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Education affects culture in a hugely direct way. If you refuse to see this, that is your own blindness.
Oh bs. Teachers don't raise children and teens. Stop trying to pretend they do. Parents raise children and teens. Their culture influences everything they think and do.
It's not the education, it's the environment. Children did not evolve to exist in a digital environment divorced from reality and human contact. It screws them up.
It does. Their behavior is problematic at home, on the streets, in schools and everywhere. My GP, who is in his late 60s has noticed the radical change in kids' behavior over his years as a physician.
Oh bs. Teachers don't raise children and teens. Stop trying to pretend they do. Parents raise children and teens. Their culture influences everything they think and do.
Your inability to see how 1200+ hours of schooling a year for 10-20 years affects peoples' minds, habits, values, and overall development... is astonishing.
Please elaborate on the change in human behavior that education must now address. In order to address the problem we must define the problem. Just saying human behavior has changed is too vague to address anything.
Please elaborate on the changes in business to adapt to human behavior changes that education needs to consider.
Unfortunately, the changes that have been made to education have resulted in less and less being taught/learned. I'm failing to see how this is getting us ahead. A high school diploma doesn't even guarantee you can read or do simple math today. We've shifted high school up to college. A bachelors degree is the high school diploma of yesteryear and a masters the equivalent of a bachelors and a PhD a masters. What's next?
What we are doing now is not working. What we did yesteryear did work. We turned out educated high school students. Now we turn out ill educated college students. What has really changed is a complete failure to hold students accountable for learning. They now have to be entertained into learning and all the fun and games have cut out major portions of the curriculum. I learned very little in activities based classes. The best thing I can say about them is the time goes fast but I don't feel I got my money's worth. It was just ticket punching to get a degree. I'm amazed at how much higher education changed from the 80's to the 2000's when I went back for my MAT. Most of my classes were a joke. Very expensive jokes at over $400/credit plus technology fees...registration fees...etc, etc, etc...
Sadly I learned more chemistry attending a lousy high school in the late 70's than my students learn attending a school that is heralded as one of the best in the state today and when NGSS is adopted, they'll learn even less. I'm not seeing where the changes we've made are improving anything.
I'm a firm believer that one of the objectives of education should be teaching the learner how to learn and adapt because that is what they will be asked to do for the rest of their lives. I'm thankful that I came up through a system that expected me to adapt to succeed. That's an important skill to learn before you leave school.
But we didn't, really. The whole rationale for exit exams back in the early 80s was because so many students were receiving diplomas that they couldn't read. That isn't even counting the huge cohort that dropped out. The biggest change that I see is that we are now expected to educate people who in the past would not have gotten past 8th or 9th grade.
The decline in public education in America began after World War I, and has continued ever since by design.
Progressives like John Dewey placed less emphasis on facts, knowledge, and scholarship, and believed that any child knowing more than another produces low self esteem in the less knowledgeable.
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But we didn't, really. The whole rationale for exit exams back in the early 80s was because so many students were receiving diplomas that they couldn't read. That isn't even counting the huge cohort that dropped out. The biggest change that I see is that we are now expected to educate people who in the past would not have gotten past 8th or 9th grade.
We've changed a lot and I think you hit the reason for the changes we've made. Because we're educating people we wouldn't have in the past and educating people to levels we wouldn't have in the past. The end result is we've made everything easier. We teach less, expect less and entertain more. So kids now get to college and need two years of remediation before they can start college level classes.
If we want everyone to graduate what's easier? Bringing everyone up to high expectations or lowering your expectations? We've done the latter. I hate it when people claim we're still using curriculum version 19XX when nothing could be farther from the truth. Not even close. What has changed is we expect students to learn less and we now entertain more (probably because the kids who could learn more are BORED and the bottom isn't going to care no matter what you teach). IMO, the thing that is wrong with version 20XX is that we are trying to educate everyone to the same level. That would be fine if we wanted that to be 8th grade but it's not fine even for 12th grade. We're pushing kids through as if graduating means something without actually doing the work and learning what should be learned by a graduate.
