What does your ideal education system look like?

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Another delightful spin-off thread. Some people began to tackle it the last time the education issue came up so here's an opportunity to go more in depth. I'll start:

1) Being a government funded glorified babysitting service will no longer be tolerated as sufficient.

2) Judging from our other threads on education - a better method of assigning funding to schools must be worked out.

3) Ditch the rote memorization and regurgitation scheme. The fact that you temporarily knew at least 51% of a subject's curriculum does not mean you are educated.

4) Training in information retrieval. Library and internet skills, assessing sources, etc.

4/5 crossover) Training in the analysis of retrieved/presented information for validity.

5) Training in critical thinking. This shall at minimum include applied logic, statistics (because the field is often misused), cognitive biases and how to avoid them, etc.

6) Training in creative thinking.

7) Comprehensive sexual education (see also: sexual morality thread). Let's move it beyond the 'abstinence', extremely low production value videos and rolling a condom onto a wooden phallus level.

8) Comprehensive training in personal finances. This should include basic budgeting, how to decipher credit card/loan terms and conditions, how to use such things properly, and so on.

9) Better student:teacher ratios such that teachers may better strive to apply and evaluate the above.

and if you can count this as part of the education system -
10) All parents acknowledge and embrace that learning does not end at school. They strive to reinforce the above.

The German system.

More arts education at an early age. Save the other stuff for when kids are older and can grasp what they are being taught instead of getting frustrated like they do in our current system. On the other hand kids can grasp things like music and dance from an early age.

Also, a lot more gym, with a wide choice of activities so as few kids as possible have to do something they don't want to. Kids don't get to play enough these days, especially at an early age/especially when it comes to physical play. Honestly, I think most of the behavior problems schools have are a result of trying to get kids to sit in desks for too long.

Athletics (not Physical Education) should be a separate entity from the education system entirely.

What is the opinion in the US on Selective Secondary Education?

This means that after Elementary School (around age 12) pupils are enrolled according to their ability into one of three Secondary Educations. Either vocational training, one that later allows enrollment in to universities of professional education and a third which is more intensive and allows enrollment into research universities. It's also possible to climb the ladder sideways, usually with a bit of a short track.

PoderOmega wrote:

Athletics (not Physical Education) should be a separate entity from the education system entirely.

I don't know about that--athletics is a way of getting kids to look on 'school' as something more than just the boring place you get homework from. It sounds good in theory to make school all about education, but sometimes the most direct route is not the fastest when dealing with practical issues, like human psychology.

Now, if we're talking about the *adults* ignoring the educational aspects of a school and treating the local school like a sports team, then yeah: there definitely needs to be some changes in our priorities. I just think we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater by putting up a wall of separation between the two.

Also, athletics contributes to the *social* education of children, and that brings up another issue: should school just be about preparing children *intellectually* or about preparing them as a complete human being?

CheezePavilion wrote:

I don't know about that--athletics is a way of getting kids to look on 'school' as something more than just the boring place you get homework from. It sounds good in theory to make school all about education, but sometimes the most direct route is not the fastest when dealing with practical issues, like human psychology

I am not sure how athletics makes the school a less a boring place during regular school hours. After school events for sure, but i'm not seeing how it would take the boring sting out your typical classroom setting. There's a pride element to it for sure, but I think schools (and parents) should take pride in intellectual success the same way that athletics currently is held.

CheezePavilion wrote:

Also, athletics contributes to the *social* education of children, and that brings up another issue: should school just be about preparing children *intellectually* or about preparing them as a complete human being?

I'm taking the word "ideal" literally here. I agree that athletics contributes to the social education and I do think school should prepare people as a complete human being. So I am modifiying my response to: "Athletics should not be given more priority or resources than any other extra curricular department". I understand that athletics is a money maker, but in an ideal education system (or country) this would not be the case.

