Is school just a hoop to jump through?


Backroads
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Be that public, private, charter, unschooling, whatever. 

Implicit bias of the op: I am a teacher.

I'm musing on some weird situations with some of my students. Granted, it's a weird year for education. To the point, I have some families who are insisting on accelerating their kids through school with the intent of graduating high school at the age of 12 or whatever. This is regardless of whatever the kids actually know or are able to do. One parent's reasoning is, since this is a form of a homeschool, they the parent will be right there helping the kid, assessments included, state tests will be opted out of, and the kid will likely graduate knowing enough to get by and that what matters is the diploma.

Now, I completely believe one doesn't need a fancy college degree to create a good life and the state of education is of course up for argument. Your average parent can teach your basic reading and math. 

But we're talking parents so checked out of learning they just want the diploma. In one specific case, we have parents wanting a 7-year-old to enter 3rd grade when they can't yet read. Of course, reading skills could develop later, so it's not like they're doomed to illiteracy.

But back to the first point, if skills can be developed other ways to mastery, or mastery isn't needed, is school now just a hoop to jump through?

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My reaction on seeing your thread title was, "Absolutely." But on reading your actual OP, these parents are insane. They are the poster parents for the "Why Homeschooling Is Evil" movement.

Of all people, homeschoolers—the real ones—know that performance is the ultimate and only true indicator of educational effectiveness. The attitude you describe is so Out There that I'm tempted to say it's not an appalling travesty at all, but merely a highly localized example of parental insanity that has no bearing on the larger world.

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39 minutes ago, Vort said:

The attitude you describe is so Out There that I'm tempted to say it's not an appalling travesty at all, but merely a highly localized example of parental insanity that has no bearing on the larger world.

I had never seen it before this year, and suddenly I have three cases. 

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I'll answer this as a parent, on our weird journey this last 12 months--

DD started last year (Fall 2019) going into Kindergarten knowing her letters and sounds, but struggling to blend "D-O-G" into 'dog'.  She was also a little particular about somethings and can be prone to tantrums when told to re-do something.   So all in the normal range for incoming Kindergartners.  While she loved going to Kindergarten... her old-school teacher whom really struggled with any non-neortypical students.  Teacher would tell us all the time "your daughter's just too far behind, I can't handle her, you really should advocate that she get a full time para, etc".  Which was the opposite of what my daughter needed.  It was very frustrating, and my daughter made little academic progress.

In March we suddenly find ourselves homeschooling.   In desperation, I ordered a bunch of random stuff off of Amazon, with the criteria being "are you in stock?".  

And with that grab bag stock, we worked hard--- my daughter needs a scheduled regiment to function, and I need it so we don't drive each other crazy.   With her having so much positive reinforcement, individual attention, and truly individualized learning plan, my daughter suddenly flourished.  By the end of the quarter, her reading level was mid-first grade and math mid second grade (adding 100's together, etc).   

Her 1st grade school has been fully in-person, she started at the top of the chart on all subjects, and she.... honestly hasn't made much progress this year because so many other kids are catching up and she's so far ahead.  She's actually atrophied in a lot of areas, which is frustrating.

 

 

 

I now know that my husband and I are by FAR the best teachers for my daughter, and she can go so much faster and higher than what she gets at her school.  If we really wanted to she could learn all high-school material and be graduated by age 12.   I also know why we're NOT doing that.  Because there is HUGE benefit in her going to school beyond the academics.  She learns social skills, communication, listening, teamwork, following through when she's not the center of attention, etc.  Those are PARAMOUNT.  And I can't teach those at my kitchen table.  Not the way she really needs it.  Yes, I and DH are the most important teachers she can have, but that doesn't down play the essentialness of that entire team of teachers and students.  And I am SO thankful for how much I know her 1st grade teacher, principle, staff, and all of professionals have worked their tails off to give her a great experience in this extreme topsy-survey year.   The schooling experience (not just the academics) is so critical for kid's growth, family sanity, and society as a whole.

