6 ms·

Fatbird, you suggest that we "reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them". Replace the word education in your s

Fatbird, you suggest that we "reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them". Replace the word education in your statement with the word training and you have a good definition of what exists in schools around the world today. "The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order." - John Taylor Gatto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30fxRwkBbHc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30fxRwkBbHc

fatbird 14y ago
I don't even know what you're talking about besides a plug for a homeschooling crank. If you think "reliably detect the optimum training environment" is what we do now, you know little about the education system.
- chefsurfing 14y ago
  The ad hominem attacks and annoyed tone of your argument betray a disintrest in any argument that does not match your established view. I invite you to consider new ideas. "crank": An eccentric person, esp. one obsessed by a particular subject or theory. John Taylor Gatto is an education crank who has dedicated his life to improving education and fighting schooling. I think we would do well to have more such cranks among us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
  - fatbird 14y ago
    Read MZ's comment above for why I dismiss Gatto as a crank. I not only consider new ideas, I'm familiar with a variety that work in various circumstances and not others, and my point remains that children vary, so should educational options, and that the primary problem is finding the right option, once options are available. Gatto would have us all homeschooling. Read up on New Jersey Youth Challenge Academies for a very on-point counterexample.
Mz 14y ago
Yeah, I used to quote Gatto too, as well as the publishing house founder who established a publishing house to get Gatto's work published. It is super popular on homeschooling lists, even gifted homeschooling lists where people parrot this crapola like it is Gospel without ever engaging their brain. I figured it was kosher because it was repeated by so many smart, highly educated folk on elitist lists. (People who have been to big name colleges, like Harvard, some on scholarship because they were brainiacs.) Then one day, on a forum unrelated to homescholling, I repeated the bit about how literacy rates used to be lots higher, before public school was instituted. I made an ass of myself. Yes, I have visited old ghost towns and seen the poor spelling conventions and other physical evidence of low general literacy. Yes, I used to be a history major and I know details like you used a pictorial sign for your tavern because so few people could read and that the purpose of church stained glass windows was to share some of the bible stories in pictorial form with the illiterate masses. I was taken in anyway, as are lots of very intelligent, educated folks. Yes, I also know that there is a huge, important difference between a real education, which teaches you to think effectively, and mere training, which typically prepares you for a particular job. I have spoken of that many times. (FYI: "liberal arts" is designed to teach you to think. They are called that because they are supposed to be very freeing: If you can think effectively, you have much more genuine choice in life than the average person. Liberal Arts gets pissed on a lot as a really terrible thing to major in. And it may well be terrible, at a lot of schools. I don't really know. I think there is some truth to the idea that "90% of everything is crap".) These days I find it questionable to quote anything by Gatto. The book was published with a hugely biased political agenda. The publishing house founder is a homeschooling crusader who would love to have public school abolished. For that matter, he would like to also have private school abolished. He would like homeschooling to be compulsory nationwide in the U.S. (if not globally). That's a much more questionable agenda in my opinion than whatever agenda the powers that be had when they dreamed up public school. (I homeschooled for many years. I think it can be a wonderful thing. But I see zero reason to believe that compulsory homeschooling would be inherently superior to what we do today. In the U.S. today, homeschoolers are generally rebels, defying the system in order to do right by their children. So they are typically very devoted parents. There is no reason to believe the excellence in education typical of homeschoolers today would remain the norm for homeschooling if it was the only avenue for getting a k-12 education.)

fatbird 14y ago

I don't even know what you're talking about besides a plug for a homeschooling crank. If you think "reliably detect the optimum training environment" is what we do now, you know little about the education system.

chefsurfing 14y ago
The ad hominem attacks and annoyed tone of your argument betray a disintrest in any argument that does not match your established view. I invite you to consider new ideas. "crank": An eccentric person, esp. one obsessed by a particular subject or theory. John Taylor Gatto is an education crank who has dedicated his life to improving education and fighting schooling. I think we would do well to have more such cranks among us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
- fatbird 14y ago
  Read MZ's comment above for why I dismiss Gatto as a crank. I not only consider new ideas, I'm familiar with a variety that work in various circumstances and not others, and my point remains that children vary, so should educational options, and that the primary problem is finding the right option, once options are available. Gatto would have us all homeschooling. Read up on New Jersey Youth Challenge Academies for a very on-point counterexample.

Mz 14y ago

Yeah, I used to quote Gatto too, as well as the publishing house founder who established a publishing house to get Gatto's work published. It is super popular on homeschooling lists, even gifted homeschooling lists where people parrot this crapola like it is Gospel without ever engaging their brain. I figured it was kosher because it was repeated by so many smart, highly educated folk on elitist lists. (People who have been to big name colleges, like Harvard, some on scholarship because they were brainiacs.) Then one day, on a forum unrelated to homescholling, I repeated the bit about how literacy rates used to be lots higher, before public school was instituted. I made an ass of myself. Yes, I have visited old ghost towns and seen the poor spelling conventions and other physical evidence of low general literacy. Yes, I used to be a history major and I know details like you used a pictorial sign for your tavern because so few people could read and that the purpose of church stained glass windows was to share some of the bible stories in pictorial form with the illiterate masses. I was taken in anyway, as are lots of very intelligent, educated folks. Yes, I also know that there is a huge, important difference between a real education, which teaches you to think effectively, and mere training, which typically prepares you for a particular job. I have spoken of that many times. (FYI: "liberal arts" is designed to teach you to think. They are called that because they are supposed to be very freeing: If you can think effectively, you have much more genuine choice in life than the average person. Liberal Arts gets pissed on a lot as a really terrible thing to major in. And it may well be terrible, at a lot of schools. I don't really know. I think there is some truth to the idea that "90% of everything is crap".) These days I find it questionable to quote anything by Gatto. The book was published with a hugely biased political agenda. The publishing house founder is a homeschooling crusader who would love to have public school abolished. For that matter, he would like to also have private school abolished. He would like homeschooling to be compulsory nationwide in the U.S. (if not globally). That's a much more questionable agenda in my opinion than whatever agenda the powers that be had when they dreamed up public school. (I homeschooled for many years. I think it can be a wonderful thing. But I see zero reason to believe that compulsory homeschooling would be inherently superior to what we do today. In the U.S. today, homeschoolers are generally rebels, defying the system in order to do right by their children. So they are typically very devoted parents. There is no reason to believe the excellence in education typical of homeschoolers today would remain the norm for homeschooling if it was the only avenue for getting a k-12 education.)