Falling education standards and what to do about them.

Facts- there are none-

nvtribefan said:
I still didn't see any sources, but I believe paying teachers well is a good thing.
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Tribe Fan and others- good evening to all-
I have no "facts" to support what I say. Statistics, especially education stats, can be used to "prove" anything or any point of contention.
Instead, I have nearly 40 years of time spent standing in front of public school classrooms in a wide range of settings- tiny little dirt-poor rural schools, fairly wealthy middle class schools- even college classes.
I have learned that US public school classes very accurately reflect the communities that the kids come from. If education is valued at home, the kids are pressured to achieve at school. If education is not valued at home, the kids may or may not achieve at school.
I have been impressed by what my foreign exchange student have told me on a number of occasions. If I can summarize:
My foreign students from Sweden, Germany, Japan- have told me the biggest difference between US schools and their schools- In their schools, the teachers actually do very little- the kids do everything. In US schools, the teachers do everything and the kids do almost nothing.
I found that information to be very interesting- good evening to all- Ed
 

Number 32 in the first test, about the plane flying due north. If it has to turn *RIGHT* on the last turn?

Never mind. I get it now. :rolleyes:
 

Aunt Bea said:
It is discouraging and confusing. Many of the suburban schools in my area have a 98% graduation rate and the city school has improved to just over 50%. IMO it doesn't have much to do with actual money for education, I think the wealthier folks place a higher value on education and are able to provide a more stable home life.

Another disturbing trend in my state is that each public school has a state funded police officer or state trooper on site, they are called Resource Officers. Is school really that dangerous?
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Very many of them are, Aunt Bea.
 
In my day ('ere we go!) in Wales (oh gawd, 'ees off agin') school was initially an infant boot camp in the first year where rules were learned and enforced as we learned our "ABC". It was never a place of fun but of learning.

At 6 we were expected to read and write and start on use of cursive writing with real pens and ink. I always seemed to have ink stained index and second finger but I was far from alone in that.

As we moved up the year classes so more complex subjects were added until by aged 11 we had been streamed into the academic stream, the technical stream, and the rural stream. The rural stream were those kids expected to become manual workers.

At 11 we were streamed once more and segregated to those who would then be transfered to "Grammar Schools" or for the less able to "Comprehensive Schools" where the concentration would be educating kids to work as technicians and such rather than to enter a profession which was the objective of the Grammar Schools.

But (OK , I know, shouldn't start with "But")for everybody school was not and was not intended to be fun. It was about work. Seated in rows in front of blackboard teaching and trouble if you misbehaved that would include corporal punishment.

It worked.

By 11 most of us in the stream that I was in, and many in the lower stream were confident with rudimentary algebra and the calculus.

Sport was 20 min a week in a gym and 40 min a week field sport and 20 min a week swimming.

I didn't particularly like school because it was hard work and I absolutely hated geography.

When our kids went to school albeit by that time we had moved to England we were horrified at how poor education had become and when I first heard about mixed ability classes I really thought I had misunderstood what they were. Sadly I hadn't.

Now our g'kids are at school we're shocked at the stories they tell, stories backed up by the occasional newspaper articles that appear from time to time, but blame must be put on parents too. Children who are totally unprepared for school even to the extent of not being toilet trained or able to communicate by having been stuffed in front of a TV all their lives to date and on top if that having parents, or increasingly a single parent with no idea of even the basics of parental responsibility.

Was it better in my day when I started school in 1950?

Oh yes, it really really was.
 
It was better here, too, Aeron. I never expected, nor did my peers, that school was for fun. It was a place to learn the things that would get you through life. One of the first things we had to learn, if we hadn't learned such things at home, was the standard we were expected to meet in behavior. Nobody cared if we liked it or not, or if iti upset our little psyches or not, we were expected to behave properly. And guess what -- it did not hurt us one bit! Perhaps if behavior standards were insisted upon nowdays, we wouldn't have all the violence and so on we have in schools today.
 
Warrigal said:
Rudimentary algebra, maybe, but calculus 11? I call BS.
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Not BS at all. Note that I used the word rudimentary. The example that I remember was to calculate the locus of a point on the flange of a railway wheel as it progressed along a track and how we were surprised to note that it travels in the reverse direction.


That was in my final year at the intermediate school and the majority of the class were 11.
 