I think we need to go back to exit exams to stop just pushing people through and I think we need to go back to the idea that college is for the few and quit putting everyone on a college bound track. That is impossible to achieve because everyone is not college bound material. It's a waste of effort and money to even try. I'd love to see us go back to version 19XX where vocational education and on the job training were available. We need to get back to teaching the basics and holding students accountable for learning them. If you don't learn them then you don't pass. By 8th grade we should have a good idea of who is/is not going to put in the work (I won't say has the ability because it's not intelligence that matters but rather willingness to work to achieve in the vast majority of cases.). We should then split kids up into tracks. College bound, a "normal" high school education and job training. If a student doesn't want to be in school past 16, they'd be required to have a job. We need to quit trying to force an education on those who don't want it and we need to raise that bar at least back to where it was though I think the damage is already done here. College has already adapted to freshmen with less knowledge/ability. Going back will be hard but I think we need to go back. Version 19XX worked much better than version 20XX. It wasn't perfect and we can improve upon it but we've thrown out too much of what worked. The first thing we need to bring back is the idea that if the student doesn't want to learn that is the student's choice and they should not be allowed to pull everyone else down with them.
Oh bs. Teachers don't raise children and teens. Stop trying to pretend they do. Parents raise children and teens. Their culture influences everything they think and do.
IME peers influence outcomes more than anything else. I've seen some major transformations in very short time.
I teach in a school that can be described as preppy (if that term is even used anymore). Three years ago, we have a girl transfer in mid year. I'd describe her as a goth punk with a bad attitude. She struggled and did poorly that year. The following September I see this pretty girl in a flowered dress and sweater walking down the hall and I can't place her. Then I realize it's punk goth punk girl. The purple hair is gone, the spikes are gone, the leather is gone, the black make up is gone, she's smiling and acting like this has always been the way she is. She graduated last year and is going on to college with her new friends.
I remember thinking as she walked down the hall that day "I bet your parents are happy with this move.".
People underestimate the power of society and I don't understand that. People get that if you live in an area with high gang activity that kids are more likely to get into trouble and have bad outcomes but they don't want to admit that if you live an area where success is modeled that kids are more likely to succeed. I'm convinced it's not the schools or the teachers. It's the neighborhood. Now parents in successful neighborhoods demand good schools and teachers and get them but it's the neighborhood making the schools good and demanding good teachers not good schools and teachers turning the neighborhood around.
While I think teaching is a horrible profession to have as a parent (the hours suck), I wish I'd become a teacher sooner for one reason. I would have realized the power of picking the right neighborhood to raise my kids in. Back when I had my kids I was operating under the delusion that I would be the biggest influence on my kids. NOT even close. It was their peers. I think that's the way it has always been. We told the broker we would not look at houses over $100k back then. THAT was a mistake. We could have raised our kids with much better odds if we'd spent half again that much and we could have done it. It wouldn't have been easy but it could have been done. I see way too much negative peer influence in both of my kids in spite of having taught them better.
Human behavior has changed, that's what. And much of that due to advances in technology.
Business has adapted to it over the years but education hasn't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chiMT
Not only has human behavior and the human environment changed, but we have discovered a lot about human behavior and psychology. A lot of stuff we did before simply wasn't good methodology. A lot of our methods were based on faulty (or lack of) conceptions of humanity.
Interestingly, there is some thought that our brains are still evolving and most people don't want to hear that.
Stronger evidence that natural selection has continued to shape the brain in recent epochs comes from studies of DRD4, a mutation in a neurotransmitter receptor that Moyzis, Wang, and many others have linked to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children diagnosed with ADHD are twice as likely to carry the variant gene as those without the diagnosis. DRD4 makes a receptor in the brain less effective in bonding to dopamine, which might explain why Ritalin, which increases the amount of dopamine in the space between neurons, is often helpful in treating the problem.
This is part of why education and business have to adapt to the distractible brain. Of course, this is theory and new research, not fact, but it is still quite interesting.
Last edited by toobusytoday; 07-20-2014 at 01:23 PM..
Reason: PLEASE, PLEASE stop using such long quotes. Link and three sentences.
But we didn't, really. The whole rationale for exit exams back in the early 80s was because so many students were receiving diplomas that they couldn't read. That isn't even counting the huge cohort that dropped out. The biggest change that I see is that we are now expected to educate people who in the past would not have gotten past 8th or 9th grade.
Well, I'm going back a bit farther than the 80's. I do believe that we did a fair job of educating our kids in the mid 1900's (damn it makes me feel old to type that ). I'm not sure when we started to slip but there was a time when we were the top. We're middle of the pack now.
Your inability to see how 1200+ hours of schooling a year for 10-20 years affects peoples' minds, habits, values, and overall development... is astonishing.
You're confusing school with parents and guardians. That's where you are confused. School is school. Parents are parents. Society and culture are society and culture.
I'd be all on board with you if you had suggested stricter schools. But even LAXER than they are now? You've got to be kidding me.
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). I'm not sure when we started to slip but there was a time when we were the top. We're middle of the pack now.
