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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Feb 20, 2024 14:16:56 GMT
Feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I will try and explain what I think with a bit of a simplification in terms to two types of people, and this will hopefully illustrate the problem we have. You can extrapolate to the real situation by considering things are a range of cases between the two.
OK well as I see things, school is like the preparation for work and employment, and this country works as a system with rules and so forth. Going back to my early childhood and thinking what it was like at school, there were definitely the two types in view. A class consists of a teacher and about 30 or so pupils and all these pupils are psychologically different. It's just nature, where all physical attributes display a range of possibilities. Now the system of education being taught does not cover for everyone. There are psychologies that it works better with and those it does not. I mean lets say your brain worked in the sense that it was good at copying information and relaying it back to the teacher accuracy. Pretty early on at school we are going to find a particular system imposed on a spread of different psychologies is going to result in some minds being compatible and producing the results the system measures and some will be a mismatch, whereupon they will get low marks. In my schools and amongst the inmates, the concept of the teacher's pet emerged. It was like you got a sort of resonance between the system of education the teacher was working with and the psychology of the pupil. If we look at the other extreme, there were always 3-4 in the class which were the teacher's enemy. The usual charge agaisnt such people was that they were "disruptive". disruptive was an official categorisation made by the teacher, where pet was more a term the kids would use. Officially they would be categorised as a number of different superlatives, e.g. very bright, successful etc.
Now this kind of distinction is already being made very early on in the child's experience of school. We are maybe talking at say by the age of 7-8 the teachers have already graded and analysed everyone, and as they have they treat them differently. The disruptive have to be punished. They will be made to sit in detention at break times in the main hall and the teachers will pass by and learn of their offending nature and well really they are getting more and more what they call "type-cast". Meanwhile the teacher's pets will often get additional music lessons after school and might even go on to win an external music competition, or used to present the school's excellent teaching as an example to the wider community and may well get photographed by the local press for winning a competition. Pretty early on we see this gap between winners and losers widening. The disruptive are used to set the example to anyone thinking of offending the system and the pets are heading to Oxford and Cambridge, even if they don't know it at this stage.
I' like you to consider what it is like if you put yourself in the shoes of each type, and how such early experiences would shape your basic attitude towards the system. One type believes whatever he does he can do nothing right, and the other believes that they can do no wrong and are indeed brilliant and above everyone else. Also what if this brilliant type ends up as an MP which she stands a good chance if she can make it to Oxford and then be the brightest of the brightest, which in layman's terms equates to being the president of the Oxford students union. I did at one time get to a debate in the Balliol Junior Common Room(known as the JCR), so I kind of know what that is like. The eloquence of the speakers was second to none, but to this day I wonder if they were really as intelligent as the legend says they are. Your thoughts...
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Post by Orac on Feb 20, 2024 14:43:03 GMT
I hate to say this, but I feel one of the problems is a lack of significant streaming.
By the age of 12, it is usually obvious whether you have a student who is going to make an honest stab and conjugating Latin verbs, or (say) understanding what a dynamic equilibrium is.
Practically minded students should be streamed off into learning practical skills that will likely lead to them being able to make money. Those that continue to be disruptive need to be handled off-site in holding facilities full of social workers until the police can charge them as an adult.
No system is perfect btw
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Feb 20, 2024 15:04:04 GMT
I hate to say this, but I feel one of the problems is a lack of significant streaming. By the age of 12, it is usually obvious whether you have a student who is going to make an honest stab and conjugating Latin verbs, or (say) understanding what a dynamic equilibrium is. Practically minded students should be streamed off into learning practical skills that will likely lead to them being able to make money. Those that continue to be disruptive need to be handled off-site in holding facilities full of social workers until the police can charge them as an adult. No system is perfect btw I think the problem is it is one of those mechanisms which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The disruptive kid may have been so classed at an age where he did not have his wits about him. At the age of 7-8 you really don't know what is going on and it is hurtful to be classed as such and such, especially if you feel you don't deserve it. All that has happened is they put a standard program in front of this array of individual people and some found it interesting and some found it uninteresting. Standard human psychology states that if you don't find something interesting you will lose attention, discard it and forget it, and then you would try a different approach, only at school he can't try a different approach. This then leads to a negative spiral in the more the teachers think he is dumb the dumber he will get because now they are teaching even more mickey mouse stuff to him. It's the same uninteresting stuff, but spelt out one letter at a time. Now what is he to do as the lessons are even more tedious. The boredom is getting intolerable, so he thinks of anything to change the status quo.
