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This is from a book written five years ago, but I think some of the material is as relevant today as ever. Here they are, in a nutshell:
1. (Student) Ability varies.
4. America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
I have a problem with those two.
What is academically gifted? If a kid can be a really great carpenter how many schools can figure that out. It is almost as though you need to be bad at math to get into woodworking shop. You get slotted on the basis of grades.
Anyone who has read much of Murray's work would realize that he broaches subjects that would make your average Neocon very angry. Murray's views and evidence flies in the face of school choice and vouchers which is a current rallying cry of the neocon right (since NCLB has been an utter failure).
He's not a talking head and brings reams of data and evidence to his research. The fact that his work makes a lot of people uncomfortable means he's doing something right.
This is from a book written five years ago, but I think some of the material is as relevant today as ever. Here they are, in a nutshell:
1. (Student) Ability varies.
2. Half of the children are below average.
3. Too many people are going to college.
4. America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
I haven't read the book and I think it's important that we're careful about how we apply these "truths," but it seems like these are things that are worth having a conversation/debate about instead of simply accepting the current narrative and expectations that are in many ways unrealistic.
I would definitely be careful with no 4 - I mean in terms of how it is interpreted and applied.
An educational system that focuses mainly on exploiting the abilities of the "naturally gifted" for the benefit of the system (referred to here as "America's future", whoever "America" may be) is a Darwinistic, inherently non-democratic, "survival-of-the-fittest" type of system (and I would also argue, inherently immoral). This kind of system will ultimately fail most citizens by denying them a chance to use education to elevate themselves and to rise above their origins or genetics.
A system that focuses on the "gifted" is one that allows the non-gifted (which would be most) to grow and develop into mere exploitable material simply because they do not promise to contribute "heavily" to "America's future" - other than perhaps by becoming future consumers of trinkets.
I would never be entirely OK with a system like that - not in a country that claims to be a democracy with an educational system supposedly designed to give everyone an equal chance in life.
I would favor an elite (as opposed to "elitist") educational system that exposes ALL of its young people to a rigorous, high-end curriculum and holds high expectations for ALL young people, not just for a few "gifted".
Those few gifted will even exceed those high expectations; some will meet them, and others will fall short - but whatever the outcomes, I would expect ALL future citizens to be exposed to a rigorous curriculum.
It is the only way in which you can claim to have a real democracy.
Anything less is "lip service democracy" simply because you can't have a democracy with masses of morons and just a few "gifted leaders" at the top.
That's called an aristocracy - which, last time I checked, America was turning its nose at.
Talents may come out on their own, but they only soar if they are harnessed and prefected. It is from our best and brightest that all our innovations come. This is not to say that we shouldn't educate our bottom, work to get the most out of them, make sure they get as many of the basic skills as possible, or meet their needs, just that we can't continue to ignore the top. We especially need to stop teaching to the bottom. At minimum, we at least need to go back to teaching to the middle.
Not at all. I think we need to go back to "teaching to the top" - all after having taught "to the bottom" and "to the middle" first.
You would think this would be self-explanatory but it doesn't look like it is.
I never understood why the American curriculum can't naturally move through all stages for all children.
From "teaching to the bottom" the first day (say, "2+3=5"),
...to "teaching to the middle" the second day (say "write 5 as the sum of two numbers where one number is one unit bigger than the other"),
... to "teaching to the top" the third day (let's say something like "10 people got on a bus; at the first station, some people got off; at the second station the number of people who got off is one more than the number of people who got off at the first station; at the end of the line, there were 5 people left in the bus. How many people got off at the first and at the second station?).
First day: Basic day.
Second day: "Average Joe" day.
Third day: "Gifted / Feel-Some-Pain-if-Not-Gifted" Day
Everyone will be expected to apply themselves and go through all three stages. The first two days will ensure systematic, organized, foundational, rigorous learning.
The third day will challenge - it will give the gifted kids the opportunity to shine and it will make the average, even the bottom children, experience some much needed pain (which is a horribly underrated pedagogical method in American schools).
If gifted/advanced kids finish their work fast and furious during the first two days, there are always plenty of extra/more challenging problems handy for them to do on their own while the class covers the foundation. Then they will have the opportunity to shine during the third day.
Then again, the truly gifted/"oh-so-advanced" kids are few in reality (much fewer than the number of kids in "Gifted programs" would suggest) and most will definitely not be scarred for life by doing foundational work during the first 2 days. The time to shine will come soon enough.
Then why is it that schools in the US have a hard time with this very honest approach?
Why do they obsessively need to track, label, separate into obviously hierarchical groups and identify Darwinistic/inborn/genetic abilities before they even did their job of exposing the entire class to ALL LEVELS of knowledge?
Who are they to think that an apparently "average" child who is shown how to do a more difficult problem or challenged to think hard about it - will not eventually master such problems, just as well as the classmate who solved it in a few seconds because of giftedness?
Who are these schools to take such basic right away from so many children?
How about exposing everyone to all levels of teaching and THEN separate them and decide "who's who"?