 

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Perhaps these parents just don't understand what education really is. Or, they just want school to be done because they are just fed up with actually taking care of their own kids for once. Who ever thought a parent was more responsible for their child's education than the teacher? ;) 7 year old's don't belong in 3rd grade unless they are a true genius...those types of kids are reading Charlotte's Web at age 4 and doing long division in 1st grade...very rare. Some parents who are now teaching their children for the very first time may think that because their little one knows 2+3=5 they are at the top of the class. These parents have no way to truly grade and judge their child's development because they have no one to compare them to. Kids also miss out on developing many soft and social skills when they don't interact with kids their own age. Advancing children grades should be a rare event.

Many parents view their children with rose colored glasses that are, let's just say, very rosy. Some parents also try to live through their children to make up for past failings and/or insecurities. You see this behavior in youth sports all the time...dad wants little Timmy to make it to the major leagues because dad loves baseball, and so he enrolls him in traveling competitive baseball teams and spends thousands of dollars getting him professional equipment and coaching lessons. What dad doesn't want to see is that Timmy truly sucks at baseball, and will never play beyond high school. Better to even out the eggs than to put them all in one basket with a gaping hole in it.

Now, are some education classes worthless...absolutely. I work in the medical field, and it is a common joke amongst doctors and nurses that none of us ever use the advanced algebra we were "required" to take in order to graduate college. It is true that y=mx+b, but no doctor in the world today actually needs that information to treat patients. I do think it would be better for schools to focus on information that is truly applicable to everyday life, and save the specialized stuff for college. College should be more specialized then it currently is as well...yet so may worthless "general education" courses will always be required because it is such a cash cow for those universities.

Can education be gained outside of school and university walls...yes. However, having a diploma matters, more so for the hard work and sense of accomplishment than the knowledge in my opinion. Kids should not graduate high school without actually learning something. Many millennial parents are setting up the future generation for failure due to a sense of entitlement, lack of work initiative, and an inability to cope with defeat. So many kids and young adults are afraid of the world and just want to stick their head in the sand because they don't know how to apply knowledge and/or think critically. 

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You make some valid points, @Jane_Doe, but your final summation:

46 minutes ago, Jane_Doe said:

The schooling experience (not just the academics) is so critical for kid's growth, family sanity, and society as a whole.

Is utterly opposite to what I have seen.

The growth of children, the sanity of the family, and the benefit of society as a whole results from children being taught the skills for correct and appropriate social interactions. The opportunity to teach such things is constant, daily, all around us. Schools have no monopoly on teaching such skills, nor any particular ability to do so.

On the contrary, most of the social conditioning learned in public schools (and I speculate in private schools, as well) is uniformly negative. The older the child gets, the more soulless the "education" offered. Individual teachers may indeed offer great value to some students, but the way the system is set up is not to the exaltation of the individual's gifts and the harmonization of society, but rather to the stamping out of all inconvenient impulses and enforced conformity to an all-too-often arbitrary standard.

I refused to sacrifice my own precious children to the so-called greater good of society by sending them to public school, especially as young children. I have great hopes that my children will follow in those footsteps and preserve my grandchildren from such a course of action. Your mileage may vary, of course. You are tasked to care for your children, and you will answer to God, not Vort, for how you discharge that duty. And in point of fact, I'm happy to support you in your parental efforts, even if they don't always mirror my own. But in my personal experience, "the schooling experience" is an almost uniform evil, and not something I care to expose my young children to.

Edited by Vort
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20 minutes ago, scottyg said:

Perhaps these parents just don't understand what education really is. Or, they just want school to be done because they are just fed up with actually taking care of their own kids for once. Who ever thought a parent was more responsible for their child's education than the teacher? ;) 7 year old's don't belong in 3rd grade unless they are a true genius...those types of kids are reading Charlotte's Web at age 4 and doing long division in 1st grade...very rare. Some parents who are now teaching their children for the very first time may think that because their little one knows 2+3=5 they are at the top of the class. These parents have no way to truly grade and judge their child's development because they have no one to compare them to. Kids also miss out on developing many soft and social skills when they don't interact with kids their own age. Advancing children grades should be a rare event.

