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Alex · 02-05-2006, 03:31 PM

I guess where I differ is that I don't think it is the job of schools to teach children to be "well rounded human beings."

I think the big problem with our society is that education has come to be defined solely as something that happens between the ages of 5 and 18, between the months of September and June, and between the hours of 7:30 and 3:00 inside a building placed within a few miles of your home. And therefore we feel that everything we think a person should know has to be crammed into that window.

A certain subset then extends this to the age of 22 or so. But then the vast huge majority of people stop their "education."

Also, in our two income, no parent at home society, school has increasingly become a babysitter and a surrogate for parenting. And where, at one point in time schooling was more about teaching things parents weren't necessarily qualified to teach it has increasingly become about things parents don't take the time to teach.

And this creates a conflict between those want schools to be babysitters and the end all be all of creating a person out of a child and those who view schools as having a relatively limited role in the life a child and otherwise want to retain control.

There was never a golden age when the two were inextricably linked (people have been arguing over what children should read for a very long time) but as curriculums have increasingly encroached into broader areas of life and "modern" pedagogocal methods the conflict has grown more pronounced. And it isn't always from the right; in high school I had a friend whose parents pulled him from a "life math class" (essentially household finances and stuff for students not cutting it in the standard math progression) because it had strayed from how to balance a checkbook into a semester long stock market game that was teaching capitalism as the way the world worked (and the parents were very much communists and unhappy with this).

There will always be stupid parents and incompetent teachers (I've never really met a stupid teacher but plenty who masked their intelligence well) and it is easy to hide behind these outlyers, but it is also disingenuous to deny that the reach of public schools into new areas of a pupils "education" hasn't greatly expanded and that perhaps parents have some reason to be disconcerted.

02-05-2006, 03:31 PM	#65
Alex . Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 13,354	I guess where I differ is that I don't think it is the job of schools to teach children to be "well rounded human beings." I think the big problem with our society is that education has come to be defined solely as something that happens between the ages of 5 and 18, between the months of September and June, and between the hours of 7:30 and 3:00 inside a building placed within a few miles of your home. And therefore we feel that everything we think a person should know has to be crammed into that window. A certain subset then extends this to the age of 22 or so. But then the vast huge majority of people stop their "education." Also, in our two income, no parent at home society, school has increasingly become a babysitter and a surrogate for parenting. And where, at one point in time schooling was more about teaching things parents weren't necessarily qualified to teach it has increasingly become about things parents don't take the time to teach. And this creates a conflict between those want schools to be babysitters and the end all be all of creating a person out of a child and those who view schools as having a relatively limited role in the life a child and otherwise want to retain control. There was never a golden age when the two were inextricably linked (people have been arguing over what children should read for a very long time) but as curriculums have increasingly encroached into broader areas of life and "modern" pedagogocal methods the conflict has grown more pronounced. And it isn't always from the right; in high school I had a friend whose parents pulled him from a "life math class" (essentially household finances and stuff for students not cutting it in the standard math progression) because it had strayed from how to balance a checkbook into a semester long stock market game that was teaching capitalism as the way the world worked (and the parents were very much communists and unhappy with this). There will always be stupid parents and incompetent teachers (I've never really met a stupid teacher but plenty who masked their intelligence well) and it is easy to hide behind these outlyers, but it is also disingenuous to deny that the reach of public schools into new areas of a pupils "education" hasn't greatly expanded and that perhaps parents have some reason to be disconcerted.
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