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[hariseldon]

I thought I'd post some thoughts about education (for kids 3-16 - I'll leave higher education to one side as that's a whole other topic) to kick off a bit of discussion and see where it leads, as in another thread I posted some thoughts as an aside but didn't want to hijack the thread with my crap.

First, some background on my own qualifications to speak on the topic. Scroll to the red bit if you don't give a shit about the background crap. First of all, I'm 38, and I missed about 3 years of school because I had anger management issues. During that time I taught myself how to program computers and that's how I ended up as a professional software developer for my primary career. I left school with a good set of GCSEs despite this, then buggered up my A-levels and buggered up a HND (half a degree) before just going into the IT industry without a degree. Later in life I got a degree in Psychology/Globalisation (the latter half is religion, politics, economics and culture) and a masters in computing.

During the mid-00s downturn in IT I taught courses to adults at the same college where I buggered up my A-levels (didn't have a degree at this point - to this day I still have no idea why they hired me). I enjoyed it, and got myself a degree before moving to Thailand to teach in an international school for 3 years (I was a diversity hire - they needed more men - but also really they mostly wanted my girlfriend at the time to teach the kindergarten class - I knew none of this at the time). The first two were spent teaching IT from grades 1 to 11 including an iGCSE program, the third I took charge of a primary school class where the girls were doing ok, but the boys were really struggling. There was a lot of bullying and bad behaviour in the class, it was awful. I made a few simple changes such as doing up the classroom myself so they'd respect their environment more and bringing discipline for everyone's benefit and the bullying went down a lot, the behaviour improved, and the kids were able to learn. The previous (lady) teacher hated the boys and it showed. Giving them a bit of time and help, and a bit of respect, enabled them to make good progress. No I'm not a particularly good teacher, but I found a few simple things which helped.

I came back to the UK to work in a British school as a teaching assistant while I put plans in place for a PGCE or MEd (at this point I had the degree), and this got me into lots of classrooms in a secondary school. I was honestly shocked at what I found. The 2nd (of 5) set of 15 year olds (year 10) could not do their times tables. There was rampant cheating with teaching assistants more or less doing the work for students that were known to be just too lazy to give any shits. Scribes in the exam were given to kids who were just lazy. The league table focus on getting as many C or above in GCSE meant that the focus was on precisely that, students around a C or a D. Anyone else was ignored. On the subject of GCSEs, the lower paper was at a level my 4th graders could handle. We were using Singaporean books when I taught in Thailand, and the standard was much much higher than the UK.

Misbheaviour wasn't the fault of the kid, it was the fault of the teacher. I had a useful knack for dealing with it, often fighting fires during classes in addition to the job of looking after whoever I was assigned to by giving a quick look, a brief signal, that I'd seen whatever was going on and they should stop it, but ultimately penalising teachers for bad student behaviour will lead to teachers not reporting it, which leads to it not being solved, but does make the stats look great.

Every lesson started "this will be in your GCSE exams". It was an exam factory. The teachers were bored, the kids were bored, I was bored, but with so much pressure to get exam results, it just got worse. In IT classes I'd show kids faster ways to do things and then get told off because my way didn't tick the boxes. Kids were constantly on their phones, and school policy was to ignore the issue.

I got out and went back to software development and now earn double what a good teacher would make, 4 times what I was on at that time, and don't have to deal with the nightmare of not being able to help these poor kids. I am still in contact with a number of teachers here and elsewhere in the world (the teaching staff in Thailand was very international and now they're all over the world) plus my wife's mother teaches primary and has done for a few decades, so her input is quite useful.

END OF BACKGROUND CRAP

So, with the background out of the way, here's some of my thoughts on education in the UK.

1. Early years teaching is fucked
As mentioned, my mother-in-law teaches primary school classes. Kids are arriving in a state that 10 years ago would have been unthinkable, unable to hold a pencil, to use a toilet, to feed themselves, far more often than has ever been seen before. This is not in a deprived area either. The current running theory among teachers I speak to is phone addiction on the part of the parents, and plonking the kid in front of a phone or tablet so they never get the stimulation they should get from the outside world.

