I came across an interesting blog/article/whatever on Psychology Today about Schools being more for showing off good grades instead of really learning something valuable in the classroom. That's not an entirely inaccurate belief. The author, Peter Gray, PhD., did make a few good points. However, I suspect he may be over-thinking this problem. That happens A LOT with college professors that are trying to analyze social problems. Schools definitely need a few 'culture changes' for lack of better term. However, some of his suggestions may not be workable past elementary school (or, maybe until the student has graduated from elementary school?) and only with small classroom sizes. Is that possible in many of our nation's public schools today?
Let's do a little cursory analysis of his little editorial here and find out...
"If schools were for learning rather than showing off, we would design them entirely differently. They would be places where people could follow their own interests, learn what they wanted to learn, try out various career paths, prepare themselves for the futures that they wanted. Everyone would be doing different things, at different times, so there would be no basis for comparison. People would learn to read when they wanted to learn to read, and we would help them do it if they wanted help. The focus would be on cooperation, not on competition. That’s what occurs at certain democratic schools, which are for learning, not for showing off, and such schools have proven remarkably effective."
Sounds like the Montessori method to me... One of my college professors once said that I would do well in that kind of environment. I guess that's because I spent so much time in my college's laboratories and library doing classwork, homework assignments, experiments and just exploring the knowledge available. If primary and secondary school had been like my college experience, I would have been a Straight A student every year. Not to mention a MUCH better adjusted individual. I was much more social in college than I was in grades K-12.
I hear that it works wonders for kids that are autistic in some way as well, including Aspies like me. I guess I'll never know since my school days are most likely over now. College is too expensive for me to go back again, even if I want to get another degree. (And I have been considering the idea for some time now.)
"One thing we know about learning is that it is inhibited by the kinds of pressures that we use at schools to motivate performance. Many psychological experiments have shown that contests and evaluations of all sorts lead those who already know well how to perform a task to do it even better than they otherwise would, but has the opposite effect on people who don’t know it so well."
Well, then I say that is a fantastic opportunity for teaching children the value of sharing knowledge. Have the kids who are good at that subject tutor the ones who are not. It also has the intrinsic/qualitative benefit of teaching social skills, especially teamwork, leadership and co-operation for mutual benefit. Those are qualities that seem (to me, at least) to be sorely lacking in our society today. It has contributed to our political leadership being more useless than ever and the military having to lower their standards to get enough bodies to fill slots. It doesn't help in the private sector, either.
"Much has been written about the education gap between children from economically richer and poorer families in the United States. It’s interesting to note that over the same period of time that pressures to perform well in school have been increasing, that gap has grown ever larger. In fact, one study (described here in the New York Times) showed that the gap in standardized test scores between the affluent and non-affluent grew by about 40 percent between the 1960s and today.
I’m sure that lots of factors figure into this education gap, but here’s one I’d like you to consider. Let’s suppose that children from economically better-off families learn, at home, much of what they are tested on in school. They perform well under the pressure of tests and the constant evaluation that occurs at school, because they already know a lot of it. They are used to this way of thinking. Let’s suppose that children from economically worse off families don’t learn so much, at home, of what they are tested on in school. They perform poorly on the tests, right from the beginning, because they don’t already know it. The high pressure of constant testing and evaluation—coupled with the embarrassment and shame of failure--makes it very difficult for them to learn at school what the others had already learned at home.
The failure may lead them to accept, fatalistically, a belief in their own stupidity, which may cause them to drop out of the whole process, mentally if not physically. In other words, I suggest, the high-pressure environment drives a wedge between those who already know and those who don’t already know, causing the gap to increase from year to year in school. And, as the pressure to perform well increases, the wedge widens."
I've attended public, private and religious schools. All three provided very different environments and cultures. That being said, one thing was always the same: Kids from poor backgrounds (not necessarily just economic backgrounds, either) didn't do very well most of the time. Their parental figures didn't invest a lot of time in them. Maybe the parents were always busy working or, maybe that parental figure just didn't care. I can't say for sure. Every case is different.
Ultimately though, it is always up to the student to learn ANYTHING while in school. If you can read and write, the rest is only a matter of time and perseverance. I learned all of my vast knowledge of scientific and technical subjects by reading books and web pages. Most of it didn't come from a classroom. The Teachers were there mostly to show me HOW to learn a subject, not WHAT I should learn. I think that is something that most people do not realize, including the politicians that are always blaming teachers for public education's many VERY publicized short-comings. If students do not care to learn, they won't learn. You can't force them. New regulations and innumerable achievement tests be damned!
Parents must be more involved and encourage their children to learn. Kids from poor backgrounds don't get that encouragement at home. They are born to parents that never valued education, might be a drug addict/drunk and thinks that living on social welfare programs is their right because of their ancestors being mistreated by the society of that time. Does that sound like an environment where a child will be encouraged to read a book? Not from what I have seen and experienced.
- Lord Publius
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