Just a tad misleading, don't you think. Yes, age 11 would have been the last year of primary school over here and the maths curriculum was devoted primarily to arithmetic with elementary geometry concepts.

On entering high school, at a typical grammar style selective school, the first maths lesson was our introduction to generalised arithmetic (algebra) and the second was our first formal proof of a Euclidean theorem. Calculus was introduced three years later and only for students aiming to matriculate.

Your plotting of the locus of a moving point would most certainly have been an example of an enrichment topic introduced by the teacher and unless equations were involved, it is more geometry than a study of differential calculus.
 
Remember i'm going back over 65 years here and with obviously different syllabuses not to mention parental involvement.
 
So am I and at that time the NSW curriculum was pretty much a copy of the UK one. It was before the introduction of comprehensive schools - we copied that development too.

My school was a selective high school but not called a grammar school because the private sector had appropriated that term. The curriculum was academic - one, two or three languages (French, Latin and German), English, Mathematics I (Arithmetic, algebra and later calculus), Mathematics II ( Euclidean geometry and later trigonometry and co-ordinate geometry), Science (combined physics and chemistry) or Biology, History, Geography and for the lower classes, the option of Art, Music or Needlework. We had no choice of subjects in the junior school. Classes were graded and everyone in each class had the same timetable and courses. I was in the three languages class and was spared art, music, needlework, history and geography.

It was pre baby boom and matriculation was an opportunity not available to the majority of students because of the streaming into different schools and streaming within the schools. Girls' schools had less options than boys' schools. At my school we ere not allowed to study physics as a full subject but we could study chemistry or biology. In boys' schools biology was down played as a soft subject.

To attend my school I had to travel from my home in the suburbs to the centre of Sydney by train (~ 45 mins) and many mothers would not let their 12 year old daughters do this. I was one of the lucky girls who were allowed to travel and also allowed to stay on at school past 15 years of age.

This is a photo of my class in 1956, second year of high school.
I'm 5th from the left in the front row.

school photo 3.jpg
 
I would have guessed who you were, the prettiest one!

One immediate difference was combined physics and chemistry. In the academic stream physics and chemistry were two separate subjects and Latin was mandatory.

I mention the splitting of physics and chemistry because I couldn't stand chemistry whereas I physics I found fascinating. Probably why I went on to read physics!

But again about geography, yeugh.

Ah schooldays! Wasted on kids!
 
Our headmistress, herself a BSc, thought it quite proper that physics not be allowed for girls because she was not allowed to study it at university in her time. I settled for chemistry which I did find fascinating.
 
Butterfly said:
It was better here, too, Aeron. I never expected, nor did my peers, that school was for fun. It was a place to learn the things that would get you through life. One of the first things we had to learn, if we hadn't learned such things at home, was the standard we were expected to meet in behavior. Nobody cared if we liked it or not, or if iti upset our little psyches or not, we were expected to behave properly. And guess what -- it did not hurt us one bit! Perhaps if behavior standards were insisted upon nowdays, we wouldn't have all the violence and so on we have in schools today.
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Meaneeee;)

That's the thing, a common set of expectations and/or walking around knowledge. With all the religious, legal and political stuffff going in school now a days it's a very watered down curriculum with the goal of just getting the student to graduate rather than actually learn or prepare them for life in general.
 
There is absolutely no place for religion in school. At the very most it should be comparative religion but indoctrination kids with "god" rubbish or that the bible or any "holy book" is other than a fairy story is disgusting.

As for creation being factual, words fail me.
 
One of the principle foundations of our U.S. government was the "separation of church and state". Many of the early European immigrants had seen, first hand, what happens to their nations when the "Church" becomes the primary force behind their nations leadership. In recent years, that Separation is being increasingly eroded as the "Evangelical" influence gains strength. Religion, IMO, is a personal thing, and should not be forced upon others.

We need only to look at the Middle East, and the endless conflicts between the Sunni and Shiite factions of Islam, and how that is destroying much of that part of the world....and spreading terrorism everywhere.
 
One of the many problems with Islam is that it is not "just" a religion, it is a soup to nuts thing that has a fixed and immutable legal and punitive system, a complete government system, and an impertinent to change whatever way of living and legal system it encounters to Islam all hel together with theism that in itself bears no close examination.

Separation between "church and state" in the case of Islam is quite simply a non sequitur. It makes for an interesting problems in coming years.

Especially in the education of children.
 

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