Is mass education a failed experiment?

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is this really working? wrote:

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RyecorDone wrote:
"Mass education" is a way to even the playing field, to give every kid a chance to rise to whatever level their educational opportunities might provide for them.

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But to give everyone a chance, you just need to make education available. It doesn't need to be compulsory.

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Only the republicans want crappy underfunded for the majority of the population.

The rich repubs send their kids to private schools so they have a leg up their whole life, no worries.

The poor repubs keep their kids undereducated so they keep voting repub.

It's a vicious cycle.

Hmm the US invested heavily in education after WW2 into the 70's and look where we ended up? Who would've thought.

We need to bring our people up in this globalized world, not every man for themselves.

Yes, mass education really did work and still is working if you define "working" as accomplishing what it was meant to do. Mass education was really the best way to facilitate the industrial revolution. You needed a basic level of literacy, enough to read directions for operating a machine, knowing which pile to stack finished products in, etc. And you needed to transform an agricultural work force, one where you can kind of work on your own schedule much of the time, into an industrial one where people respond to bells or whistles that tell them when to show up for and leave work, when to stop working and have lunch, one that follows instructions from a supervisor. These are, not coincidentally, the same things you need to do to graduate from high school.

It was never really meant to produce scholars, deep analytical thinkers, the people who would go on to become the supervisors who would tell the products of mass education when to show up for work, break for lunch, and go home, i.e., white collar workers. But it did create the possibility of becoming one of those white collar types for many who did well in public schools.

"...Industrial Revolution..." should have been capitalized.

It seems IQ is the primary determinant of ability to acquire knowledge in such a way as to derive economic or social benefit. This pisses lots of people off for obvious reasons.

School is:

1) childcare, and

2) a sorting mechanism that identifies those that are intelligent and hardworking and allows them to flourish.

It is, overall, a good and fair system.

Bottom line, public education is a fantastic example of a government funded social program. Learning aside, I’ll chalk up free childcare including transportation and in many cases food as a major player in a healthy economy.

It’s either that or bring back child labor. If they want to work let them!

Rojo my reply to you was blocked for profanity? This was my reply.

You must have been a very good runner.

Times have changed. Things taught in school over the years can be referenced in seconds through a phone.

The entire teaching profession can be reduced by 90%. Have one virtual teacher per hundreds of classrooms, and have grades, etc computerized.

Teachers complain about the 20:1 ratio constantly. This would eliminate tat complaint... and most of them, and the unions.

Nope. You have an inaccurate view of the purpose of mass education. We have a well-trained workforce to drive the economy. When used appropriately (like post-WW2) it functions amazingly well in generating GDP. Today, the wealthy classes have simply largely abandoned them in the hunt for cheaper labor. Now we're eating our own, our best innovations are social media apps to constantly distract attention from productive ends.

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is this really working? wrote:
We've grown accustomed to the idea of sending every single kid to school, but compulsory education for all is really a pretty new idea. Have our experiences really proven mass education to be a good idea? The average person is still dumb as a bag of bricks. Mostly public education has just shown that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Why not just open our schools to those who actually want an education and let people make their own choices about enrollment?

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adsfdasfasfsafadfa wrote:
The average person is dumb as a bag of bricks but most of them can read and do basic math (addition and subtraction). Get rid of mass education and they will be illiterate and unable to count past 10.

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John Dewey pretty much had public education figured out in the early 1900s and since then we have just been playing a game where we see how far we can stray from Dewey's ideals before the public education system falls apart. Compulsory public education came about in the later part of the 1800s due to the industrial revolution. The mechanization of farm labor sent millions of Americans from working on farms to factory work in the cities. The major problem was that many rural Americans had little schooling and could not read or do basic math well enough to be able to work in a factory. Compulsory public education sought to remedy that and prepare rural Americans for work in the factories.

Dewey saw a larger social role for public education. Public education wasn't just about makin sure the children of farmers from Kansas would be able to be able to operate industrial machinery. Public education was about preparing children to become ethical participants in a democratic society. Dewey did not want schools to just be about forcing children to master the skill necessary for their future vocations in the factories. Dewey wanted children to become autonomous ethical human beings capable of participating in democratic society. Thus, Dewey's model of education, in short, is more about experiential learning over route memorization and mastery (there is a lot more to it than that).