2. Over-prescriptive curriculum and management embracing every new fad
See my earlier tale about computing classes. Every lesson must start with (apart from informing the kids that this will be in the GCSE exams for every class from year 8 and above) the learning objectives. Seriously. This did not happen when I went to school, but now the teacher must waste 5 fucking minutes writing the learning objectives on the board. The kids do not give a fuck. I don't want to tell them what they're going to learn, I just want to get on with helping them learn it. Never did it in Thailand, and it had no negative impact.

My mother-in-law is told that a certain number of non-PE lessons must be outdoors. In fucking Scotland, with small kids. Additionally, they have to go on a run at regular intervals outside of PE, which involves all the rigmarole you'd expect.

3. Obsession with measurement
Not everything can be measured. A balanced education can't be measured on a 20 point scale. We've lost the intangibles in pursuit of faux-science dressing itself up as the real thing by attaching numbers and statistics. This measurement is then misused by people who don't understand statistics, or who wilfully misuse them. Got statistics on bad behaviour? Great. Let's not look at which students are causing the most disruption, or whether certain times of day are worse due to students not being fed at home and being tired and hungry at school, nope, let's single out teachers who report bad behaviour as the problem. Magically the reports of problems go down and management look like fucking saviours of education, meanwhile the playground is something like the fucking hunger games.

4. Basics are being missed
How fucking hard is it to teach times tables? Answer? Not fucking hard at all. I even went a step further and built a little browser game for the kids to play each other, scoring points for getting them right and drawing a matrix for me to see which sums they struggled with - it would give them bonus points for getting the difficult ones right and the ones they kept getting wrong would mysteriously appear more often (can't think how that kept accidentally happening), and there would be a live league table while they were playing on the big projector in the class (I'd commandeer the computing room for this). The kids fucking loved it and their performance improved immensely. The competitive aspect of it made it exciting, the measurements I made made it useful, the smart sum-choice made it even more useful.

Memory is unfashionable and the powers that be don't want to focus on it anymore, but memory is vital. You memorise the shitty bits so that your brain isn't used processing simple stuff and can focus on the meatier bits. As a result of missing those bits we end up with kids struggling later on because they're spending valuable processing time on things that should be fucking automatic.

5. Piss-poor parenting
I had one kid whose parents didn't feed him. They gave him money, he bought doughnuts, because he's a fucking kid. He would then bounce off the walls at school. Another poor girl was thoroughly neglected, had to do all the housework while her brother did nothing but play games. She couldn't concentrate to do homework because of all the noise and general chaos at home. So many examples like those two just broke my heart. The problems in deprived areas (and I was working in one) are huge and multi-generational, and piss-poor parenting kicks off the cycle again for the next generation. Parents are often drug or alcohol addicts, sometimes Dad is absent either due to being an arsehole or being in prison, so no male role model. The poor fuckers didn't stand a chance.

6. Communication skills
The kids who were really struggling came from very chaotic home lives, but even above that there was still an undercurrent of poor communication skills, where communication consisted of shouting at each other, and the kids were mystified when told off for this. The reason, quite simply, is that that's how people talk to each other at home. I recognised this as soon as I saw it because I come from a working class background myself and my early twenties saw me in fairly struggling company (I knew many of the inmates of the nearest mental hospital) and they all had this particular manner of communication. No nuance, no calmness, just shouting. It wasn't necessarily meant aggressively but it came off that way. Partly it was also a product of the streets being pretty rough, so you had to appear tough to get out in one piece.

7. Little boxes
We had a few kids who were mildly autistic. They were irritated at being in chaotic classes full of assholes. I know because I was the exact same as a kid. The school did not handle it well, failing to understand that kids like that would just love a bit of quiet space to chill out and read a book. Let them use the fucking library instead of forcing them into the playground. Their lack of sociability was treated as a problem when in reality it was just that they didn't enjoy the company of a bunch of screaming kids, mostly preferring adult company, and who can blame them?

8. Special needs/behavioural difficulties mixing with mainstream
Many years ago someone had a wonderful idea, to put special needs children into mainstream schools so that they could integrate, and to bring kids with behavioural problems into the same mix. That's great for the troubled and challenged kids right? After all, they get a proper education rather than being hidden away out of sight out of mind. It's one of those really good intentions that leads to hell sad to say.

