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School makes kids stupid?

I watched this last night it was interesting. When they showed footage from inside a 'typical' classroom I saw some very bad behaviour. I could be wrong but I tend to place the blame for bad behaviour at the feet of the parents. The children whose parents are making the effort to find better schools are probably being raised to higher standards of behaviour and eagerness to learn. More willing students will make a school perform better. If teachers have to expend 75% of their effort just getting kids to sit down and shut up then there is little learning left.

Not once did Stossell consider that students who don't want to learn won't. If too many students don't want to learn then none of them can. Unfortunately, there will be some willing students who get caught up in this mess. I don't have any solutions but I do know that instilling a desire to learn and the discipline to behave appropriately is the job of parents.
 
jimlintott said:
I watched this last night it was interesting. When they showed footage from inside a 'typical' classroom I saw some very bad behaviour. I could be wrong but I tend to place the blame for bad behaviour at the feet of the parents. The children whose parents are making the effort to find better schools are probably being raised to higher standards of behaviour and eagerness to learn. More willing students will make a school perform better. If teachers have to expend 75% of their effort just getting kids to sit down and shut up then there is little learning left.

Not once did Stossell consider that students who don't want to learn won't. If too many students don't want to learn then none of them can. Unfortunately, there will be some willing students who get caught up in this mess. I don't have any solutions but I do know that instilling a desire to learn and the discipline to behave appropriately is the job of parents.
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Just drug the kids :D


Sincerely
Tobias
I am, of course, kidding.
 
jimlintott said:
I watched this last night it was interesting. When they showed footage from inside a 'typical' classroom I saw some very bad behaviour. I could be wrong but I tend to place the blame for bad behaviour at the feet of the parents. The children whose parents are making the effort to find better schools are probably being raised to higher standards of behaviour and eagerness to learn. More willing students will make a school perform better. If teachers have to expend 75% of their effort just getting kids to sit down and shut up then there is little learning left.

Not once did Stossell consider that students who don't want to learn won't. If too many students don't want to learn then none of them can. Unfortunately, there will be some willing students who get caught up in this mess. I don't have any solutions but I do know that instilling a desire to learn and the discipline to behave appropriately is the job of parents.
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I'm not a big Stossel fan. He seems to me like the Michael Moore of the right. But like Moore he sometimes makes a good point, even if he has a dishonest way of making the point.

Private schools would have a lot more freedom to innovate and improve themselves then public schools do. Its almost impossible to suspend a student these days unless they bring a gun or drugs to school or something equally agregious. Private schools wouldn't have that limitation. Those students who were causing problems in those clips would not last long at a private school.

And private schools have total freedom when it comes to how they teach. They aren't beholden to some school board, aren't forced to try every lame brained new teaching gimmick that comes along. No discovery learning. No "new" math. Not if what the teachers doing is affective.

There are definately some advantages there to a more privatized system.
 
It would also mean that the 42% of Americans who reject evolution would be free to demand that it be removed from their children's science curricula.
 
Canadians have no problems expelling students for behaviour. You don't need to have a gun or weapon to get expelled. They do just seem to think parents of disruptive kids don't care, and in some cases won't work them at first. Willing parents can work with the schools to help find out what is going on with their kid.

Some kids have legitimate problems and need an aid or other interventions. Some need extra attention in regards to disciplinary programs.

With this taken care of, then why are we still getting kids in high school that can't read. Why are they allowed to pass? On the program they had kids with parents or caregivers that did care, and had to intervene. These kids didn't have behavioral problems.

Stossel's main beef was the fact that parents don't have educational choices, and schools have a "monopoly". There's not much incentive to work with students, espcecially those that might be floundering for whatever reason, to increase achievement scores. He also found increased spending correlated with decreased achievement. He then looked at Belgium and other countries to compare educational systems where parents had more choices.

I found the show wasn't too bad.
 
It's quite shocking to see people who have been through the education system,Graduated highschool and gone to college still being as stupid as can be. In my experience simply going to school is not enough to make you smart. People can go all of the way to the 12th grade and have perfect grades and then go to a 4 year college and graduate and still come out extremly ignorant of extremly basic things such as math or science.
You've got college graduates who still don't have a clue about how evolution works and deny it. You've got college graduates who can't even do basic algebra equations. You've got college graduates who are stupid enough to believe in nonsense like psychics,homeopathy or God.

The problem is 1.They don't actually learn things correctly in school to begin with. Ignorant teachers rampant. 2.They don't ever actually continue to deal with the things they would learn in school. They don't continue to study outside of the classroom just to learn for the sake of learning. Learning about the basics of evolution a year in 10th grade biology won't do you any good if you never deal with it again. You'll simply forget what you learned and go back to denying it.
 
When I was in elementary school - highschool, I found that a lot of kids just did not want to learn and were there because it was required by law. They cheated and only did work half-well. I wonder if the attitude of American teens is against education.
 
Melendwyr said:
It would also mean that the 42% of Americans who reject evolution would be free to demand that it be removed from their children's science curricula.
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Perhaps, but the truly religious parents will "teach" kids the "controversy" on their own time.
 
Stossel's main beef was the fact that parents don't have educational choices, and schools have a "monopoly". There's not much incentive to work with students, espcecially those that might be floundering for whatever reason, to increase achievement scores. He also found increased spending correlated with decreased achievement. He then looked at Belgium and other countries to compare educational systems where parents had more choices.
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Oh I quite agree with this and with most of what has been posted here. I just think that Mr. Stossell left out the students and parents in the equation. While everbody blames everyone else they don't realise that there is plenty of blame to go around. If each part, from government down to the student, would realise how they are failing the system and work to correct it, the public school system would work fine.

