Something’s been on my mind for a long time. It’s the whole “public school atmosphere” thing.
I didn’t generally like school when I was a kid. I guess I went to pretty good schools, as far as schools go. I liked a lot of my teachers. I just didn’t like the “set-up.” I thought that whoever designed the whole process must have been a bunch of ignorant, arrogant jackasses.
Year after year, teachers and students complained about the same things. Some were reasonable, some weren’t.
The jackasses who designed the school systems never seemed to care about the reasonable ones. They cared about toys for themselves. They liked those tests where you needed No. 2 pencils to fill out circles on sheets. (They loved those things.) They loved their little computer punch-cards with the corners cut off. They loved things called “semesters”, “modules,” “units,” and “curriculums,” and they like to do things like, “covering material,” “getting you ready for the big test,” “giving pop quizzes.”
Even the furniture was distasteful. I was about six feet tall when I was 14 (that was pretty tall in the ’60s), so those stupid little desks that wrapped around you (the ones with the graffiti ground in by Bic pens on the tops and the gum on the bottoms) really annoyed me. They were designed for Hobbits.
All the other furniture seemed so institutional. Perhaps because it was institutional. The bookshelves, the cabinets, the teacher’s metal desk… all designed by people with zero sense of what a child might relate to. They couldn’t care less about that.
Even the books were awful. The rows and rows of sameness; covers designed by some nefarious department of some megalithic textbook company. Designed and distributed by “The evil Dr. Textbook…“
I remember the sense of disgust I had when I noticed that some administrator, pandering to what he or she sensed the students could “relate” to, had ordered dozens of copies of some “young reader” books. They had some insipid title, like “The Rebel of Hilldale High School.”
Yeah, real rebellious. I could just see the lab-coats and bean-counters at Cosmo-Demonic Scholastic Textbook Publishing arranging a focus group about “what the youth like to read.” They’d come up with a theme (rebel-who-finally-learns-some-socially-approved-lesson-which-gets-him-the girl-because-he’s-not-such-a-badass-after-all.) Then they probably hired some hack to write it, then shipped it out to hapless teachers all over the country.
The teachers dutifully put the books on the institutional bookshelves, in nice, neat rows. Eventually a kid would pick one up, look at the cover, sneer or sigh, and throw it back onto the row. We almost never had to read those books, thank God, because most of the teachers knew what was up.
I’ll bet most of those teachers would have liked to have broken out their forbidden copies of “Catcher in the Rye” and let us pass them around. But nooooo…, we didn’t have time. We had to “cover material.”
I’d like to continue along this thread for a few days. Please leave a comment and let me know if I should keep this up, or get back to math (or as Frank Zappa liked to say, “Shut up and play yer guitar!”)
I think there are some Ideas in this thread that it would be worth clearing up, not just to rant, but so I can get on to “real math” with you and I having a better understanding of how we can approach it more effectively and meaningfully.
Waddya say?
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What I hate is the whole age-grouping thing. Ideally, they should dig deep, master skills, and use them in later lessons, but many kids don’t master anything. They just drift from C to D to C, not really retaining anything and not caring, because there’s no incentive to excel. No easy answer to it, I guess. And you’re right – the furniture is institutional because institutional is cheap — it’s all about the bucks!
Gee, I went to public schools. We had excellent math and physics courses in H.S. This included
a physics course where we derived the Bohr Atom, and PV=nrt from the hypothesis of statistical
chaos. I had an excellent electronics course. Also first rate English and History courses.
We read Chaucer in Middle English, and Beowulf in translation. In French Class, we read Zola
and Victor Hugo.
In elementary school, my fifth grade classroom had books by H.G. Wells, Poe, and Milton.
My fourth grade class had excellent science–I learned there to build and design electric motors and generators, and to use an oil immersion microscope.
Such was life in the 1960′s in the NYC public schools.
Many of my high school teachers were bona fide radicals–one lost his job for a protest against saluting the flag, and others had marched in the civil rights demonstrations. Many were card carrying socialists–red diaper babies–who actually believed that it was a socialist goal to teach their middle class and lower class kids to think and read and question authority.
Today, elementary school is about job training–not about education ( which comes from the same root as “educe”–to bring out.)
AMERICA HAS DESTROYED ITS PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM–ONCE THE BEST IN THE WORLD.
To give you an idea how far the mighty have fallen, I grew up in the East South Bronx in NYC.
We used to CARE about education in America–now we care about image, politics, and measurement of the mediocre.
Professor Homunculus sez:
Amen, sister!
There are other sites with similar concerns about the morality-based design doctrine of public school. Please check out these other links:
School Sucks Podcast http://schoolsucks.podomatic.c.....4_06-08_00
The Class Struggle http://wp.me/ptcfd-1L
Interesting sites. I’m only partially with you on this stuff, though. People love to hate stuff, so you have to be careful that you don’t entice people into creeping into conspiracy theory.
Sure, in general, schools suck. But not because kids don’t like them. Veggies are good for you and kids hate them – that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with veggies.
But I agree with most of your premises. Either way, it’s good that you are pointing out a lot of the stuff you are pointing out. We need to do something about our schools. But first I’d like to figure out what it should be before we burn the schoolhouses down, you know?