My buddy Kevin, who managed to crawl under the wire and escape last year, sent me a link to a really interesting article in the Indianapolis Star about the state of education in Indiana. Everyone has an opinion about educational reform but the focus of the article is simply that Indiana has it all wrong. As I say, everyone has an opinion, but the speaker they refer to in the article, Pasi Sahlberg, is someone who truly does know what the hell he's talking about. Read the article.
Going along in the same vein, or maybe in vain, I'm currently reading the book Reviving Work Ethic by Eric Chester. My observations I posted the other day about the abilities of the Woodshop boys, he confirms with scientific data. The current generation of high schoolers don't have any type of decent work ethic and he gives a real good explanation as to why that is so. He also explains what employers can do to maximize the production when you hire one of these critters. I'm a little over half way through the book and it's very good - explains a lot and confirmed that what I've been seeing is in fact how it is and not just one old fart bitchin' about the younger generation.
I received my Imprimis from Hillsdale College the other day and this months feature is adapted from a speech by Charles Murray titled: Do We Need the Department of Education? He proceeds to make his case against the DOE from both the constitutionality aspect and the functional aspect. Regardless of which angle you take it from, he maintains the answer is not only no, but hell no. "Probably we are today about where we were in math achievement in the 1960s." "The Department of Education spends about $200 million a year on research intended to improve educational practice. No evidence exists that these expenditures have done any significant good."
In Friday's Wall Street Journal an op-ed piece by Lenore Skenazy addressed the issue of the importance of child's play. The focus of the article is about a study that found preschoolers spend only about 2-3% of their day in vigorous activity. The main reasons are fear of injury and resulting law suits and falling behind educationally. The result: "In striving to make our kids super safe and super smart we have turned them into bored blobs. Fortunately, the remedy is as simple as it is joyful: just see the playground the way kids do. Not as an academic wasteland. Not as a lawsuit waiting to happen. Just the very best place to spend a whole lot of time."
My Man Mitch has proclaimed February 1st as Digital Learning Day in Indiana which coincides with the national day for the same thing. I got some e-mail thing all about it complete with links to see testimonials about how digital learning saved my life (to be honest, not sure what they said. I didn't check them out). While looking at the Wisdom of the Hands blog the other day I checked out a link he had posted that stated some of the geniuses in Silicon Valley who create all the technology send their children to a Waldorf school where the use of technology is limited.
So now I'm going to attempt to tie all of this together: We start by keeping kids off the playground because they need more educational time or we're afraid they're going to get hurt. This of course deprives them of the opportunity to learn how to interact with others, develop their motor skills and fall down gracefully, which means that they will hurt themselves when the inevitable fall does occur.
Next we send them K-12 to a school in Indiana that, according to the man from Finland, is doing everything wrong. In addition to Indiana's misguided reforms, the feds, in spite of spending billions of dollars, can't get the math scores up any higher than what they were in the '60s and have succeeded in making college degrees just about worthless as well. And because they've managed to screw things up as royally as they have, the answer apparently is to have the little darlings sit in front a video screen even more than they do now and have digital learning come to the rescue.
So the end result of all of this is an education that allows a kid to graduate from high school with no real skills, no work ethic, a college degree that's not worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell, but he's got some really nice tattoos and he gets to wear flip-flops instead of real shoes. It's no wonder they can't make a simple footstool in the woodshop.
2 comments:
Well stated! A collegue of mine recently stated that she thought our school should require every kid to take Chemistry. I said absolutely not! The class they all need to take is the auto tech class (which, by the way, always has a full roster of kids, girls and boys, at my new HS). They will all be driving cars and eventually those cars will break down and they need to know a little about how to fix it or at least not get swindled.
Right you are. Everyone should get a little grease under their finger nails and a little sawdust in their hair from time to time. Besides learning something, they can get a better appreciation for the people who do those types of things for a living and they might even discover they like doing it themselves.
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