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Post by Reactionary Rage on Dec 15, 2021 13:27:04 GMT
It might not be such a bad idea! Given fallen standards, teenagers who are barely literate and universities having to run courses for students prior to starting to try and get them up to speed on the basics then, yeah, maybe focusing on more of that stuff might actually be a sensible thing. The ex had some student email her charity the other week with an enquiry relating to her course and the email was doggerel. It was embarrassing. Guess what course this student was on? JOURNALISM. I had to laugh! And then I kicked her cat. Something has gone wrong.
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Post by Reactionary Rage on Dec 15, 2021 13:31:46 GMT
Actually ,with disruptive behaviour and attitudes what measures are open to teachers to CURB their troublemakers? Isolation booths Detention Talking to their parents Throwing them off a cliff Do these work? I mean with a good percentage of these kids the parents are the fundamental problem so trying to get anything out of them is a waste of time. They can just punt that back to the teachers these days and blame them for their own failings.
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Post by Reactionary Rage on Dec 15, 2021 13:35:34 GMT
Going back to knowledge, I really like hearing people talk about things they're passionate and knowledgeable about. They get engrossed in it, that's when knowledge can bring real happiness. You're creating this world you can just immerse yourself in. It seems like so much education is simply memorising and regurgitating things rather than really learning about stuff and exploring subjects in an investigative, exciting way. At uni in particular I thought it was more about memorisation shit and felt I was just vomiting stuff onto a piece of paper but then I did do IT, which, holds little interest to me really so I kinda blagged it.
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Post by oh oooh on Dec 15, 2021 13:39:30 GMT
But the problem with this 'it's getting worse' idea is that it can't possibly be true. People have been saying the same thing since time began.
I'll quote Socrates again:
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
470 BC
so what, then? the problem hasn't changed. The way we deal with it has, and we're not going back to hitting kids. That's a sign of bad teaching, where the problem doesn't lie with the child but with the teacher, who can't instil respect because they're shit at their job.
Anyway hitting kids just breeds resentment.
There isn't an easy solution. If we're forcing (and we are) children to go to school for 12 years then there's going to be a fair proportion who get fuck-all out of it, and a smaller proportion who actually hate it. But what's the alternative?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 15, 2021 13:47:08 GMT
Going back to knowledge, I really like hearing people talk about things they're passionate and knowledgeable about. They get engrossed in it, that's when knowledge can bring real happiness. You're creating this world you can just immerse yourself in. It seems like so much education is simply memorising and regurgitating things rather than really learning about stuff and exploring subjects in an investigative, exciting way. At uni in particular I thought it was more about memorisation shit and felt I was just vomiting stuff onto a piece of paper but then I did do IT, which, holds little interest to me really so I kinda blagged it. I've always been poor at memorising stuff ( which is one reason why I did terribly in my exams at school,although I did very little revision, which hardly helped!) unless it's something I'm interested in and then it comes very naturally. I tend to conceptualise information by placing it in a wider narrative..that's how I remember stuff. I find it much harder to remember things as dry facts.
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Post by tory on Dec 15, 2021 13:51:49 GMT
The biggest concern is that it is almost impossible to exclude children from education for bad behaviour. The lack of truly meaningful sanctions for children means that it's not very difficult for one or two children to completely disrupt the learning of a whole class of students. I have a Year 11 class where one student completely disrupts the other 29. If he isn't in the class, they learn. If he is, then it's a battleground. The lad is troubled, but the question, which is often never answered in a truthful manner, is why should one child disrupt thirty others? All the attention is placed on the one child to "manage" their behaviour, but the effect they have on others is almost brushed under the carpet. And the conversation you hear around the school from other teachers is "that kid shouldn't be here" - i.e they should have been expelled a long time ago.
Children have a right to be educated by the state. That's a lovely idea, but the reality in many instances is that some parents, who have no real investiture in their children's education, see education as one big childcare institution that keeps them out of the house or off the streets. Poorly behaved children then enter a merry-go-round of schools where they are "transferred" to other places and then eventually find themselves in a managed place where they try to get a few GCSEs.
One of the big issues, at least in the UK, is that the process of hiving off less academically-minded boys (mostly) at the age of 13 or 14 to attend to technical or vocational colleges has never truly been applied that well. Successive governments have thrown millions at trying to solve this issue and it hasn't worked. In Germany it works, to a certain extent, due to the fact that Germany has a much larger manufacturing base than Britain. There are engineering jobs to go for example. The comprehensive system eradicated workshops and the like, so that students, particularly boys, who want to do design or "stuff with their hands" has disappeared. The outcome of that is that when students study physics and maths at GCSE level it becomes entirely theoretical. If they did Design, Woodwork etc, then they would be able to apply it in the workshop. Many students leave school with a host of academic subjects that then have no real application in the real world, so it is no wonder that many play up.
The problem with trying to solve that issue is that you have to then think about what age do you say to a child that you are determining where they go? Many people didn't like the 11+ system because it defined them from too young an age. They bore those scars for the rest of their lives. Do you apply it at 16? It could be far too late then, for they may have wasted their education.