And make "THEN" somewhere around 8th grade at the very earliest - because you really can't draw conclusions before you even allowed the children a few years to try to achieve.
The school's job is to teach everything that's to be taught, not to distribute education based on eugenics principles.
PS: Before the knee-jerk reactions invoking "envy", "sour grapes" and the like rear their ugly heads - disclaimer: I do have a kid in a "gifted" program and I WOULD consider it fair that my kid learns whatever stuff he's learning in segregated "gifted" class - together with his classmates in the regular class. If he's truly so much better than most others, he should feel free to shine in the crowd during the day when the challenging material is taught; but this is no reason for others not to be exposed AT ALL to what he is exposed to during "gifted" day.
John Taylor Gatto's books Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction would be good reads.
Basically, the educational system has been used as a tool of control of the masses. It has almost nothing to do with enabling each child to be their best and develop a mindset of continuous learning. It serves mostly to keep the status quo of hegemonic power. If they wanted to improve humankind as a whole the public school systems would make a concerted effort to apply methods used at educational institutions which the elite send their progeny.
Numbers 3 & 4 could better be addressed with a tract / skills / aptitude assessment to enable those with different strengths and ability to choose and find apt trade schooling, rather than bogging them down in an environment they are not suited too and wasting time going to college as a four year party and making many of them debt slaves.
Gatto goes into the historical development of the predominant public education system. Some prescient insights were found in his investigation of: The Child, The Parent and The State by John Bryan Conant (1959) and Alexander Inglis' Principles of Secondary Education (1918).
Compulsory education was intended to be what it had been for Prussia in the 1920's. A fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a surgical intervention into the prospective unity of those underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age grading, by constant ranking on tests, and by many other subtle means and it was unlikely that the ignorant masses of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous cohesive whole.
This is from a book written five years ago, but I think some of the material is as relevant today as ever. Here they are, in a nutshell:
1. (Student) Ability varies.
2. Half of the children are below average.
3. Too many people are going to college.
4. America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
I haven't read the book and I think it's important that we're careful about how we apply these "truths," but it seems like these are things that are worth having a conversation/debate about instead of simply accepting the current narrative and expectations that are in many ways unrealistic.
As the grandson, great-nephew, son, and brother of eduators, I have to agree with each of these truths, taken at face value.
And #2 is just funny, because it matter-of-factly doubles-down on #1, which refutes the commonly-espoused notion that each child is extraordinary.
John Taylor Gatto's books Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction would be good reads.
Basically, the educational system has been used as a tool of control of the masses. It has almost nothing to do with enabling each child to be their best and develop a mindset of continuous learning. It serves mostly to keep the status quo of hegemonic power. If they wanted to improve humankind as a whole the public school systems would make a concerted effort to apply methods used at educational institutions which the elite send their progeny.
Numbers 3 & 4 could better be addressed with a tract / skills / aptitude assessment to enable those with different strengths and ability to choose and find apt trade schooling, rather than bogging them down in an environment they are not suited too and wasting time going to college as a four year party and making many of them debt slaves.
Gatto goes into the historical development of the predominant public education system. Some prescient insights were found in his investigation of: The Child, The Parent and The State by John Bryan Conant (1959) and Alexander Inglis' Principles of Secondary Education (1918).
Compulsory education was intended to be what it had been for Prussia in the 1920's. A fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a surgical intervention into the prospective unity of those underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age grading, by constant ranking on tests, and by many other subtle means and it was unlikely that the ignorant masses of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous cohesive whole.
Scary indeed. I know this is happening for real not because I found "empirical data that supports this argument" but because I feel it every day in my bones, after busting my back (and bank!) to compensate at home for the primitive, wooden, chaotic, and hardly challenging curriculum my children are exposed to every day.
If you don't seriously supplement at home (and know what you're doing!!) or if the parent can't send the child to one of those mythical "elite" schools that us, mortals, can't even dream of and where children are probably exposed to a dramatically different curriculum than the watered-down, hodgepodge, superficial information used in public schools....then you can rest assured your child will be left BARELY EDUCATED, even in the best of public school districts in the country.
We live in one such district and not a day passes by when I am not left speechless at the poor quality of the curriculum - completely devoid of rigor, the generally low academic expectations, and the superficial "teaching-to-the-test" practices.
If this is what America's awesome public schools have to offer (yes, ours does produce high test scores but that tells me very little!), I shudder to think of what is taught in the poorly performing ones.
Must be complete educational carnage.
You did well on standardized tests ...because of luck? ...
Why did you leave out the rest of my sentence (thereby taking my statement out of context)? As I wrote: "... so I was 'discovered' DESPITE my background."
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I wish this thread had not deteriorated into back-and-forth insults; these are important issues that I wish we could discuss rationally.
Last edited by karen_in_nh_2012; 12-02-2013 at 05:12 AM..
Good luck. No rational discussion is going to take place in an open internet forum once posters many of whom have not even read the work in question weigh in with accusations and insinuations of racism, immorality, hegemony, conspiracy, eugenicism, and so forth, straight from the moonbat playbook.
Last edited by Hamish Forbes; 12-02-2013 at 04:46 AM..
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