PoderOmega wrote:

I am not sure how athletics makes the school a less a boring place during regular school hours. After school events for sure, but i'm not seeing how it would take the boring sting out your typical classroom setting. There's a pride element to it for sure, but I think schools (and parents) should take pride in intellectual success the same way that athletics currently is held.

Finding something boring is a state of mind, an emotion. Like you said, that 'pride' element or whatever you want to call it creates positive associations with school in general, not just those afterschool hours. Why? My impression of human nature is that things we have positive associations with we tend to find less boring. Logically what you say makes sense, but then again, finding something 'boring' isn't a matter of logic, it's a matter of emotion, and positive associations with a specific aspect of school can become a more generalized positive association.

I agree that schools and parents and the whole community should take pride in intellectual success the same way that they do in athletics, but I don't think that has anything to do with my point about using athletics to foster a sense of connection to the school.

I mean, if we're going to ship these kids off and lock them up inside buildings for as long as it would take to impart the kinds of education we're all talking about in this thread, I think it's important for kids to have positive associations with an institution that's going to play such a huge part in their lives. For both the practical reason that I think you will get better results, and the moral reason that children deserve schools they actually want to be in.

+++++

To go beyond our discussion, something I don't think we should lose sight of in this thread should be mentioned: schools are not factories. We're dealing with people here, and although they may not be independent adults, the ends have to justify the means in the context of how we treat these subjects that are human, not so much raw material we stick in one end of the school system in order to turn out adults at the end.

bandit0013 wrote:

The German system.

I'd go with the Finnish system but I know where you're coming from.

Personally I've found that experience in doing something seems to be the best teacher of all. I suppose that comes from knowing that consequences come with your actions, and those consequences can't be reversed. I'd support a system that gets kids the most hands-on with daily life as possible.

Any system would have to incorporate close communication with the parents, and reduce the current dependency on 'rote' learning and increasing the amount of skill-based teaching.

Make the local public school and it's success/failure wholly accountable to the community in which it exists. No meddling or mandates from a state or federal department of education.

Socialization is certainly a big part of the current system but unless your ideal system is having everyone in extremely isolated home schooling I suspect the social benefits will remain.

MacBrave wrote:

Make the local public school and it's success/failure wholly accountable to the community in which it exists. No meddling or mandates from a state or federal department of education.

As an ideal I agree. Though in practice only so long as said community is aware that sometimes you will have kids who due to laziness, apathy, or simple ineptness will do poorly or fail. Under the current system you can see parents trying to demand their precious angel's grade move up to an A... from an F.. surely it must be the teacher/system's fault! Or maybe it's the fact that the kid never studied and did every assignment 5 minutes before it was due. Which brings me to an additional point;

11) Whatever method of evaluation replaces the rote system will not give out marks solely for the sake of "self-esteem".

and an unrelated

12) The demands on the students will increase with age such that by the end they are identical to the 'real world'. As an example from my own case - Even with my summer jobs at the time when I look back I find it a bit cruel that I spent 12 formative years getting used to having 3 months of vacation a year in a society where 2-4 (likely 2) weeks/year will likely be the max for the rest of my life.

I'm not sure that the German model is necessarily superior to our own from the numbers I've been looking at. link

I think the Finnish and South Korean models are the ones that really kick ass. The Canadian, Kiwi, and Japanese models aren't too far behind.

krev82 wrote:

Socialization is certainly a big part of the current system but unless your ideal system is having everyone in extremely isolated home schooling I suspect the social benefits will remain.

Socialization isn't an all-or-nothing thing, though. Social benefits will remain, sure, but not all possible social benefits. So why not have more of them?

krev82 wrote:
MacBrave wrote:

Make the local public school and it's success/failure wholly accountable to the community in which it exists. No meddling or mandates from a state or federal department of education.

