So what conclusion have we reached? Everyone should be given the opportunity to achieve as much education as they desire, but the educational settings need to be customized for individual ability. The most able should not be slowed down by the less able, and the less able should not be expected to graduate from MIT. At the same time, however, the social mixing of people of different abilities is to be encouraged, particularly since intellectual ability is not everything in life.
So what's the problem? I have no idea, but perhaps society simply cannot handle this model.
~~ Paul
This model was in use in public schools prior to about the mid-1960s. Was it entirely fair? No. You had teachers (who were, by the way, better educated then than they are now) deciding on this, but it was not until after about 1965 that they started institutionalizing this with what was called "tracking." At that point, a teacher in 1st or 2nd grade (6-7 years old) would make a decision about each child: is he a "dummy" or smart? Whichever was decided, that would attach to his or her permanent record (yeah, there is such a thing) and follow that student all through school, including when/if he/she moved. In jr. high (what today is called middle school) "dummies" and avg. and smart kids would begin to be seperated out from one another until by high school there were "general" courses that the dummies went through and more advanced courses for the avg. to smart kids.
Now, to be sure, since the pubs have to take all-comers, there are going to be vast disparities between aptitudes, attitudes, upbringing, and yes, intelligence. But having a 1-2nd grade teacher decide, essentially, the life-fate of someone seems, oh...I dunno rilly, rilly stupid?
Back then, of course, one simply did not question the teacher, the principal or the school. It was most often the case, these were the most educated people most people were ever in contact with. Then, more and more Americans became more and more educated and more and more avg. to smart "kids" who were identified as "dummies" in this system said to themselves "they are not doing this to MY kids."
And the schools were forced to change.
So, what the schools have done is, of course, go overboard in the OTHER direction. Since about the mid-80s or so, when the kids who went through this began becoming school-age parents themselves, and unlike their parents and certainly grandparents, raising holy hell down to the school over everything from lunchroom menu to seating charts to yes...QUALITY of education, the schools have had to react.
One would THINK that they would try to change for the better. Instead, they've changed for the worse in their reacation to this backlash. Today, they simply don't recognize ANY difference in ability, aptitude, intelligence, etc. They do not teach to the high middle and low. Instead they teach ONLY to the low. Given, this is largely in response to bitching parents of truly low-intelligence kids--the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But it has also worked out very much in the teachers' favor.
Of course, teachers in here laugh at this. They are attracted to a forum such as this because they are not the norm. Still, none are intellectually honest enough to admit that Ms. Jones down the hall has all the intellectual weight of gossamer. Or that Mr. Smith downstairs should have been forced out of teaching years ago. But the reality is that of the positive feedback loop of America's entire education system: you have kids being poorly educated for the most part. They (typical case) leave the K-12 system barely educated to the equivalent of the 6th grade circa 1940-1950. Nonetheless, many are still able to get into public colleges/unis which, as someone noted, are no longer institutions of higher learning so much as profit-making enterprises that compete and compete HARD for every student for the exact same reasons K-12 schools do so: $$.
But the colleges and unis have to deal with the product K-12 is sending them. Look at any college catalog...get hold of some from say, 1960. Compare the numbers of remedial courses offered. Typically, these course are there just to get the students up to the ability to pass 100/entry-level courses like "the essay" and "the research paper" and beg. math and science classes.
So how is this in the teachers' favor? Well, teachers, typically, graduate from the very lowest levels of their college graduating classes. That's just a fact. So we now have teachers poorly educated in our K-12 system who graduated at the lowest levels in college teaching our kids K-12. In order to survive, they must dumb-down what they teach, graduating kids who are dumbed-down, who go into college; some of them become teachers, already dumbed-down a degree lower than their K-12 teacher; they then, in order to survive, must dumb-down THEIR students...some of whom go on to become...teachers?
This is called a positive feedback loop. And as anyone can see, the more dumbed-down the curricula are, the easier it is for "teachers," who are themselves today the 4th-5th generation of dumbed-down students.
It's really pretty easy to understand once you understand--and admit to--the system as it has existed past about 1965.
Tokie
