Origins of Public Education
What I intend to talk to you about this afternoon is what I understand you are aware of — the positive goals and values that you seek as homeschoolers. But I want to talk about the specifics of what you’re fleeing, because what you’re fleeing is alive and well in the green state of Vermont. Perhaps Vermont is one of a half-a-dozen states that the U.S. Department of Education uses as testing grounds. I believe they picked Vermont because they understand that you people are so reasonable that you’re always willing to negotiate. Anyway, I have some information to bring to you on a different outlook on what the intention of schools is…
Stan:
The History of US Public Schools
19 February 2011, 9:47 amDeAnander:
Obligatory Illich hat tip: Deschooling Society
19 February 2011, 2:18 pmChas:
Gatto is a hard-core libertarian with the typical foolishness about God in schools and the supposedly enlightened “intents” of the “founders,” but he’s a terrific source of information on how the modern school system was designed and why and for whom. If you can stomach the libertarian dogma, he’s well worth reading. This article is interesting because it’s the first I’ve seen in which he openly admits that he’s a libertarian.
22 February 2011, 11:41 amCharles:
Also, after the abolition of slavery, mass public education was started for the ex-slaves. Once it was given to the Black people , it had to be given to the masses of White working people. A victory for Black workers led to a victory for White workers. Black and White unite and fight the powers-that-be.
22 February 2011, 12:02 pmWaldow:
Appreciate being able to check into Feral Scholar from time to time and find the well thought radical stuff one finds here. That earthworm-wearing-a-mortarboard icon above sums up what many, myself included, knew fresh from 5 years of university… As in the worm was in some ways better off before encumbered by the “hat”. Ha! It only takes 10 years after university to unlearn.
I’ve a buddy who’s classical liberalism I’ve been chopping at for 13 years, and this article will help. He works making internet coursework for a big university from pre-existing brick-and-mortar classes. He’s often mentioned an intuitive sense for Gatto’s observation that public schools, “[do not] teach the way children learn” & maybe he’ll see another piece of why “it is not supposed to”. As a technical person, he has a chance to slip some innovative learning into students’ heads (IMHO innovations from tech are more quickly accepted by the status quo than innovative “human” instruction. So we slip further into technology’s trap… another story.)
24 February 2011, 3:58 pmCurt:
Dis comment is about education but not about schools.
28 February 2011, 6:18 pmIt is about the role of the press in (mis)educting the American public. Ok I can see the people at the top have an economic motive to manipulate the population. But at some level below the top there has to be some people working in the MSM who understand that something is foul is being perpitrated on the American people and do not gain directly from it financially except perhaps by getting to keep their job.
So what are Feralscholars to think, that the people working in the media in what would be the civilian position equivilant to Colonels and Majors and Master Sergents are stupid? Or, do they know that something in their industry is grossly wrong but they do not want to do anything about it because it would be an inconvience?
How long can they coninue to believe, well if we show a more liberal slant the conservatives will be pissed off and if we show a more conservative slant the liberals will be pissed off so we will keep our reporting RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE. (hahahahahahahaha)
for them?
Henry:
Effective Education for a New Society
By Thomas H. Greco
Many years ago I read Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling Society. It is a remarkable work that points out the general phenomenon of institutional failure, not just the failure of the educational system. Here below is an excellent TED talk about effective education in slums and the Third World. There are lessons there for every context.
Here are some major points that I gleaned from the talk:
Effective Education:
* Based on Pull, not push
* Provides Quick payoff
* Is inherently interesting
* Starts with questions, problems, games and projects
* Provides practical skills
* Embeds learning in productive activities
* Utilizes peer to peer interaction and learning –t.h.g.
http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/effective-education-for-a-new-society/
5 March 2011, 11:43 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
Have you heard about the cheating scandal in Atlanta where it was not the students who were caught cheating but the principles and teachers who were caught erasing the students answers and entering the correct answers?
6 July 2011, 4:44 pmI can not say that I am surprised. The school authorities were under a lot of pressure to cheat. I still think that they should be punished.