As an ideal I agree. Though in practice only so long as said community is aware that sometimes you will have kids who due to laziness, apathy, or simple ineptness will do poorly or fail. Under the current system you can see parents trying to demand their precious angel's grade move up to an A... from an F.. surely it must be the teacher/system's fault! Or maybe it's the fact that the kid never studied and did every assignment 5 minutes before it was due. Which brings me to an additional point;

This brings up a good point: how would be evaluate students across communities? You can't blame parents for demanding their precious angel's grade move up if that grade moving up means their kids make and extra million dollars over their lifetime because they get a job with a better salary. Which leads to...

krev82 wrote:

11) Whatever method of evaluation replaces the rote system will not give out marks solely for the sake of "self-esteem".

and marks should not be given out as 'rewards' for hard work, either. Marks that will be used by the world to extend or deny opportunities should be an assessment of that individual's talents. If a kid doesn't want to do homework but then aces the test, they get the A.

krev82 wrote:

12) The demands on the students will increase with age such that by the end they are identical to the 'real world'. As an example from my own case - Even with my summer jobs at the time when I look back I find it a bit cruel that I spent 12 formative years getting used to having 3 months of vacation a year in a society where 2-4 (likely 2) weeks/year will likely be the max for the rest of my life.

I think it's not a matter of making the demands identical, as much as making kids aware of how the real world works. Get in the right job and you can have 52 weeks off a year for the rest of your life after enough years of work--I saw a thirty year old being profiled who went to work in the financial industry who made enough money to live in the middle of Manhattan the rest of her life and not work.

An extreme example, but overall I think if we're going to go beyond academics in the education school imparts (and I agree we should) the focus should be on empowering kids to honestly weigh the options in front of them when they get out in the real world. I think schools are too committed to the 'work hard and you'll succeed' model, when that's not how the real world works.

Teacher accountability. If you are bad at your job and are incapable/unwilling to improve your skills to get good at it, you're gone. I don't have enough fingers to count the number of teachers through my time in school who were either unable to teach, unwilling to work with struggling students, couldn't control a class or something else. One teacher was verbally abusive to his students (he was literally mentally unstable) and another had a stack of sexual harassment complaints against him. But because they were both close to retirement, the union and the school board refused to do anything and dozens of students got a substandard education in their subjects. It needs to be made clear that no matter what point in your teaching career you are at, the students are the most important thing and you must be at the top of your game or you'll lose it.

I don't support the concept that a local community should be responsible for its school; this model gives you the atrocity that is the Texas system, where creationism is taught alongside science and local school boards rife with corruption and personal crusades endanger the education of their young.

There should be a standardized, national curriculum that local communities must incorporate.they can add regional information, but I do not consider the "local school board" structure as anything but bad.

Seth wrote:

I don't support the concept that a local community should be responsible for its school; this model gives you the atrocity that is the Texas system, where creationism is taught alongside science and local school boards rife with corruption and personal crusades endanger the education of their young.

There should be a standardized, national curriculum that local communities must incorporate.they can add regional information, but I do not consider the "local school board" structure as anything but bad.

+1

Seth wrote:

I don't support the concept that a local community should be responsible for its school; this model gives you the atrocity that is the Texas system, where creationism is taught alongside science and local school boards rife with corruption and personal crusades endanger the education of their young.

So the rational individuals in that community vote the current school board out or vote with their feet and move to another community that more aligns with their views.

I think the main point is that different countries and different communities and different people have different preferences for education. A British friend who lived in Germany for 10 years (his daughter's first word was "Nein!") came back principally because he felt that their German (primary) school was too prescriptive and inflexible in their education, and wanted a school that was more responsive to each child's needs.

Different children also respond better or worse to different styles of schooling, some like a prescriptive system, and some find it too claustrophobic. A friend of mine moved from a wishy-washy "kids should be free to express themselves" school to a highly disciplined school and did much better. His younger brother moved in the opposite direction and thrived in the less regimented school.

We want children to have pastoral education, but not at the expense of the three R's. We want accountability for teachers, but league tables and metrics just lead to teaching to the test and gaming the system.

