There you go with the methodology, techniques, and theory! Re-inventing the educational wheel, yet again. Montessori, Dewey, Tolstoy, and Rousseau were writing a century or more ago. Tell us something we don’t know.
There is a reason we are stuck in reverse. There is a reason we cannot escape the pedagogical obsessions. We hav…
There you go with the methodology, techniques, and theory! Re-inventing the educational wheel, yet again. Montessori, Dewey, Tolstoy, and Rousseau were writing a century or more ago. Tell us something we don’t know.
There is a reason we are stuck in reverse. There is a reason we cannot escape the pedagogical obsessions. We have allowed ourselves to be dependent upon our teachers and our schools for something we are mistakenly calling education.
My dad used to say often that children should be seen and not heard. I think teachers should be seen and heard from only when students ask for their input! I am the last person to diminish the importance of “good” teachers. However, when children are given a mindset from the time they can speak or before that they will only learn when they attend a school, “pay attention” to a teacher, and follow instructions for 12 years, we have completely defeated our purposes.
Institutionalizing learning or “education” and creating a category for teaching that takes the initiative away from the individual child is our first mistake. But then, we compounded and perpetuated the error by passing laws to require school attendance. There is one way and one way only to escape that trap.
IEP’s are splendid. But they cannot ever be implemented on any scale for any length of time. All such innovations run counter to the authoritarian bureaucracy which is endemic to compulsory attendance. Control, order, discipline, obsessive measurement, focusing on the group and the school’s mission and mandates, etc., etc., must always take priority, except for small scale and temporary “models” and “experiments”, Bill Gates, notwithstanding. How many times do I have to say it? Either you put your confidence in the individual or the state. Those are your choices. I choose the individual. The state should be providing the resources and oversight, not taking over the lives of children and engineering society.
" Individual or the state" is a bullshit false dichotomy that plays well in Trumpworld.
Public education supports socialization, which is more important than ego centered "individualism." The IEP helps the kid to perform.
I had something to do with the SSA Listings of Impairments for kids. I also heard disability cases, worked with juvenile crime, etc. Most behavioral impairments can be diagnosed, treated, so that kids don't turn out to be menaces to society.
My statement about the individual and the state was not a commentary on individualism versus the state or collectivism. It was added as an afterthought when I was fatigued and I was thinking only in terms of whether the state should be deciding the direction of the individual’s life on the basis of some imagined expertise relative to curricular content and values. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.
I agree with you and have stated here many times, I believe, that socialization is a primary function of schooling. It is, however, a function which has been performed extremely poorly for the reasons I have often outlined. When students have no autonomy, when they feel put upon, bullied, oppressed, or ignored, or when their peer interactions are superficial and distorted by competition and myriad restriction, socialization is perverted.
“Behavioral impairments”??? Are they “learning disabilities”, impairments, lack of social skills, and problems which students bring which require amelioration??? Or, are they problems created and exacerbated by the school? Are they disabilities because they inhibit authentic learning, or are they instead reactions to extreme frustrations, abuse, the physical restraint of bodies needing movement, exercise, and deep breathing and the denial of learning opportunities which are organic and logical? Control and behavioral training are for pigeons and lab rats. Some of us were taught all to well what the schools wanted us to learn.
Mr. Solomon,
There you go with the methodology, techniques, and theory! Re-inventing the educational wheel, yet again. Montessori, Dewey, Tolstoy, and Rousseau were writing a century or more ago. Tell us something we don’t know.
There is a reason we are stuck in reverse. There is a reason we cannot escape the pedagogical obsessions. We have allowed ourselves to be dependent upon our teachers and our schools for something we are mistakenly calling education.
My dad used to say often that children should be seen and not heard. I think teachers should be seen and heard from only when students ask for their input! I am the last person to diminish the importance of “good” teachers. However, when children are given a mindset from the time they can speak or before that they will only learn when they attend a school, “pay attention” to a teacher, and follow instructions for 12 years, we have completely defeated our purposes.
Institutionalizing learning or “education” and creating a category for teaching that takes the initiative away from the individual child is our first mistake. But then, we compounded and perpetuated the error by passing laws to require school attendance. There is one way and one way only to escape that trap.
IEP’s are splendid. But they cannot ever be implemented on any scale for any length of time. All such innovations run counter to the authoritarian bureaucracy which is endemic to compulsory attendance. Control, order, discipline, obsessive measurement, focusing on the group and the school’s mission and mandates, etc., etc., must always take priority, except for small scale and temporary “models” and “experiments”, Bill Gates, notwithstanding. How many times do I have to say it? Either you put your confidence in the individual or the state. Those are your choices. I choose the individual. The state should be providing the resources and oversight, not taking over the lives of children and engineering society.
" Individual or the state" is a bullshit false dichotomy that plays well in Trumpworld.
Public education supports socialization, which is more important than ego centered "individualism." The IEP helps the kid to perform.
I had something to do with the SSA Listings of Impairments for kids. I also heard disability cases, worked with juvenile crime, etc. Most behavioral impairments can be diagnosed, treated, so that kids don't turn out to be menaces to society.
Mr. Solomon,
My statement about the individual and the state was not a commentary on individualism versus the state or collectivism. It was added as an afterthought when I was fatigued and I was thinking only in terms of whether the state should be deciding the direction of the individual’s life on the basis of some imagined expertise relative to curricular content and values. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.
I agree with you and have stated here many times, I believe, that socialization is a primary function of schooling. It is, however, a function which has been performed extremely poorly for the reasons I have often outlined. When students have no autonomy, when they feel put upon, bullied, oppressed, or ignored, or when their peer interactions are superficial and distorted by competition and myriad restriction, socialization is perverted.
“Behavioral impairments”??? Are they “learning disabilities”, impairments, lack of social skills, and problems which students bring which require amelioration??? Or, are they problems created and exacerbated by the school? Are they disabilities because they inhibit authentic learning, or are they instead reactions to extreme frustrations, abuse, the physical restraint of bodies needing movement, exercise, and deep breathing and the denial of learning opportunities which are organic and logical? Control and behavioral training are for pigeons and lab rats. Some of us were taught all to well what the schools wanted us to learn.