DeVos will likely get confirmed, unfortunately, but my concerns have not changed. I'm a firm supporter of public schools. Federal, state, local, whatever -- pubic education is as much a tax-supported project as fire protection and safe roads. However when private sector PROFITS derive from education it's a diversion of tax dollars.
America has a long tradition of private academies, both parochial and endowed by foundations, where tax money sometimes benefits students but with marginal institutional benefit. Even now there is a rising crop of private-sector schools -- call them charter, private, target, magnet or whatever -- many of which do a good job at educating their respective student bodies. Outfits are now getting in the game that are organized, clean, with cutting-edge resources, even well-compensated faculty and/or operating as non-profits. What could be more attractive?
The problem is two-fold:
1) By further enabling "in loco parentis" they are collectively eroding the importance of family (even community) input to the growth and development of upcoming generations, and
2) most of them are cherry-picking the most promising students from the "public" population, thereby giving their respective institutions a differential advantage in the education goal, while leaving the public sector teachers the task of educating a more challenging population -- not to mention removing from that group the very peers who would otherwise have become role models for others as well as surrogate teaching assistants ("teacher's pets" at whom we have been taught to sneer).
(Also, damn few, if any of these private school alternatives accept kids with mental or behavior problems or those who don't speak English as their mother tongue.)
I'm sorry, but I still regard this government-can't-do-anything-right attitude and doctrinaire libertarian-privatization-free-market worship to be lies from the pit of Hell.
Philip Eismann But what to do,if in your neighborhood,the school aren't functioning,your child can't wait till we fix the public school system,ideals and all. At the moment we test schools and students,to determine who gets funds,who goes on to higher education. A student who needs to work,in order to feed his siblings,isn't going to have his homework done but in truth works harder then most but is lucky to get a C or D plus,but no higher education . Those struggling students,with broken homes,those are the teachers pets ,both teacher and student are lost in our current system.
John Ballard You make excellent points. Sadly the circumstances you describe are widespread across the country in many public education systems, and I have no problem with private options in those cases. I'm very impressed, for example, with KIPP Academies and any number of similar alternative systems. I'm not painting all private alternatives with a broad brush. But I am keenly aware of a proliferation of doctrinaire efforts often driven by politics, ROIs and/or religious motives more than the admittedly more challenging task of improving schools in the public sector.
Atlanta's Westminster and Lovett schools are truly excellent, and one of my children went to Howard School for two years because the public school teacher she encountered "didn't believe in" LD -- said she was "just lazy and needs to study harder." We knew better thanks to a private opinion by a clinical psychologists advised otherwise. I was fortunate to have a friend in public education to guide us, but all that was decades ago and since then much has changed.
I wish I had better answers. But from all I have read an avalanche of private schools has more to do with private sector mining of taxes for profits ahead of education. The trend has been more pronounced in the post-secondary sector than primary and high schools, but that segment also has a growing share of the problems from which my objections derive. It is a pernicious trend that over time will only make public education worse for the students you describe so well.
John Ballard My opinions derive in part from when I was a GI in Korea all of 1966 and half of 1967. Most of my off-duty time was learning about the country and teaching English conversation to advanced students at the local high school. Korea was so poor at that time that it could not afford universal free public education, so private alternatives in that case were available for those young people who couldn't pass the entrance exams to attend public school. It was exactly the opposite of what I knew from America where "private" meant "exclusive top-grade" settings. By the time one of those Korean high school kids got into my after-school, weekend classes they had already passed two entrance exams to remain in public schools. And those who were academically strong enough to go on would have to pass more tests to advance to college -- again, most of which was publicly funded. I did have a chance to tour Ewha University once, founded by Methodists in the nineteenth century, but as with today's American alternatives the places with truly good standards were few and far between.
Philip Eismann Yes,I agree. Education has never been a one size fits all. Some children learn by route ,that may work for you as a teacher but others need something else. Here in Germany, the Rudolf Steiner,and Waldorf education, also known as anthroposophy, pay a big role. Its pedagogy emphasizes the role of imagination in learning, striving to integrate holistically the intellectual, practical, and artistic development . All of it ,pretty ideals,if you happen to believe.
I leaned about the ideals of a public education,I went to NYPS,PS32 and when I came up ,we were sure this was the best answer,with standardized teaching and testing,that was the ideal behind the Iowa tests. Now that public schools are rated by they're students test results and teachers worried about the schools ratings,only prep,for those tests,SAT's,college enrollment,those troubled neighborhoods ,zones,students are the big losers.
In a world where kids grow up wanting to be famous.
John Ballard I forgot about rote learning. It's no longer highly regarded by most professionals, but I'm also a believer in memory discipline, having come from a time when memorizing the multiplication tables and committing poems and segments from literature was pushed hard in school. My Korean students often carried with them homemade strings of flash cards, about the size of postage stamps on a string, to help them memorize the many Chinese characters in widespread use all over Asia. Pronunciations change from country to country but the meanings of Chinese pictographs doesn't change. I learned the phonetic Korean alphabet quickly (it's phonetic, like the Western alphabet, so I could "read" without knowing what it meant -- rather like "reading" any Western foreign language -- but those characters remained a mystery to me).
And who can forget that the Scripps national spelling bee is always won by Indian kids who come from an education tradition heavily invested in rote learning?
Philip Eismann If only one size fit all. I liked memorizing. I was no good at it but it taught me nonetheless.To do what,what was hard. That my material,took on many shadings,that a text wasn't a fixed thing, that words had colors, that an idea was only fascinating as long as it was in movement.( which is why I at times I write ,out to lunch posts,keep it moving,what did you say?)Like looking out over the same view but from a slightly different shift in position, that you can never enter the river in the same spot idea,(whether life is a river,that's an amusing discussion. Are we shipwrecked,for the moment, is there such a thing as progress? )Memorizing text may hold a key.
Memorizing poems,formed a national identity. Every child could recite,Paul Revers Night Ride, even the weekly hit parade,built a national memory,stuck in traffic on the way home from the beach,every car with its windows rolled down,played basically from the same hit list,in the dinner the jukebox played the same songs,now we have climate control. For some this was stifling,the constrictive Eisenhower's Years.( it's funny to find hippies,posting Eisenhower quotes)And we rebelled,rebellion is patricide. This urge for destruction,this instinct, to blame the system, this idea that out of a vacuum something new and better will emerge, is probably a terrible notion(my argument with Buddhism ).Trump as Cultural Revolution.
I like Chinese poems,simply cause ,you have to learn in read a different way,both vertical and horizontal.
Cicadas' voices gather in the old monastery
Birds' shadows fly over the cold pond
"cicadas' voices ,"echo the "birds shadows', ""cold "prolongs "old "and "monastery "is reflected in the "pond."
We just can't be exposed to enough trivial stuff that leads nowhere ,in a pragmatic world. Crime and Punishment,is reason with a sledgehammer,but it's no longer on the school curriculum.
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