My university friends who went to the best public schools (e.g. the ones you pay ten grand a term for) got a better education than I did (average comp near Warrington). It just seemed that they had smaller class sizes, better facilities, more time with the teachers (especially the boarders).

A lot of my friends are married to teachers, and they tell me horror stories from schools in central Southampton and Portsmouth (my colleague's wife's class in Portsmouth has two children called Pompey. Of different genders). How you come up with an education scheme that works for them as much as a school in a middle class area where all the parents are fully involved with the education of their kids, I don't know.

MacBrave wrote:
Seth wrote:

I don't support the concept that a local community should be responsible for its school; this model gives you the atrocity that is the Texas system, where creationism is taught alongside science and local school boards rife with corruption and personal crusades endanger the education of their young.

So the rational individuals in that community vote the current school board out or vote with their feet and move to another community that more aligns with their views.

The problem with voting with your feet and leaving the community when we all live in the same country or especially the same state that community continues to be a part of our state/community.

So if the rational individuals keep moving out of communities, those communities become full of irrational individuals and now we've got pockets of dumbassery all around the country getting even worse. We're still going to use everyone's tax dollars to pave their roads and provide all their government services, but they're just going to become less and less able to pull their own weight.

The idea of community-based schooling sounds good in theory, but at some point theory has to meet reality, and I don't think empirically the signs give any hope that community-based schooling would work any better--and I think a lot that it would work far worse--given a lot of the communities we have in America.

I just don't see any problem with schooling in America that wouldn't be made even worse by making local units even more independent than they are now.

Cheese has the right of it. one of the biggest differences between me and the libertarian camp is my staunch belief that people - especially americans - are irrational and need benevolent leadership to guide them: it's why our country's addiction to religion is so rampant.

Having the inteligencia vote with their feet doesn't stop creationism from being taught or the Tuskegee experiments from being ignored, it encourages that behavior.

MacBrave wrote:
Seth wrote:

I don't support the concept that a local community should be responsible for its school; this model gives you the atrocity that is the Texas system, where creationism is taught alongside science and local school boards rife with corruption and personal crusades endanger the education of their young.

So the rational individuals in that community vote the current school board out or vote with their feet and move to another community that more aligns with their views.

Since when have the majority of Americans viewed things like evolution rationally?

Reading Monkey Girl convinced me that there needs to be national standards. The sheer level of incompetence, ignorance, and bullying that characterized the Dover school board was shocking.

In a modern state, education should serve to provide opportunity to individuals without means, maximize the potential of its most precious resource (its population), and cement social continuity for its citizens. These goals are best served by nationalized curricula.

Education should not be an instrument to affirm traditional or religious ignorance, balkanize territories with fictional history, or ossify class and racial differences. The way to that is localized school boards.

Paleocon wrote:

Education should not be an instrument to affirm traditional or religious ignorance, balkanize territories with fictional history, or ossify class and racial differences. The way to that is localized school boards.

I take it you are not a fan of private or parochial schools? Homeschooling?

MacBrave wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Education should not be an instrument to affirm traditional or religious ignorance, balkanize territories with fictional history, or ossify class and racial differences. The way to that is localized school boards.

I take it you are not a fan of private or parochial schools? Homeschooling?

As an option for an individual, I don't really have a problem with it. But I don't see that devolving all compulsory education to those options or so financially weakening public compulsory education to the point that the above are the only viable options is a policy that serves the public interest. And in the end, public policy should be about the public interest.

I think point #10 in the OP may be the most important, and the hardest to improve. Becoming educated requires motivation. Those habits start at home, with parents leading by example. Crazy right?

MacBrave wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Education should not be an instrument to affirm traditional or religious ignorance, balkanize territories with fictional history, or ossify class and racial differences. The way to that is localized school boards.

I take it you are not a fan of private or parochial schools? Homeschooling?

I am--in fact, I went to parochial school. Thing is, there was no attempt to affirm religious ignorance. Problem is, not every parochial or private or homeschool is as good as mine was.

