Hobbit
Senior Member
My mom has been tracking the failings of the education system since she got into it. So far, she's got a perfect batting average at spotting bad ideas as soon as she hears them (middle school was one of the biggest). So here's a short list of what's wrong with the education system, according to me and my mom.
Lack of Discipline: When I went to a private school, what many would consider minor infractions would get you a paddling. We did NOT act up in class. We paid attention and learned. Now, spineless administrators and parents who won't accept that their kids aren't perfect ensure that teachers have little power over students who don't care about their grades. And thanks to "individuality," many things that would encourage discipline, or at least keep discipline problems out of the way of honor students, things like uniforms, reform school, and honors classes, are scrapped. I still can't believe the huge objections to uniforms. It has been shown that wearing a uniform gives a student a sense of propriety that leads to discipline, but the PTA always kills any uniform proposal in two seconds flat.
Political Correctness: Apparantly, placing children of different academic ability in different classes is descrimination. Funny how not playing the 6th string in basketball is not... Anyway, the idea that nobody can feel inferior to another is bullcrap, and I've seen it end many honors classes in schools, leading otherwise bright students to get bored and give up on education, forever affecting their lives.
False Measurements of Success: Those who want to measure a teacher's success always do so with standardized test scores, beacause they're too lazy to have somebody do a personal evaluation. This leads to false successes in high class neighborhoods where the parents actually make their kids try and hire tutors for them, and it leads to false failures in lower class areas where getting a 10th grader to actually learn the alphabet could be considered a miracle. Taking from an e-mail my mom got, imagine if dentists were done the same way teachers were. Some of the best dentists in the world work backwoods counties of rednecks and get so good because their patients' mouths are disaster areas and they manage to salvage them. However, they get more cavities reported, so they would get a bad grade and be forced to be observed by some Beverly Hills dentist whose patients have no cavities and who doesn't know the first thing about fixing a disaster mouth. Another example was a speaker who spoke to the teachers at my mom's school. He used to make grape jelly and said that teachers should be expected to produce smart students in the way he was expected to produce good jelly. If he didn't make good jelly, then he'd go out of business. My mom asked the guy, "And what would you do if over half of your shipments were sour grapes and you weren't allowed to return them. If we get a bad batch of students, we can't just send them back and ask for better." Things such as this is why a mediocre teacher to manages to always win teacher of the year in the county. She gets all honors classes.
Bad Parents: I don't really think I can add any in this catagory.
I think privatization really is the key. Subsidize it for lower income families so schools actually have to compete for business. I guarantee they'd shape up faster than any government regulation could.
Lack of Discipline: When I went to a private school, what many would consider minor infractions would get you a paddling. We did NOT act up in class. We paid attention and learned. Now, spineless administrators and parents who won't accept that their kids aren't perfect ensure that teachers have little power over students who don't care about their grades. And thanks to "individuality," many things that would encourage discipline, or at least keep discipline problems out of the way of honor students, things like uniforms, reform school, and honors classes, are scrapped. I still can't believe the huge objections to uniforms. It has been shown that wearing a uniform gives a student a sense of propriety that leads to discipline, but the PTA always kills any uniform proposal in two seconds flat.
Political Correctness: Apparantly, placing children of different academic ability in different classes is descrimination. Funny how not playing the 6th string in basketball is not... Anyway, the idea that nobody can feel inferior to another is bullcrap, and I've seen it end many honors classes in schools, leading otherwise bright students to get bored and give up on education, forever affecting their lives.
False Measurements of Success: Those who want to measure a teacher's success always do so with standardized test scores, beacause they're too lazy to have somebody do a personal evaluation. This leads to false successes in high class neighborhoods where the parents actually make their kids try and hire tutors for them, and it leads to false failures in lower class areas where getting a 10th grader to actually learn the alphabet could be considered a miracle. Taking from an e-mail my mom got, imagine if dentists were done the same way teachers were. Some of the best dentists in the world work backwoods counties of rednecks and get so good because their patients' mouths are disaster areas and they manage to salvage them. However, they get more cavities reported, so they would get a bad grade and be forced to be observed by some Beverly Hills dentist whose patients have no cavities and who doesn't know the first thing about fixing a disaster mouth. Another example was a speaker who spoke to the teachers at my mom's school. He used to make grape jelly and said that teachers should be expected to produce smart students in the way he was expected to produce good jelly. If he didn't make good jelly, then he'd go out of business. My mom asked the guy, "And what would you do if over half of your shipments were sour grapes and you weren't allowed to return them. If we get a bad batch of students, we can't just send them back and ask for better." Things such as this is why a mediocre teacher to manages to always win teacher of the year in the county. She gets all honors classes.
Bad Parents: I don't really think I can add any in this catagory.
I think privatization really is the key. Subsidize it for lower income families so schools actually have to compete for business. I guarantee they'd shape up faster than any government regulation could.