When a child is so disruptive they have to be expelled, somewhere along the line that child has been failed by someone. Society will have to pay a price for these kids at some point.

The public schools here in Canada don't seem to have these problems and are really quite good. What is the difference between the U.S. public schools and Canadian public schools? As far as I can tell the only difference is that Canadian schools are attended by Canadian students.
 
Basic Stossel journalism: find a problem, find a way to blame it on government, select an example where you can give the appearance of a solution based on "free market economics", and voilà, libertarian proselytism.

Of course, actually analyzing the complex issues of the identified problem and taking a comprehensive look "solutions" other people might have found doesn't give you good ratings. It's much easier to misrepresent the facts and tack on a memorable catchphrase.

Stossel's only good when dealing with claims of psychics helping police investigations...

jimlintott: There are many factors, such as the way public schools are funded (it appears more evenly spread in Canada, though you'll still find discrepancy between fancy suburban schools vs poor big city neighbourhood ones) and a whole slew of cultural factors. The US spends lots of money on "education" but you have to look at where the money goes. Administration and football related expenses appear to be often higher priorities than teachers and (good) books.

But, since both in Canada and the US, the decisions are made by politicians (influenced by self-serving lobbyists and ideologues fond of one-size-fits-all solutions) and apathetic electorate*, problems with public education rarely ever get solved.

*an editorialist (Pierre Foglia of La Presse) illustrated this nicely. Recently, he pointed how changes to the curriculum mandated by the government but decried by teachers go unnoticed by the population while when teachers decide to use pressure tactics (such as not having Halloween related activities for the kids) to get the government's attention, then parents complain that teachers don't treat/take care of their kids properly...
 
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jimlintott said:
The public schools here in Canada don't seem to have these problems and are really quite good. What is the difference between the U.S. public schools and Canadian public schools? As far as I can tell the only difference is that Canadian schools are attended by Canadian students.
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I can't speak for Canadian schools, but Dutch public schools are overall pretty good as well, or were in my day, so I've been wondering about why that is. I think that much of the problem isn't so much that American public have a monopoly in general, but that each has a local monopoly. In the US, you're assigned to a specific public school depending on where you live. By contrast, in the Netherlands, you can attend any publicly funded school you like; if you want to go to a school on the opposite side of town, that's your lookout. So American public schools don't have to compete with each other, whereas Dutch ones do, and I think that's a big difference right there.
 
Melendwyr said:
It would also mean that the 42% of Americans who reject evolution would be free to demand that it be removed from their children's science curricula.
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Holy cow. Good point.

But I would think that for a school to take 'vouchers', it would have to be accredited by the state. Any school that had a single ID/Creationism class should/would be deemed as 'unacceptable', and thus no vouchers could be used at it (not only because the government would be giving money to a religious institution, but also because such a school wouldn't meet basic science standards)
 
jimlintott said:
I watched this last night it was interesting. When they showed footage from inside a 'typical' classroom I saw some very bad behaviour.
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They had given some students cameras, and had them film in classrooms.

My guess is the bad behavior was mostly people acting up because they were being filmed for TV.
 
But, since both in Canada and the US, the decisions are made by politicians (influenced by self-serving lobbyists and ideologues fond of one-size-fits-all solutions) and apathetic electorate*, problems with public education rarely ever get solved.
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There I have to disagree. In Canada we have done A LOT to educate the students with behavorial problems, and thus have solved many educational quandries. I don't see kids here in high school that can't read. We also have appear to have fewer incidents of kids bringing weapons to school.

What to do with kids who lashout, drive their desks around the class, and throw books when frustrated? Put them in a class with only 6 kids and two teachers, that's what. Not a "special ed" class, but a class where normal education curriculums are taught, and the kids get a lot more attention when they need it. Why? Because some kids are born ADHD, with Tourettes, and have anger management issues. My son had disruptive tics and threw fits (for example, when he couldn't find a word in a dictionary-he would become convinced his dictionary was the only one without the word and throw it across the room while yelling how that dictionary was different and therefore stupid, etc.).

These kids then get an education and don't grow up quite so angry with a world that is punishing them for not sitting quietly in class instead of helping them deal with their impulsiveness, anger, and different viewpoint on the world.

Of course, there is then the the problem of overdiagnosing kids with problems and trying to get them out of the classroom or put them on medications. It's a balancing act trying to determine who actually needs intervention vs. some kid who wants attention or whatever. As a parent with one child with a clear diagnosis of Tourettes, I can't help but wonder if they just want to automatically say that my other son does too at the slightest sign (when he may just be copying some things his brother does). So far my younger son is in a regular class and doing well academically, just with a few bumps (complaints of him drawing on desks, making fart noises, and not standing still in line ups).

For the most part, the school systems here are pretty great. We have a choice of two schools we can send one son to, and three for the other. Schools work with parents as much as possible to adddress problems, and offer choices from there.
 
I'm not saying there are necessarily major problems in the Canadian systems (as education is a provincial jurisdiction). As I understand it Alberta is doing quite well (though they have the resources to throw money at potential problems, in the sense that they don't need to sacrifice spending elsewhere if something arises), and Albertan students rank high, at least in math and sciences, compared to the rest of Canada (they're 1st, if memory serves) and much of the world. In my own province things aren't so great, and the implementation of curriculum reforms have actually led to lower rankings compared to the ROC and internationally (Quebec used to be 1st or 2nd in Canada in math and sciences like 12 years ago, now I think it's down to 7th or 8th place, but of course they don't publisize it much anymore). And the current government isn't cooperating with teachers or even trying to put some much needed money in education... Our only consolation is that the system still isn't as screwed as the American one, for now.
 
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