The troubled kids would invariably end up in the bottom sets, along with the kids from deprived homes (who were there because home was not a good place for learning due to chaos and non-supportive parents). You might expect that class would be an outlet for those kids, an opportunity for them to make up some of the ground lost as a result of their home lives. Nope, we throw in kids with limited cognitive function to slow the class down below the level these kids could potentially reach, and add fuel to the fire by mixing in the disruptive kids. The teacher might get lucky and get a teaching assistant or two but most of the lesson is fire-fighting, with very little actual learning going on, and before you know it we've failed our kids. But what of the top sets where you might have some kids from poor backgrounds who against all odds have fought their way to the top? Well, of course you also have some smarter disruptive kids and they end up monopolising the time of the teacher too, or worse causing trouble that the teacher is unaware of. It helps nobody.

9. A man-free zone
I was a diversity hire in both of my school jobs. I had no idea at the time but it's pretty fucking obvious now. There are very few male teachers (in part because of society assuming that any male working with kids is trying to fuck them - that was something I encountered a great deal and all male staff were only too aware of the risks of being anywhere near a female student). That means little opportunity for a positive male role model for many fatherless kids. It also means that education is focused in on what works for girls. Boys behaviour is seen as inherently bad. Unfortunately the staff room was a very unwelcome place for men at the school where I worked, which only added to my desire to leave. There's a reason boys are failing in schools and this undoubtedly contributes. That's not to say that all female teachers suck, many are very good at what they do and almost all are trying very very hard in difficult circumstances, but you need male influence to understand why group-work isn't always the best solution, why a bit of rough-housing is not a big deal, etc.

There's a shitload more, but it'll turn into war and peace so I'll pause there for now and add later, and I want to get other people's contributions and see where that steers the thread. I look forward to seeing what you bunch of reprobates have to say!

EDIT: Added 8 and 9.

 

[petran79]

My parents are both secondary education teachers. I am into special education for 10 years, though each year I have to renew, hoping they'll hire me. Usually I work at different places each year. Many kids into SE suffer because of the change of teachers, both in primary and secondary education. i teach at secondary education, that can have kids from 14-24. Some schools make excuses to keep kids so they dont close due to few student numbers or because parents dont have anywhere else to send them. Things are dire really.

My parents are into general secondary education. Currently both are principals in high schools (15-18). Here school principals are teachers. Managers are usually in the higher ranks of education administration. In the UK usually the regional city councils are in charge regarding school personel.In Greece all is in direct control by the ministry, with regional management branches deciding how to distribute personell, depending in each schools needs.

My dad was for a while a member of an administration council in our city branch, that decides the placement of teachers at schools, but seeing how they mistreated laws and regulations, he left.

Everyday I hear about issues they face, both from their own schools but also in higher ranks. Hopeless really. Teachers are the profession with the most psychological issues.

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

Such a huge topic. I will probably revisit the OP to pull various pieces out, but I'd like to chew on the information more.

I'll contribute this: our boys need a better teaching method that is distinct but not separate from how girls are taught. I think the rise of so-called "toxic masculinity" is because we no longer have male-oriented education. We are not passing down a functioning paradigm. By prepubescence, a boy must be able to say "this is how I can perceive the world, as a male". Testosterone correlates with better spacial reasoning but also chronic impatience. Instead of cramming pubescent boys into a chair, we should harness that energy. It's not about women sucking at math. It's about boys being great at math.

Education, which is fairly liberal in the West, wants us to adopt certain ideals from socialism yet cannot apply "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to half our population of students.

The goal wouldn't be to exclude girls, of course. The goal is to use methods that seem to work better with boys and other methods that seem to work better for girls. Overall, we should tailor the teaching method to the student. In a way I'm not merely talking about educating boys and girls. I'm talking about an educational program that includes child development, psychology, and a core philosophy and then builds from there. Instead, we do it top-down: here are all the new factoids and developments in society. Absorb them without bias or critical reasoning, please. We will test you on how well you perform this task.

This concept of wholistic education applies to women too, but I think we already tailor our education toward women quite well. Boys...not so much.

I had a rather unique education which is where a lot of these thoughts stem from.