Maybe that makes me a hypocrite though. Did I not just say yesterday that some level of cheating is justified as a neccessary self defense. Well actually I used the word lying and keeping secrets but lying goes under the catagory of cheating.
Clearly the people in charge of the Atlanta schools administration thought that there cheating was a neccessary evil. How can I really judge them harshly if I have never been a school administrator? One thing though it sets a really bad example. Should educators who think that crime pays be allowed around children? Maybe the answer is yes.
Maybe the answer is that you do a risk cost benifit analysis and if you get a big gain are not likely to get caught and if you do are not likely to get harshly punished, and the costs to others of your crime is spread around so much that the victims only loose a little you should commit the crime. Why that sounds to me like the definition of a special intrest group. Perhaps children should be taught the was things are rather than the way things need to be.
I told someone that although I thought the teachers should be punished with fines and probation they should not loose their jobs because not only did the cheating have the approval of principles and administrators the teachers were actually under pressure to go along. The teachers should learn that it is their duty not to go along. Yet it seems that most of the people in American society need to learn this so why should the teachers be the first to be singled out?
The principles and administrators are in a somewhat different boat. They would be older they would have higher salaries. They were in a position to offer greater resistance. Yet they were very likely the ones that came up with the idea. Did they have evidence, or at least suspicions that other school districts were cheating too? My daughter told me many stories of cheating on tests in the schools she went to
…….by the students.
I told my niece that as for the principles go it should be off with their………ears. I said ears because I wanted my judgement to be
unclear. This case is clealy a disaster. Some people need to be made to pay for this disaster. But like many disasters it seems to have been created by cumulative failures.
I would like to send my respect to those people who tried to stop this disaster. The report that I read said that there was negative actions taken against people who tried to bring this problem to light. I wonder if anything can be done to help whistle blowers. The Manning case makes me think that there is nothing that can really be done.
The reporter who wrote the story certinly went overboard when he called this the biggest cheating skandal in US history. He needed to add the words officially acknowledged in front of the word cheating.
Do I need to say more or does that cover it?
Alan:
worth a listen, imo:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
21 July 2011, 2:03 pmhttp://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-critique-of-home-schooling-by-stephen-downes/2011/07/08
A critique of home schooling by Stephen Downes
8th July 2011
Stephen Downes writes:
“In this 15 minute video I outline my criticisms of home
schooling and describe success factors for an alternative,
community schooling.”
Michael Anderson:
http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf
The Underground History Of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto.
The principles of technocratic centralized “liberal” society are outlined in the book. Education, narrowly defined as obedience, consumption, and loyalty to the state, is an important part of the diabolical solution.
23 October 2012, 11:05 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Michael Anderson
24 October 2012, 7:12 pmI’m at page 185, and I think he is plainly wrong. Most of the graduate students in North America (graduate students do most of the research) are outsiders, often one or two generations removed from peasant or farmer life, be they Asian, African, or from elsewhere. The method proposed isn’t what produces the advances, of itself – people have to think, and because in North America scientific authorities are often ridiculed, and natural science professors often not respected compared to elsewhere, professors and other researchers use the evidence for a given interpretation of facts to justify themselves (when they are honest; otherwise propaganda on the character of their opponents is used).
(Boer) Tom:
@Michael Anderson
On page 305, for statements 1, 5 and 6, one can readily imagine situations that would falsify these, yet they (and other falsifying occurences) aren’t detected. Insofar as statements 2, 3 and 4 are concerned, we don’t usually worry whether they are real, only whether they are measurable and predictable on the basis of foundational theories (quantum and (sub)atomic and Einsteinian relativity). What it would mean for them to be real is obscure.
Newtonian gravity is not mechanical as understood in his time. That said, even if it could be considered mechanical, it is not clear why behaviorism would follow from it, except perhaps as an initial null hypothesisis that could be rejected from the experience of raising a child. And his definition of positivism would require the rejection of atomic theory, quantum theory etc.