I see no real solution to the issue to be honest, other than making people pay for education, even if it is just highlighting to people how much they are paying for it through their taxes. Like with the NHS, the problem is that the conception to many of these enormous institutions of many people is that they are free. We do pay for them, but we don't know how much exactly.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 15, 2021 13:52:16 GMT
But the problem with this 'it's getting worse' idea is that it can't possibly be true. People have been saying the same thing since time began. I'll quote Socrates again: The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.470 BC so what, then? the problem hasn't changed. The way we deal with it has, and we're not going back to hitting kids. That's a sign of bad teaching, where the problem doesn't lie with the child but with the teacher, who can't instil respect because they're shit at their job. Anyway hitting kids just breeds resentment. There isn't an easy solution. If we're forcing (and we are) children to go to school for 12 years then there's going to be a fair proportion who get fuck-all out of it, and a smaller proportion who actually hate it. But what's the alternative? A much wider curriculum that isn't narrowly academic but instead develops a range of skills. If a kid love cars, have him work a garage two days a week, instead of forcing him or her to learn the causes of the first world war.
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Post by tory on Dec 15, 2021 13:59:59 GMT
Let the market decide then.
If people could choose where to send their children, rather than just being allocated a school by area, then perhaps you might see a difference. A school that had an emphasis on engineering and mechanics, supported by local companies who may offer bursaries for talented students, could encourage boys for example, just as agricultural colleges support children who live in rural areas.
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Post by Reactionary Rage on Dec 15, 2021 14:03:37 GMT
But the problem with this 'it's getting worse' idea is that it can't possibly be true. People have been saying the same thing since time began. I'll quote Socrates again: The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.470 BC so what, then? the problem hasn't changed. The way we deal with it has, and we're not going back to hitting kids. That's a sign of bad teaching, where the problem doesn't lie with the child but with the teacher, who can't instil respect because they're shit at their job. Anyway hitting kids just breeds resentment. There isn't an easy solution. If we're forcing (and we are) children to go to school for 12 years then there's going to be a fair proportion who get fuck-all out of it, and a smaller proportion who actually hate it. But what's the alternative? A much wider curriculum that isn't narrowly academic but instead develops a range of skills. If a kid love cars, have him work a garage two days a week, instead of forcing him or her to learn the causes of the first world war. We deffo need a more vocational approach for some students but we also need to strengthen the basics. There is too much of this trying to stick a round peg into a square hole going on whereby kids who have skills and intelligence but are not academic are being lost and their potential not fulfilled. If you look at the behaviour of schoolchildren in this country and America, say, then I think you can see a decline and teachers who have worked for decades will sometimes tell you this. It's to be expected given social changes over the last 50 years.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 15, 2021 14:17:58 GMT
The behavioural changes are entirely a reflection of changes in society in my view. Solutions are complex and various, but almost always involve much greater financial investment, to the degree that must governments are reluctant to do. Smaller class sizes would help enormously. I also think the role of teaching assistants could be expanded ( at the moment they tend to be used solely to help individual pupils, but they could be used far more to help the teacher).
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Post by tory on Dec 15, 2021 14:20:34 GMT
Easy solutions that cost vast amounts of money to implement.
What is essentially happening in schools, in my opinion, is that they are evolving to act as a childcare institution as well as educating. I had a massive row with my sister-in-law last month because she seemed to believe that school would do everything with regard to the upbringing of her child, in particular with regard to morality, and that she could abrogate herself from any sense of responsibility.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 15, 2021 14:28:55 GMT
Easy solutions that cost vast amounts of money to implement. What is essentially happening in schools, in my opinion, is that they are evolving to act as a childcare institution as well as educating. I had a massive row with my sister-in-law last month because she seemed to believe that school would do everything with regard to the upbringing of her child, in particular with regard to morality, and that she could abrogate herself from any sense of responsibility. It depends on society's priorities doesn't it? It could be funded if those priorities were different. I'm not sure what you do about poor parenting though, that's very difficult to solve and is again a reflection of wider society.
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Post by Reactionary Rage on Dec 15, 2021 14:33:43 GMT
Easy solutions that cost vast amounts of money to implement. What is essentially happening in schools, in my opinion, is that they are evolving to act as a childcare institution as well as educating. I had a massive row with my sister-in-law last month because she seemed to believe that school would do everything with regard to the upbringing of her child, in particular with regard to morality, and that she could abrogate herself from any sense of responsibility. Are you aware of Katharine Birbalsingh and her success as a headmistress? I think you can implement cultural changes in how we teach that can really benefit children without throwing money at it but it means a very different approach although her results are startling. It's interesting what you say about your sister-in-law. It's the old lack of personal responsibility issue innit? Parents who expect teachers to do a dual role which lets them off the hook. No wonder we have problems.
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Post by oh oooh on Dec 15, 2021 14:36:00 GMT
It's a similar thing to parliamentary politics - there IS no ideal state, everybody (probably rightly) criticises whatever system is in place, pushes for change, the change is no better, people want to return to 'the basics', experts say it's unwise, blah blah blah
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Post by oh oooh on Dec 15, 2021 14:49:34 GMT
A majority is always going to be 'failed by the system'
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