 

[petran79]

Problem is that overall primary and secondary education, even vocational education, are heavily ignored in favor of tertiary education. All focus in the media and advertising is on how the elite students pass in the top STEM and polytechnic universities, law and medicine schools. Ignoring the fact that usually students whose parents spend more on cram schools and extra curriculum teaching have the advantage. Non-mandatory high school especially is seen just as a stepping stone to universities. The contrast in quality between tertiary and secondary/primary education of many countries is staggering.
This creates even further problems in the long run, destroying many students with potential since everything else is regarded as failure.

Now that you mention boys and girls, my parents were of the generation that studied in all boys and all girls secondary education. Mixed education in secondary schools here began since 1979. The irony is that when parents were asked if they wanted to send their kids to mixed schools, the majority were negative. They cited moral dangers and attention span disorder due to premature bodily and emotional growth as reasons. While the parents supporting it said that schools should reflect society and kids would be familiarised with the opposite sex (70s term).

That trend for all gender schools gained more popularity recently
Supporters of exclusively girl schools now maintain that boys and girls should be taught differently, citing that girls are negatively affected by the presence of boys in class.They mention that male and female brains are different. Male brains contain fluids that are more suited for the information centres of the brain, while female brain has fluids that favor the connection of all those centres.
Really as you see one can make any excuse or claim they want to support their cause. Eg contrast between emotional intelligence of girls vs practical intelligence of boys.
Even now, girls that study in all girls schools have issues adjusting to a work environment with male colleagues, because in school they developed their own closed hierarchy.

 

[Arkage]

Very good write up! I will spend some time this weekend typing up my own views, but they generally align with yours.

 

[Arkage]

Some background: I've taught in high minority/poverty/crime schools for about 10 years, specifically K-8 schools. They were also high minority, with one being 80/10/5/5 black/latino/asian/white. After I moved, the school I'm at now is more like 60/30/10 latino/black/white.

There are a myriad of problems with public schools that are in these neighborhoods. It really is hard to figure out where to start.

1) There is little desire for teachers to teach in the inner city if their goal is to have a well-paying, well-organized, low-stress teaching job. This means teacher turnover is extremely high. A first year teacher typically works in the city for a year or two and then move into a suburban job with that experience.... if they last that long. Often they quit after a month or two. I've heard multiple stories of teachers ending up in tears because they don't know how to deal with the environment, one of which was my predecessor before I took the job. This high level of churn ends up destabilizing the schools to significant extents.

2) There are almost always openings that aren't being filled. In the one district I taught at I believe there were over 100 unfilled openings going into the school year. This also transfer over into substitutes. At some schools they can never get substitutes to cover for teachers who are out sick, which means classes regularly get split into other rooms, adding 5-10 extra kids per class. These unfilled opening and lack of substitutes adds to the destabilization as well.

3) This many openings means there's much less desire to fire bad teachers, because in many cases the school is just happy that someone is there doing the job, even if they aren't good at it. Firings still do happen for really bad stuff, but there's no way to hold "mediocrity" as a fire-able offense when there's literally nobody else who wants the job in that environment.

4) If I had to divide students into effort levels, I'd say 20% are completely uninterested in school, 40% care enough to try to pass, 30% are motivated to learn and highly self-regulating. These aren't good ratios when teachers are under pressure to consistently raise test scores year after year to "proficient" and "advanced" levels. In addition, these ratios evolve over the course of school years, with students becoming more defiant the older they get. This is a common thing with all teens, but it is especially exacerbated in the inner city where being school smart is often juxtaposed as the opposite of being street smart. The older the students get, the more valuable it is to be perceived as "street tough" among peers due to how significantly it can impact your life in a high-crime neighborhood.

5) Parents often had bad parents themselves, so many have never been taught to value simple things like reading to your child which can have incredible impacts upon student performance and cognitive ability. One study shows that by the age of 3 poor kids hear 30 million (!!!!) fewer words than wealthy kids. Language and conversation isn't emphasized, and this can also been seen as a product of living in high crime areas where your ability to use words doesn't give you any significant, immediate benefits to your safety or well being.

6) Some of this is also due to the historic disenfranchisement of black people. It's like two people starting a videogame, one on hard difficult and one on easy. Once both get halfway through the game the difficult switches to "medium" for both, but the person who started on hard will always be behind the person who started on easy. These educational problems have long roots.

