something we don’t?
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You go ahead Spearman, send your kids to school. If your daughter isn’t wearing a hajib, she may be grabbed in the privates by the Islamic boys, and no one will do anything about it.
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