-jcr

When I look at what I know, and what proportion of that I learned on the job versus what I learned in school, I’m furious that the state made me sit and obey their bureaucrats for twelve years.

-jcr

I’ve been eking out a living doing ebooks for a decade-and-a-half, which let me see an implausible amount of educational vaporware, but folks like Khan and the Starfall team are really doing amazing things with limited budgets, almost entirely w/o bureaucracy.

I was one of a half-dozen “bright” kids when I was young, at my school, who read at a very high level. Only two of us did so naturally, the other four were drilled by their parents. Today, only us two natural readers do any significant amount of reading for pleasure. One of the others, who’s still a friend, mentions his parents made reading a duty for him, and that lingers.

I agree entirely. If I came across as thinking otherwise, that was not my attention.

I would also add to your list that some kids are positioned, either through ability or drive, to go through undergraduate and graduate school and work as a high level executive while others are positioned to be mechanics. Why should these two kids go through the same (or similar) education system for the first 18 years of their life? Why not let the former take advanced liberal arts classes while the latter takes vocational classes? I know many bristle at this notion because of the idea of kids being tracked and having their futures determined and limited for them by others (like this doesn’t happen a million other ways), but if the decision is left up to the student and the family with advice from dedicated professionals, I see no reason why we have to have the same expectations for everyone and then consider a whole class of kids failure because they were never cut out for that path to begin with.

It’s quite likely that different kids (and different parents) need different things from the schools. For example, my two school-aged kids went to kindergarten reading books independently, my wife stays at home so we don’t absolutely need daycare till 3 every weekday, and we don’t have any trouble providing them food and medical care and such. There are many kids who got to school not knowing the alphabet, whose parents work (so that daycare function is part of what makes it possible for the family to stay afloat), whose families don’t manage to provide decent meals every day, whose families wouldn’t make it to a doctor for vaccinations and such if not required for school, etc. There are even many families in the US where the parents don’t speak much English, and they’re relying on the schools and their kids’ playmates to teach their kids the language they’ll need to be full members of this society. And there are many kids with some kind of special needs, where the school is having to do a bunch of extra stuff to help the kids get something out of school.

My guess is that kids from such different circumstances just need different stuff, and that the kind of education reform or redesign that works well for, say, children of educated middle-class parents, may not work all that well for kids of Salvadoran immigrants working three jobs each, or for kids of a single mother who dropped out of school when she had her first child at 16.

Personally, I think we have far bigger questions to ask before we can begin to discuss true overhaul. The big question is… what is the goal of education? That is a question that is often ignored in our system, which is why we have so many disparate parts of the education system/process that work in opposition towards each other. We talk alot about fostering creativity but then use standardized teaching which emphasize a very different type of learning and thinking. Leaving aside my personal feelings on which of these is better, the fact is, such disjointed ideology and methodology is just stupid. There will likely be many different answers to this question, which is a good thing, at which point different paths will be constructed using different means to achieve different ends. And I’m not talking about minor differences like large group vs small group or whole language vs phonics instruction. I’m talking about far larger issues.

1. I certainly wouldn’t imagine that smaller groups would be completely insular, so there would be interaction and flux through multiple groups. Also, if ‘school’ time is reduced (as frequently happens with home schooled children, they spend much much less time in instruction, and not solely because they’re smarter, but because instruction is more focused and individualized), there’s more time overall for social interaction. I also don’t know how much a larger group than 10 or so actually interacts with everyone, on a regular basis. So I think it would be a wash, or still tilted in favor of the small groups.

2. We have bad teachers now because they have to be “teachers” in a) a crummy system and b) under odd circumstances. When you load 20 kids in a room, solely based on age, with completely different interests and aptitudes and attitudes, it’s not surprising that a ‘teachers’ time is going to be spent wasted on dealing with a small fraction of those kids, and likely not actually teaching a subject. I think this gets better as kids get older and kids are somewhat more separated by interest and aptitude into different classes. But there’s still significant problem with attitudes in a lot of classes.

But for home and neighborhood schooling, I think there would be the ability to focus a lot more on each child, and the knowledge of the ‘teacher’ doesn’t matter as much. And this would especially be true if programs like the one which started this conversation were more available, and they would be if this was a more accepted model of childhood learning. So the fact that we don’t have a lot of ‘teachers’ now that are suited to a bad system isn’t really as important. I’ve seen plenty of parents who you wouldn’t think “they could be qualified as an ‘educator’” be fine as homeschooling parents, because it’s not about them actually teaching as much as kids being interested in learning.

My objection to homeschooling is based on a few premises:
1.) Vygotsky’s social-constructivist theory tells us that much learning happens best when it is learned through interactions with peers. Home-schooling groups that are smaller than ten likely don’t offer the necessary opportunities for social interaction. And the learning isn’t simply social, but cognitive as well.
2.) We have trouble as it is staffing our schools with enough effective teachers. A lot (I’m tempted to say most but I won’t be that dire right now) of teachers are shit. Some of that has to do with unions. Some of that has to do with compensation. Some of that has to do with education as a profession still being very young. There are a myriad of factors. Smaller groupings of students will require more teachers and I don’t know if there is a supply to fit that demand. Now, don’t get me wrong; teachers do not have a monopoly on the knowledge base that we hope children attain as they go through schooling nor on the skills required to convey knowledge and guide development. I’m sure there are many people who have never took an education course or lifted an education book who could walk into a classroom today and be effective instructors. But I don’t know that there are enough out there to make your scenario a reality.
3.) Schools provide many services beyond education. Many children get 2/3s of their daily meals there. It serves as a screening tool for identifying needs. It provides access to materials that might be otherwise inaccessible for many kids.