Many parents view their children with rose colored glasses that are, let's just say, very rosy. Some parents also try to live through their children to make up for past failings and/or insecurities. You see this behavior in youth sports all the time...dad wants little Timmy to make it to the major leagues because dad loves baseball, and so he enrolls him in traveling competitive baseball teams and spends thousands of dollars getting him professional equipment and coaching lessons. What dad doesn't want to see is that Timmy truly sucks at baseball, and will never play beyond high school. Better to even out the eggs than to put them all in one basket with a gaping hole in it

If these kids were reading extremely advanced material, doing advanced math, then yes, I'd be all over advocating for them to the skip or accelerate. But the kids I've seen are extremely typical. Not bad students, mind you, just perfectly average for their age. 

As for living through their children, I am seeing one such case where the parents are very much trying to advocate for the schooling they wish they had. It's "well, Mom and Dad did this, so of course the students will be able to achieve such greatness."

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6 minutes ago, Vort said:

You make some valid points, @Jane_Doe, but your final summation:

Is utterly opposite to what I have seen.

The growth of children, the sanity of the family, and the benefit of society as a whole results from children being taught the skills for correct and appropriate social interactions. The opportunity to teach such things is constant, daily, all around us. Schools have no monopoly on teaching such skills, nor any particular ability to do so.

On the contrary, most of the social conditioning learned in public schools (and I speculate in private schools, as well) is uniformly negative. The older the child gets, the more soulless the "education" offered. Individual teachers may indeed offer great value to some students, but the way the system is set up is not to the exaltation of the individual's gifts and the harmonization of society, but rather to the stamping out of all inconvenient impulses and enforced conformity to an all-too-often arbitrary standard.

I refused to sacrifice my own precious children to the so-called greater good of society by sending them to public school, especially as young children. I have great hopes that my children will follow in those footsteps and preserve my grandchildren from such a course of action. Your mileage may vary, of course. You are tasked to care for your children, and you will answer to God, not Vort, for how you discharge that duty. And in point of fact, I'm happy to support you in your parental efforts, even if they don't always mirror my own. But in my personal experience, "the schooling experience" is an almost uniform evil, and not something I care to expose my young children to.

Keep in mind I pretty much advocate any form of schooling that works, but from my friends who do homeschool, it seems that once the kid enters junior high/high school age, the work with the parents drops off extremely, those same kids interacting in the same curriculum as any other teenager, associating with those same fellow teenagers. Of course your method of homeschooling may not be that, but it's what I've seen. I've often seen homeschooling families buying the same curriculum many schools use.  What makes buying curriculum other students are using different for each family?

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26 minutes ago, Vort said:

You make some valid points, @Jane_Doe, but your final summation:

Is utterly opposite to what I have seen.

The growth of children, the sanity of the family, and the benefit of society as a whole results from children being taught the skills for correct and appropriate social interactions. The opportunity to teach such things is constant, daily, all around us. Schools have no monopoly on teaching such skills, nor any particular ability to do so.

On the contrary, most of the social conditioning learned in public schools (and I speculate in private schools, as well) is uniformly negative. The older the child gets, the more soulless the "education" offered. Individual teachers may indeed offer great value to some students, but the way the system is set up is not to the exaltation of the individual's gifts and the harmonization of society, but rather to the stamping out of all inconvenient impulses and enforced conformity to an all-too-often arbitrary standard.

I refused to sacrifice my own precious children to the so-called greater good of society by sending them to public school, especially as young children. I have great hopes that my children will follow in those footsteps and preserve my grandchildren from such a course of action. Your mileage may vary, of course. You are tasked to care for your children, and you will answer to God, not Vort, for how you discharge that duty. And in point of fact, I'm happy to support you in your parental efforts, even if they don't always mirror my own. But in my personal experience, "the schooling experience" is an almost uniform evil, and not something I care to expose my young children to.