MacBrave wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Education should not be an instrument to affirm traditional or religious ignorance, balkanize territories with fictional history, or ossify class and racial differences. The way to that is localized school boards.

I take it you are not a fan of private or parochial schools? Homeschooling?

I'm against homeschooling because a huge part of going to school is socialization. Homeschool cannot, by definition, offer that.

But in terms of curriculum, assuming religious and homeschooling adhered to the same national curriculum, I don't see there'd be a problem.

Seth wrote:

But in terms of curriculum, assuming religious and homeschooling adhered to the same national curriculum, I don't see there'd be a problem.

Actual education: require teachers to be certified by the state for general competence and very likely require a Master's Degree. Homeschooling: be smart enough to get pregnant.

OG_slinger wrote:
Seth wrote:

But in terms of curriculum, assuming religious and homeschooling adhered to the same national curriculum, I don't see there'd be a problem.

Actual education: require teachers to be certified by the state for general competence and very likely require a Master's Degree. Homeschooling: be smart enough to get pregnant.

You don't need a degree to teach anything. You just need to understand what it is you're teaching and be able to break down the concepts in varied ways, which is a skill that is near impossible to teach.

In the year 2000, 10,280 Michigan students took the SAT exam. They were also polled on whether they planned to attend college and what their major would be. Of the 6 percent of students who selected education as a major, their average math score was 35 points below the state average. The average verbal score for education majors was 26 points below the state average. That's not saying that every teacher is dumb, but the stats don't lie. "Those who can't do, teach" didn't just magically appear as a snark in our culture. It's a shame that we can measure and reward good teachers to attract better candidates to the field.

Additionally, the certification process is highly flawed and generally serves to keep people out of the profession. I recall an article a while back about a retired NASA scientist who was denied teaching math in Georgia because he had to go through a longish (> 1 yr) certification process. My father has the same thing, he has a degree in Physics, he supervises a nuclear power plant control room and has been the head nuclear operator trainer at the plant for more than a decade. Yet irregardless of his certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions stamp of approval of his ability to train people to run nuclear reactors he wouldn't be able to teach basic arithmetic in a school unless he jumped through all these certification hoops. He likes teaching, would be willing to do it in retirement, but he really doesn't feel like going through all the extra crap.

bandit0013 wrote:

Additionally, the certification process is highly flawed and generally serves to keep people out of the profession. I recall an article a while back about a retired NASA scientist who was denied teaching math in Georgia because he had to go through a longish (> 1 yr) certification process. My father has the same thing, he has a degree in Physics, he supervises a nuclear power plant control room and has been the head nuclear operator trainer at the plant for more than a decade. Yet irregardless of his certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions stamp of approval of his ability to train people to run nuclear reactors he wouldn't be able to teach basic arithmetic in a school unless he jumped through all these certification hoops. He likes teaching, would be willing to do it in retirement, but he really doesn't feel like going through all the extra crap.

The question is whether it's worth losing people like your father in order to keep out people who shouldn't be teaching if the 'hoops' were removed.

For every one person where the conversation goes "don't worry--he's certified by the NRC" how many conversations go "don't worry about my brother/friend/daughter/etc.--they did real good in science class"?

Could the 'hoops' be set up such that the test is more sensitive than it is? Sure, but what's the return on investment? I'm all about the government being touchy-feely and bleeding heart about how it conducts business, but at some point, the government should forget about being fair, and care more about efficiency.

Also, can I ask if the certification process is just to test subject area knowledge, or is it also to make sure we're not sending people into the classroom who might be great working in the subject area, but can't actually teach (or at least haven't been given some basic skills first so we're not throwing them in the deep end without making sure they at least have an idea how to swim)? Not every great player makes a good coach sorta logic.

It's true that "those who can't do, teach" didn't just magically appear as a snark in our culture, but not all those who can do, can teach well.

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