Sometimes I give in to an impulse and believe that teachers are actually not doing their jobs. The kids I see going to school across the street every day are filled with enthusiasm and joy of life. I can see it in them every single day. I don't see miserable muppets getting off the busses and heading into the school in the morning and I don't see them coming out of the school in the afternoon. What I see are kids who are glad to be there, with their friends.
Hormones and puberty happen in middle school which is further down the road but still on the same block. Is that where the teachers start to file off the desire for knowledge that the little children have? I think by the time they reach high school it is way too late to engage them again with a desire to learn.
What the hell happens to these kids between 6th and 8th grade just down the road? It does not take Aristotle to teach young children the basic essentials of making a huge success in life by educating themselves with the help of able teachers and rafts of books.
Public education in this country is broken.
2 comments:
Those stats are worrisome, to say the very least.
They are a complete tragedy.
It is wrong. It is very wrong. I see all those kids coming to school every day during the school year as little children. They are happy, smiling and they are enthusiastic about being at school.
Something happens to them. Nobody ever discusses it in any forum.
Dead Poet Society was a story but it was a believable story. I've seen the fire to learn take hold myself. I know how that place worked, it was there in the clip I posted last week. Shame and humiliation was a motivator. It isn't anymore. What works now? If nothing works anymore, what then? The true communists will order us to spend $100,000/pupil. The one thing I know for truth is that money and student/teacher ratios are bullshit.
OTOH, I'm a libertarian. I'm not taking any mother's child away from her or from his dad because I KNOW better than them. I won't sweeten the deal either. If they don't see any benefit to raising and educating smart kids, who can stop them? The State can try, but they are losing the battle to simply feed them as this fake lunch scam shows.
It's funny. I've gone days without food without being hungry. I once spent 10 days without eating because the option wasn't at all palatable. I lost 20 pounds. I did the same thing a few years earlier when the only food on the ship was brussel sprouts from hell found in the degaussed food locker when the navy decided it was too dangerous to resupply us in the fields. Shoot. Not eating a pathetic school lunch without the essential fats, protein, gluten, bacon, cheese, butter....screw that.
I take my ideas on education from Bamfylde. Oddly enough, it was one of the opportunities my parents would have given me but they asked and I said no. My life would be very different if I had gone to Princeton. As I recall, the protagonists from the Caine Mutiny went to Princeton.
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