Today, we are seeing a resurfacing of the idea of "tracking" that Dewey railed against 100 years ago and we are again seeing demands that education to no more than be cost effective way to train a future workforce. Back in the early 1900s, "tracking" was a practice of weeding out children who excelled in academics from those who struggled. The good students continued their studies and went on to higher earning professions. The rest of the students had their education cut short and went to work as laborers. We are seeing this again with calls for pushing struggling students (mostly black and brown children) in to VoTech programs where they can have gainful employment as a hair dresser, diesel mechanic, medical assistant or welder. And charter schools and standardized testing in public education is also another example of the rejection of Dewey's position that public education is about building better citizens. Instead, charter school and standardized testing advocates want school to be a ruthlessly efficient way of filling children with the knowledge necessary to meet the demands of the current job market.

The movement away from Dewey's ideals results in schools that kids hate. My son is as smart as any kid and it only took until about second grade before he decided that he hates school. His school's curriculum is heavily determined by standardized high stakes testing. And the political reason for abandoning Dewey's principles is that students who receive the most brutally efficient knowledge transfer necessary to participate in the modern labor market are people who lack the resources to be able to understand the social problems of our time and be able to participate intelligently in society. As we have seen over the past 4 years, the erosion of Dewey's principles has resulted in a large part of the US population knowing nothing more than what is necessary to earn their paycheck, making them susceptible to manipulation through populist (the bad kind) propaganda to support a government that actively works against their own self interest (and even health and safety). Thus, modern public education's role is now to make sure the masses are compliant to the needs of capital and do not get any funny ideas about a different way to organize society.

Excellent post.

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Teachers hate homework too wrote:

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1-800-JERKSTORE wrote:
Sorry to my friends who are teachers out there but homework has to go! Seriously.

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Newsflash: teachers hate homework too. It's one more thing to create, distribute, field questions about, grade, etc. No teacher likes homework, and most teachers understand that HW is not associated with any increase in performance.

Teachers give out homework because many parents demand it. They either want something to keep their kid busy while they make dinner, or they're just so accustomed to it being a normal thing that failing to provide it makes the school seem like they aren't rigorous, high expectation, etc.

I've always said my homework is optional and that I'm not going to grade it, and you should see the looks I get from some parents, it's like I told them I plan on drinking from a flask and napping in the back of the classroom for the whole year.

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Smoke weed, talk sh!t like Lane Kiffin wrote:
Nope. You have an inaccurate view of the purpose of mass education. We have a well-trained workforce to drive the economy. When used appropriately (like post-WW2) it functions amazingly well in generating GDP. Today, the wealthy classes have simply largely abandoned them in the hunt for cheaper labor. Now we're eating our own, our best innovations are social media apps to constantly distract attention from productive ends.

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Yusef Scumm wrote:

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Smoke weed, talk sh!t like Lane Kiffin wrote:
Nope. You have an inaccurate view of the purpose of mass education. We have a well-trained workforce to drive the economy. When used appropriately (like post-WW2) it functions amazingly well in generating GDP. Today, the wealthy classes have simply largely abandoned them in the hunt for cheaper labor. Now we're eating our own, our best innovations are social media apps to constantly distract attention from productive ends.

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“Well trained” is certainly debatable.

You are correct in that using teachers appropriately is the way to go. As in... get rid of 90% of them. Teach remotely, grade electronically, and save monetarily. No more high salaries, unions, or complaints.

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[quote]Shame 45 wrote:
The problem is that school is way too slow. You need to teach the kids a lot when they are younger and keep them challenged (which is not happening). The kids acquire lazy behavior because then they expect education to always come easy.

Make school harder. Especially in the early years. Hold back the slower kids but keep them interacting with those of their age in non-core classes and sports.
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Racist post.
what are you going to do when one or two groups of k kids are moved up and the classes held back are all minorities? While it might actually be BETTER to be in a classroom of people with like abilities, the visual is really bad.

Schools and education is the one area where nearly everyone agrees that it needs a major reform and overhaul, but the second anyone mentions something they are shouted down and told how horrible that idea is.
There really is no market for new innovative ideas or approaches that veer far from what has become standard now for about 50 years.