I agree that the perception of home schooling is unfair. I’m sure there are many kids for whom home schooling is best and there are obviously many success stories of home schooling. But, the home schooling population is a self-selecting one; it does not surprise me that most of the kids who are home schooled do well. It is the same reason that kids in charter schools and private schools tend to do better than those in public schools. Yes, part of it is the likelihood of a better quality education; but there is also much that has to do with a set of parents who care enough about education to research and seek out options like charter schools or private schools or spend the time to provide a quality home education. Those parents would likely have successful children no matter where they went to school because of their own investment. So, the data is a bit skewed.

The state’s monopoly on education is troublesome. But I don’t know that widespread home schooling is the solution, given what we know about how students learn best and the practical issues around finding enough qualified home schoolers who are willing to do the job.

Considering the state, and especially the scope (5% of the world’s population but over 25% of the world’s prisoners) of US prisons I’d say that desicription is pretty well justified.

BJS Recidivism Calculator. This lets you select some traits of a given criminal (race, age, prior criminal history, sentence served), and then uses data collected from several states to give some estimates on likelihood that this guy will end up back in jail within three years.

Also be interested to see if more humane treatment produces better results.

Define “better”. I suspect who it works for and how well would depend GREATLY on that definition.

Happier inmates? Of course.

Feeling morally superior to those barbaric lower life forms over in the US? Check!

Lower recidivism? Depends VERY VERY VERY much on why they’re in there – people who like violence are still going to like violence, no matter how well they learn to cook, etc. For some groups of criminals, I could see real value here… not sure how to set up a system that won’t be easily gamed, though (since essentially ALL criminals would prefer this over the regular ones).

The part I found really odd was that they did this with what they call a “maximum security” prison. If a criminal is so easily rehabilitated, they don’t need to be in maximum security. If a criminal needs to be in maximum security, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that playing house for a while will really rehabilitate them.

But then, with that 21 year maximum sentence no matter what, I suppose they have a much lower bar for “rehabilitated” than I do.

The problem here is that drug dogs regularly give false alerts, and have been shown in controlled tests to alert to please their masters. This then provides probable cause for a search warrant. Which means these cops are going to get to search whatever apartments they want, based on no real probable cause.

If that’s the real problem (and I agree that it is) with the story in question, not that the police went through the public access areas of the apartment complex, then the story you’re linking is a VERY poor example – it strongly implies that the problem is the police going through the complex.

That’s really all I meant, what I was trying to check with you on – it seemed like you were complaining primarily about just going through the complex. Just to be clear, if they really were following Constitutional and ethical procedures (not the farce that drug-sniffing dogs has become), would you still have pointed out that story?

(Whether they would bother wasting their time to do that without the unethical method of obtaining “probable” cause is a different question… one that pretty well answers itself, I think.)

I really do think that more people would take the option of stay-home parenting and homeschooling were it not for the efforts of the government to marginalize it. As it is, it invites so much government interference into one’s life, either through the board of Ed, or through CPS, that it’s daunting. But despite the continual denigration of homeschooling as the provenance of kooky superreligious folks or anti-social weirdos, it seems to have at least as good a track record at teaching children as government schools do.

And no, it’s never going to be a total replacement for current schools, but right now it’s barely even an option. And what I’m envisioning – home or neighborhood schooled kids learning in smallish groups, like up to 10 kids in someone’s home – is for the most part really frowned on from what I can recall.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean the education is happening in the home and small neighborhood groups? Or that supervision and oversight wouldn’t be so top down?

If it is the latter, New York tried this with more community based oversight. One district (I believe in Brooklyn but don’t quote me) that was primarily poor and black actually started to make some very impressive gains but bucked the system to do it with much of the “bucking” taking the form of the black community leaders telling the white higher ups that maybe they knew better when it came to teaching their kids. Naturally, the program was disbanded, quite violently if memory serves (I think the local leaders were actually locked out of meetings). I’m being vague because I didn’t witness any of this first-hand (I think it took place in the 70′s) but learned about it in grad school. I’ll see if I can dig up more info on it.

I’d much rather see ‘education’ moved away from supposed education professionals as a group and more to a distributed system, based more on home and small neighborhood group supervision. This runs counter to the babysitting / day care / warehousing system we have now that allows higher overall productivity (especially if you count the babysitting as productivity). And I don’t know how it would actually work, but I just can’t get away from the fact that there’s a ton of inefficiency in current education, because of the frictions we’ve been talking about.

But I think it also needs to be recognized that there will always be ‘limits to access’, because if we’re talking instruction, then that takes time and effort by other specialized people, and they should be compensated for that time and effort. Some things can certainly make it cheaper (like the Khan Academy type of thing where a video is made once and then takes no more time), but it’s still got some cost. But there’s always going to be some limit when something needs ‘doing’.