There's so much potential in all of us, but we're still mired in this system that's satisfying fewer and fewer of our needs. I wonder what could be accomplished if adults were able to pursue their interests like those kids are. What kind of world would we have?

wouldn't have masters demanding obedience and we wouldn't have everything forced into a commercial moneymaking mode, that's the kind of world we would have. Which is exactly why we don't have this kind of education structure.

that they conclude their historical overview with "Common Core." What a rigid, stultifying method of teaching!

And, Sir Ken Robinson's TED videos should be required viewing for anyone who purports to 'educate' children.

We call it various names in the US. Discovery Learning or in my area of understanding Learning Cultures. People get sold on the point that students are taking responsibility for learning but this does not work in every atmosphere and not a one stop shop for all kids. In the Learning Cultures model of this exact same model, they except newcomer ELLs and SIFE students, to be able to take in high school level content in English. This doesn't work like that. I you are saying you would like to input this in with elementary students. Yes, but for all students, such as the population aforementioned, you are setting up kids for failure more than success. Since students massing the regents from the school I was in was 7% and in other cases 14% because we were told not to teach content or help students with their work. Allow them to fail in order to succeed was the idea. When time is a constraint on them. This model is not foolproof since I worked in the environment. Are there good things about it, yeah. In actuality there are great points. But there are also more harmful than positive for students success.

On a side note. I had lectures as a kid and I can tell you I think I turned out great. When I think back to my learning, the teachers facilitated the process of learning for me in order to develop my critical thinking skill. Further more a computer doesn't have all the answers and doesn't teach you to be reflective while a teacher does do that. Or should be.

Last edited Sun Oct 27, 2013, 12:54 PM - Edit history (1)

and what it's founded on has nothing to do with computers.

That's simply the difference between being an active or passive learner. It's not news that people learn better when they are actively engaged. Some choice in what they are learning, or how they are learning it, increases engagement.

We've known this for a very long time. When a "reform" movement is determined to destroy public education, we're not allowed to do what we know students most need. Allow me to explain the steps of the current "standards and accountability" movement:

1. Create very long lists of isolated standards, and assign them to cohorts of students based on grade/age. Do not allow teaching outside of those standards; hold teachers accountable for spending all of their instructional time on those standards alone.

2. Set up a high stakes testing program that, by design, will eventually cause all schools to fail.

3. When a school "fails," send in private companies to tell them how to teach, and which of your products they must use. That way you can get more of the public ed funds: as "experts" in staff development, non-educators telling teachers how to teach according to your method, and by selling your materials to be used to deliver curriculum.

4. Because part of the goal in destroying public education is to destroy the teaching profession, downgrading it to a bunch of low-paid babysitting clerks, the materials offered will be: scripted, for teachers to read aloud word by word to a passively listening audience, based on "direct instruction," and computerized, allowing larger numbers of students to sit in front of computers getting "direct instruction" on the screen.

5. The volume of criticism and blame heaped on teachers for "failure" gets louder and louder, the evaluation procedures get more and more punitive, and teachers aren't allowed to step outside the prescribed box. Ever.

6. If teachers aren't allowed to step outside that scripted box, how will students be able to?

Before the current standards and accountability "reform" movement, that bottom line, getting kids active and engaged in their own learning, was well known and part of what we did. In the current climate, we are, hypocritically told to get them engaged, and then the kinds of things that foster that engagement are proscribed.

It's not "new" or "radical." It's simply not allowed. Of course, many of us try to sneak outside that box when we think no one is looking, but it's risky. This isn't Mexico or the UK.

and make money off of them. I don't believe they really want most children to learn; they only need a special class of people to run things for them. It's dangerous for the average people to learn too much. I mean, if you're an oligarch, you're going to want to protect your position. Education for everyone would give them too much competition.

Capitalism is supposedly all about competition, but capitalism, if allowed to go on unhindered, leads to oligarchy, and competition isn't so good in the eyes of the oligarch. The goal is monopoly and ultimate control, not a continuation of competition. When you've won your final bout and have become the champion, you want the fighting to cease so you can stay at the top.

a hundred years, and the Establishment (whatever establishment -- govt, etc.) has never liked them because they allow students to direct their own learning paths. Sometimes that was for ostensibly good reasons ("we need factory workers, not artists&quot , but in the end, it has not worked well. Through the years, good students have still been able to do well (probably due to sheer willpower), but average students aren't learning much at all.

However, the situation as described in that Mexican school and in the Indian school aren't terribly similar to schools/culture in the US. Here, most children have so much access to computers from an early age that they engender a totally different attitude from the kids. Computers are for playing games and buying things, and as they get older, they are for stuff like porn, celebrities, etc. It's a rare US child that uses his computer for learning organic chemistry for fun. In our culture, any and all outlets like computers and TV are used to sell commercial things and sell ideological concepts, and are not used for useful education of any sort. If the Mexican kids' school computer was filled with what US computers are filled with, I suspect that the kids would not be teaching themselves any molecular biology.

Mexican/Indian children, especially kids like Paloma, also have overriding objectives of getting out of poverty -- education itself is the only way any of the kids in those classes are going to get out of their situations. It is very clear to Paloma that if she wants to do something beside picking aluminum out of a dump like her poor father, she's going to have to educate herself. And it's very clear to her that educating herself is also a way out for her whole family. These are powerful incentives that are no longer present in the US. Look at all the kids who graduate from college here and are working at McDonald's. The link between education and a better life has been entirely severed. No country worthy of the name would ever allow this to happen, except for the US. That's because commercial interests have taken over absolutely everything, including colleges, and now even the colleges are taking kids' money, running them through for a useless degree, and then graduating them and saying, "So long, suckers!" As long as we run the country this way, we will never fix anything. Our entire culture is based on detrimental premises.

With everything you just said.

I'll add this: before the current "standards and accountability movement" moved in to put us in our place, many of us in public schools, myself included, taught in ways that gave students some choices about learning. We still had rules, structure, frameworks, etc., but the system was flexible enough to allow us to step outside of traditional models without penalty. So many of us did.

Students are people; we simply aren't, and can't be, standardized. We learn in different ways, at different paces. We bring different background experiences to learning. Learning is a custom, organic process. There is no one-size-fits all. Recognizing that, and allowing flexibility in environment, in approach, in structure...that's what will create a system in which everyone can thrive.

back in the fifties and sixties, art, music, and play were all daily parts of the school day. It was quite flexible and bendable toward what students were interested in, and always included things that kids needed whether they knew it or not. The day was not filled with time pressures, either.

It is also instructive to read the writings of anyone educated in the past 25 years or so -- OK, how the hell did these people graduate from college? Ooops, I mean, how did they get through high school?? In my day, they would not have gotten through their first year. I swear. Colleges were not primarily moneygrubbing institutions back then; they hewed to the higher purpose of educating that proportion of the populace that was intelligent enough to get into college. Period. Certainly everyone should have a shot at college if they wish, but once accepted, the student must earn the grades to stay. Now, if you've got the dough, you get the degree. That makes many college degrees essentially worthless. Don't get me started on those goddamn internet degrees; OMG. There are people at my workplace who were promoted over much more worthy candidates just because they had one of those 'degrees' -- when the degree holder couldn't write three sentences without them having several egregious English errors. It's a farce. Back in the day, if you couldn't write correct English, you never made it through high school, much less college.