Needless to say we have opposite opinons here :)

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It's a parent's sacred responsibility to educate their kids.  It got really obvious, really early on in human evolution, that a really efficient and effective way to do this, was to have teachers and schools.  And humans have been struggling to make schools good things ever since.   I read somewhere that one of the oldest examples of "meeting minutes" in the archeological record, is an ancient parent/teacher conference, where parents are griping about the quality of education, and educators are griping about the scarcity of resources.  

Anyway, long story short, COVID and the rest of 2020 has put our resiliency through quite a workout.  The "Both parents work, kids go to school" model that has been the norm for 30+ years, has received a kick in the head with closed schools and remote learning.  And parents, who had banked their entire children's education on "someone else will do it", are being forced into making some drastic changes, including thinking about it for the first time.   It's a resiliency thing.  Some have strong resilient muscles, some have absolute squat. 

If it's any consolation, all the societal bad things are up.  Clueless parents flexing their ignorant entitlement attitudes aren't nearly as bad as skyrocketing rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, instances of domestic violence, abandonment, and suicide.  I think the only reason we don't see higher divorce numbers, is so many courts have closed/slowed to a crawl.

Edited by NeuroTypical
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1 hour ago, Jane_Doe said:

In March we suddenly find ourselves homeschooling.   In desperation, I ordered a bunch of random stuff off of Amazon, with the criteria being "are you in stock?".  
[...]
Her 1st grade school has been fully in-person, she started at the top of the chart on all subjects, and she.... honestly hasn't made much progress this year because so many other kids are catching up and she's so far ahead.  She's actually atrophied in a lot of areas, which is frustrating.

This is a very common experience when parents decide to homeschool.  It makes sense - no matter how good an educator, 1:1 mentoring from an engaged and loving parent, will pretty much always be superior to any sort of group educational experience.  There are of course exceptions, but surely the math makes sense.  Undivided attention and time from a parent, vs. divided attention from a teacher.  

The long term studies started showing up 15 years ago - in every demographic, absolutely every one, homeschooled kids outperformed their public schooled counterparts in most metrics.  Academic achievement, , grade level proficiency, readiness for college or careers, and yes, even including "extracurricular activities" (which was a surprise to many).   

Yes indeed - every demographic.  Including single minority mothers living below the poverty line in inner cities.   That category was like 80% better homeschooled than public schooled in the study I read.

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3 hours ago, Backroads said:

Be that public, private, charter, unschooling, whatever. 

Implicit bias of the op: I am a teacher.

I'm musing on some weird situations with some of my students. Granted, it's a weird year for education. To the point, I have some families who are insisting on accelerating their kids through school with the intent of graduating high school at the age of 12 or whatever. This is regardless of whatever the kids actually know or are able to do. One parent's reasoning is, since this is a form of a homeschool, they the parent will be right there helping the kid, assessments included, state tests will be opted out of, and the kid will likely graduate knowing enough to get by and that what matters is the diploma.

Now, I completely believe one doesn't need a fancy college degree to create a good life and the state of education is of course up for argument. Your average parent can teach your basic reading and math. 

But we're talking parents so checked out of learning they just want the diploma. In one specific case, we have parents wanting a 7-year-old to enter 3rd grade when they can't yet read. Of course, reading skills could develop later, so it's not like they're doomed to illiteracy.

But back to the first point, if skills can be developed other ways to mastery, or mastery isn't needed, is school now just a hoop to jump through?

I do not want you to feel bad about your profession - but I learned more of how to deal with life in two months of basic training in the army than I did in K-12 of public schools and 6 years of college.  I may be the exception because I am dyslexic and learned to read and write on my own (but still rely a great deal on spell check).  I was able to get a strong background in science from school - but I either was the smartest or dumbest kid in any of my school classes.

I believe an education should help make someone useful and able to function in society - I am not sure that is what education is attempting in our society.    I am quite sure that what happens outside of the classroom has a far greater impact on the success of our next generations.

 

The Traveler 

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