Do Not Increase The Length of the School Day Nor the School Year
I agree that there is something wrong with American primary and secondary education. But I strongly believe that (a) more of the same will not help, and (b) in fact, it might very well make things worse. High school was so mind-bogglingly boring that I barely graduated. (I was, in fact, fairly near the bottom of my class, as I recall.) It was torture. Any more of that torture, and I might very well have quit the whole rotten mess. I had nothing against learning--I was an insatiably curious kid, read voraciously, loved working logic puzzles (but had sadly not yet discovered the joys of math), excelled at debate (for all its vices, the one thing that kept me at all engaged with school...)...but high school was just hellish. Primary school, as I recall, was even worse.
I'm all for changes; I'm all for encouraging kids to learn and helping them do so. Hell, I love education.
But kids are not adults; there is no earthly reason to think that they ought to be trapped in a school day or year that emulates the adult workday/year. They'll be cogs in the machine soon enough; for chrissake, let them retain a bit of their youth. If we were doing them significant good by cooping them up, then the decision might be more difficult; but we don't seem to be. I have no hope that we'll be able to solve the problem of poor-quality education by upping the quantity. (Though one can find an edu-study (or ten) to support any plan you might wish to float...)
At any rate, if you don't know how to do something right, fer chrissake don't just do more of it.
(As always, I'll be happy to change my mind in the face of credible evidence that I'm wrong on this.)
I agree that there is something wrong with American primary and secondary education. But I strongly believe that (a) more of the same will not help, and (b) in fact, it might very well make things worse. High school was so mind-bogglingly boring that I barely graduated. (I was, in fact, fairly near the bottom of my class, as I recall.) It was torture. Any more of that torture, and I might very well have quit the whole rotten mess. I had nothing against learning--I was an insatiably curious kid, read voraciously, loved working logic puzzles (but had sadly not yet discovered the joys of math), excelled at debate (for all its vices, the one thing that kept me at all engaged with school...)...but high school was just hellish. Primary school, as I recall, was even worse.
I'm all for changes; I'm all for encouraging kids to learn and helping them do so. Hell, I love education.
But kids are not adults; there is no earthly reason to think that they ought to be trapped in a school day or year that emulates the adult workday/year. They'll be cogs in the machine soon enough; for chrissake, let them retain a bit of their youth. If we were doing them significant good by cooping them up, then the decision might be more difficult; but we don't seem to be. I have no hope that we'll be able to solve the problem of poor-quality education by upping the quantity. (Though one can find an edu-study (or ten) to support any plan you might wish to float...)
At any rate, if you don't know how to do something right, fer chrissake don't just do more of it.
(As always, I'll be happy to change my mind in the face of credible evidence that I'm wrong on this.)
posted by Winston Smith at
8:33 AM
2 Comments:
Whenever I see some middle school (or a parent) bragging that their kids do three hours - or five hours - of homework a night, I can't keep quiet. They may be trying to crowd out TV and video games, but they're really crowding out any semblance of curiosity or self-direction. If they were telling the kids to read a book, I'd be fine with it.
Extra hours in the school day could be used for the enrichment that teaching to the test has supplanted. Could be.
I know...I'm shocked by that kind of thing. I mean, granted, I basically never did homework in high school (mostly, we did farm work in the evenings). But it astounds me that no one seems to think it's odd for kids to basically go to school for almost an entire adult work-day, and then (allegedly) do, say, 5 hours of homework on top of that. Really? I mean, it sounds like some kind of slavery/imprisonment/torture. I just can't believe it.
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