His obsession with ‘Norse’ (germanic?) religion also seems misplaced; religious doctrines rarely present hurdles when powerful people decide to do evil.
On page 334, his description is at complete odds with e.g. my own experience. The sciences and history merely served to show that parents, church (OK, late apartheid RSA) and community were right. In North America, you have the worship of the ‘pioneers’. The dispatching of loyalty was only relevant to friends, not to the state, community and parents (unless they had funny ideas). Why he confuses his ‘religion of Science’ with hedonism isn’t clear either – I’ve never come across moral considerations being discussed in ‘science’ classes, much less hedonistic formulas.
Despite these problems, I do like the book – what he describes on page 313 is exactly why I initially quit school after grade 8, once I was no longer legally compelled to stay in school. And the rest of the book generally resonates as well.
25 October 2012, 3:15 amMichael Anderson:
@ Tom:
I agree about religious doctrines not presenting an obstacle to evil. Bob Altermeyer demonstrated this in “The Authoritarians” with his research on authoritarian followers vs authoritarian leaders—the followers are the ones who are religious. The leaders have no such scruples and restraints.
I think the Newton reference comes with the way Newtonian physics metaphorically RESEMBLED a giant machine (an, the free association the human mind is capable of), something very outside in the 1600′s, but a very convenient way to do business & maintain authority, both civic and religious (and do massive mayhem).
What got me on JTG’s book is that he takes many things that we talk about here, specifically industrial society, enlightenment thinking, Taylorism (mass production), and militarism, and puts them in the educational context.
He leaves references to sexuality out, for the most part, but it is implicit. I see no need to reiterate those connections.
Are you still in Canada? How’s the education system up there faring? Not so good here…
26 October 2012, 9:55 am(Boer) Tom:
@Michael
The education system – hmm. Three levels – primary to undergraduate, graduate and trades… Make that four – on the job training. Ok – primary to undergraduate education has long been a farce; when I came to Saskatchewan more than a decade ago, I did the adult grade 12 (no need then to do 10, 11); the level of difficulty was that of grade 8 back home – at least the apartheid government (actually like most African governments – the European pretensions were always a bit strange – and were we Afrikaners really that different in our class position than Gikuyus in Kenya, or Yorubas and Igbos in Nigeria? Like them, many of us were/are poor) set up a solid curriculum, and in the more urban parts of the old Cape province and Natal, actually implemented it for working class children (the Transvaal and OFS were a different matter – internalized colonialism?). But I digress – the education here on a primary to undergraduate level is a farce. On a graduate level, what has kept north america going is the promotion of challenging the profs (and boatloads of cash, now drying up); a Filipino graduate student I met told me that she had to repeat several graduate level courses for switching to the local university; the course material was to her mind on a lower undergraduate level. But once you actually start doing research, you make up for the weak education if you hope to achieve anything – strange to think back to the classes as the easy part, but there it is.
Maybe someone will say this province is backward, but Ontario dropped Euclidian geometry from their ‘grade 13′ (university preparation, with university level classes often offered) program 7 odd years ago – we were drilled in that stuff from grade eight, and I imagine that that continues. Actually, we had to prove the theorems to ourselves if we had any hope of tackling the exams. The level of language education isn’t serious either, much pretension notwithstanding.
They try to revamp the curriculum repeatedly here – grade 12 calculus goes back some ways – but these guys don’t have their rudiments in order. While I understand Ilich’s argument about failure telling you that you just cannot do it, that works mainly for a peasant society, where dropping out of primary school to work on the farm is common. Back home it is common for children to fail grade one, and they repeat, working harder, and get to understand the material. And it isn’t like we didn’t play (or get into mischief) as children. We’d sometimes harangue a teacher for not giving us enough homework – four hours a day was typical after grade three. Here they don’t even fail a class until grade 10, and a year until grade 12, and four hours of homework per day is considered shocking in undergrad.