I'll type more if I think of more, or answer any questions. For now I want to get back to Destiny

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

5) Parents often had bad parents themselves, so many have never been taught to value simple things like reading to your child which can have incredible impacts upon student performance and cognitive ability. One study shows that by the age of 3 poor kids hear 30 million (!!!!) fewer words than wealthy kids. Language and conversation isn't emphasized, and this can also been seen as a product of living in high crime areas where your ability to use words doesn't give you any significant, immediate benefits to your safety or well being.

This section has so many parts I agree with. Being a good parent to your kid helps them thrive in school. My firstborn was slow to speak and was in remedial speech-therapy classes from age 2 1/2 to 5. My wife and I worked really hard to help him overcome it. We also gave him other outlets like art and writing so that he could communicate. The therapy filled in gaps that we didn't even know were gaps. He is older and has been caught up for a few years. I can no longer recognize the stuttering, two-word-sentence 4-year-old from a few years ago. I shudder to think how far behind he would've been if we didn't work with him. If we had been uncaring and neglectful parents, I'm confident he would've been written off as learning disabled or mentally challenged and would've been stunted his whole life.

I guess my story is also a highlight of the educational system at large, not just teachers and students and classrooms. That sort of social assistance means a lot for kids who have a hard time with basic skills. Low-income areas rarely receive that kind of help, so it just compounds the issue. Kids slip through the cracks because no one stepped in to help them speak or read properly.

 

[Arkage]

This section has so many parts I agree with. Being a good parent to your kid helps them thrive in school. My firstborn was slow to speak and was in remedial speech-therapy classes from age 2 1/2 to 5. My wife and I worked really hard to help him overcome it. We also gave him other outlets like art and writing so that he could communicate. The therapy filled in gaps that we didn't even know were gaps. He is older and has been caught up for a few years. I can no longer recognize the stuttering, two-word-sentence 4-year-old from a few years ago. I shudder to think how far behind he would've been if we didn't work with him. If we had been uncaring and neglectful parents, I'm confident he would've been written off as learning disabled or mentally challenged and would've been stunted his whole life.

I guess my story is also a highlight of the educational system at large, not just teachers and students and classrooms. That sort of social assistance means a lot for kids who have a hard time with basic skills. Low-income areas rarely receive that kind of help, so it just compounds the issue. Kids slip through the cracks because no one stepped in to help them speak or read properly.

Yea, another confounding factor is that due to drug use during pregnancy and lack of parent involvement, many kids in poverty start at a much lower level when entering kindergarten. Inner city schools need to provide assistance to substantially higher numbers of students who have mental disabilities/trauma/emotional support problems (never mind they are inundated with spanish-speaking-only populations which require a whole other level of interventions), but they simply don't have the funds that other richer districts do. Many of these students need consistent 1-on-1 workers and therapy and etc. Meanwhile at the old school district I worked at, there was a single nurse serving 4 different schools every week - insane. Glad to hear that you found successful ways to bring your firstborn up to speed with his age group, and it is illustrative of how important those first few years are. There is just no way for the school system to correct issues that arise during those years, unfortunately, and that leads to many of the problems seen later on.

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

Yea, another confounding factor is that due to drug use during pregnancy and lack of parent involvement, many kids in poverty start at a much lower level when entering kindergarten. Inner city schools need to provide assistance to substantially higher numbers of students who have mental disabilities/trauma/emotional support problems (never mind they are inundated with spanish-speaking-only populations which require a whole other level of interventions), but they simply don't have the funds that other richer districts do. Many of these students need consistent 1-on-1 workers and therapy and etc. Meanwhile at the old school district I worked at, there was a single nurse serving 4 different schools every week - insane. Glad to hear that you found successful ways to bring your firstborn up to speed with his age group, and it is illustrative of how important those first few years are. There is just no way for the school system to correct issues that arise during those years, unfortunately, and that leads to many of the problems seen later on.

Yeah, that last piece is especially true. He wasn't in school yet so it's not like a teacher could've noticed that he was behind. We had to approach the school district and ask what sort of programs in our area could help him.