On the job training is laughable, especially in the professions. The most popular on-the-job course for engineers is ‘project management professional’ – that way you don’t even have to pretend to do analysis. A small minority of engineers do engineering, as commonly understood.
The other thing that is happening in universities is a neoliberal attack – this has been going on since the Roy Romanow government, the NDP’s pretensions to social democracy notwithstanding, although it has really picked up in the last four years. The university resisted increasing pay to match actual inflation, and used the government funding instead to build about half a dozen new buildings in these four years – huge buildings. Of course, the cities are also going very neo-liberal, with road repairs being done more and more by contractors with minimal oversight, and rarely court cases when infrastructure fails, as due diligence was meant as a joke from day one. Ditto highways (the province has one of the highest number of highway kilometers per capita in the world… many are gravel, though).
A strange thing in the primary schools is that except for teaching foreign languages, no university background or other substantial ability is expected (especially in rural schools) for teaching, be that English, Chemistry, etc. Granted that funding plays a role, but our institution used to attract some big names, and in the thirties the high school teaching was there – then again, single room schools were still going in many places until the fifties and sometimes beyond, and even now, it is common for rural principals to teach seven or more classes (often three at once – e.g. grades ten to twelve, as the enrollment is often low), like their staff. Somewhere something broke, though.
But if you mess with trades, you destroy yourself rapidly. From friends in the trades, they often have far more substantial educations than the universities. The high-school disaster does mean that they often cannot capitalize on it, but it is something.
27 October 2012, 3:03 amNight Washman:
On page 187 of the book in question the author asks why would the guardians be benevolent.
4 November 2012, 6:57 pmThe answer to me is clear. Because they know that they are being watched, watched from all sides.
A reasonable person might ask, well why has that not worked? The answer could be, because the rulers
thought that they were invisible. Not literally invisable. Science had instilled in them the idea that
if something could not be seen, heard, touched, smelt, or tasted it is not there. Their position taught them
that they could control the flow of information to those below them. Their trainng taught them that they could tell stories to those that might be their equals that would not be questoned. Finally they had technology to detect the developement of any sort of organized structure which might attempt to understand thngs more clearly. Which would enable abortions of intellectual embryos.
Night Washman:
On around page 250 Gatto has a subchapter titled Principles, which is another word for deontological ethics, In this part he complains about the shift that schools made from teaching principles to teaching what he calls situational ethics, which is another word for pragmatism, or flexability, or consequentialism.
11 November 2012, 4:23 amI think that shift was perfectly reasonable. Siuational ethics is actually based on a profound principle. It is based on what is the most profound principle of all. It is based on the principle that our actions have consequences and that the the correctness of an action depends on what those consequences are.
Not to base ethics on such a principle will lead to inflexability, suffering, injustice and death. the essence of this debatge can be summed up in the story of when the Gestapo ask you where the Jews are hidden when you know that the Jews are hidden in the attic. Of course the deontologists will then bring up a principle of why a lie is allowed in such circumstances but it is only because they have decided to apply situational ethics in this case that they would see the need for applying another principle. Although the principle of consequences is the most solid foundation for ethics that there is this foundation is itself nothing more than surgar. First of all it is very difficult to understand all of the repercussions that our actions will have. Second of all even if we could understand the consequences in a group of more than two people there is likely to be disagreement about how to compare these consequencdes against one another.
Just come to your senses J.T. Gatto this is part of the most advanced teaching on ethics that there is. Why should it be reserved for eliets? Would it not be unfair for some people to understand this and not others. Why should some people be handicapped by being indoctrinated in less flexible ethical systems. Of course for what goals we should use our flexability is also a key part. The most advanced ethical thinking that there is provides an answer to this question to. It is an answer that is built on a foundation of melted chocolate.
Others may say that they offer systems that place your decisions on the firm foundation of Christ, or the Quran, as just two common examples. But what they offer is a mirage.
Stan:
Actually, there is a third alternative to deontological and consequential ethics, and that is virtue ethics.
11 November 2012, 6:51 am