One trick employed at our school was to set the fire alarm off. They learnt this really helped change the boredom of the situation. In fact the act of doing that gave the pupil actual power and autonomy, because the teachers were instructed to act according to something they had been instructed to do on the command of the kid, as the kid has his finger on the button. As for punishment deterrents, well the lessons feel like punishment anyway, so it is bye the bye.
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Post by piglet on Feb 21, 2024 11:33:16 GMT
The problem with education is that its here and now, children develop at different rates, i dont think anyone knows the mechanism. Boys develop at a slower rate to girls, life situation affects development, a lad at nine, compared to 26, he will be totally different. The same person in a different family would be different from 9 to 26. To maximise educational development would include " what are we dealing with", " who are you".
When at school no one understood me, you can apply that to eighty percent of pupils, the ones who got noticed were the ones who achieved, and got more attention. No one gets me now, i dont get myself sometimes. To get someone to achieve at school you need to learn the pupils language on many levels, not going to happen.
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Post by Cartertonian on Feb 21, 2024 13:03:38 GMT
And that's where things go awry.
Too many see school as nothing more than a factory for producing unthinking, organic automatons to be fed into the economic machine and forced to follow a Dickensian work ethic of work/eat/sleep/repeat until death.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Feb 21, 2024 14:44:17 GMT
And that's where things go awry. Too many see school as nothing more than a factory for producing unthinking, organic automatons to be fed into the economic machine and forced to follow a Dickensian work ethic of work/eat/sleep/repeat until death. What would you go to school for then? Our psychologies have developed from the beginning of time to aid survival through acquiring skill and mastery over the physical world. This is why learning something which has a big advantage for one's future standard of living is enjoyable.
Also, as I have pointed out before, Dickens was involved in a secret socialist cult-like conspiracy at the Hampstead Historic Club & Wyldes Farm in Hampstead. It was fiction he wrote. Some would say socialist propaganda. Fabians and all.
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Post by Orac on Feb 21, 2024 14:58:43 GMT
I hate to say this, but I feel one of the problems is a lack of significant streaming. By the age of 12, it is usually obvious whether you have a student who is going to make an honest stab and conjugating Latin verbs, or (say) understanding what a dynamic equilibrium is. Practically minded students should be streamed off into learning practical skills that will likely lead to them being able to make money. Those that continue to be disruptive need to be handled off-site in holding facilities full of social workers until the police can charge them as an adult. No system is perfect btw I think the problem is it is one of those mechanisms which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The disruptive kid may have been so classed at an age where he did not have his wits about him. At the age of 7-8 you really don't know what is going on and it is hurtful to be classed as such and such, especially if you feel you don't deserve it. All that has happened is they put a standard program in front of this array of individual people and some found it interesting and some found it uninteresting. Standard human psychology states that if you don't find something interesting you will lose attention, discard it and forget it, and then you would try a different approach, only at school he can't try a different approach. This then leads to a negative spiral in the more the teachers think he is dumb the dumber he will get because now they are teaching even more mickey mouse stuff to him. It's the same uninteresting stuff, but spelt out one letter at a time. Now what is he to do as the lessons are even more tedious. The boredom is getting intolerable, so he thinks of anything to change the status quo.
One trick employed at our school was to set the fire alarm off. They learnt this really helped change the boredom of the situation. In fact the act of doing that gave the pupil actual power and autonomy, because the teachers were instructed to act according to something they had been instructed to do on the command of the kid, as the kid has his finger on the button. As for punishment deterrents, well the lessons feel like punishment anyway, so it is bye the bye.
I wasn't very specific - i think the levels of misbehavior need to be quite high. I don't think a child should have his future ruined for being a pain in the neck and getting into a few fights. However, in the absence of corporal punishment or parental discipline, there is a level of shitty behavior that a educational facility simply can't deal with - one example would be assaulting staff |
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Post by Cartertonian on Feb 21, 2024 14:59:07 GMT
Well, I'm glad you asked!
Educational theorists would argue that schools (and colleges and universities) should be aiming to produce rounded, open-minded human beings who can make as full a contribution to society (not just the economy thereof) as possible.
We have seen a blinkered focus on STEM subjects, at the expense of culturally enriching subjects, as if all that mattered was getting out of school and into a factory. Part of the problem is, as piglet intimated, that not all students will thrive in our current school environment. We need to think more about lifelong learning and how to grow individuals at their pace, not ours.
From my own experience, I have lost count of the soldiers I have dealt with over the last quarter of a century, who were clearly bright and able, but who didn't bother at school because they were, 'going to join the Army'. Only having done so, did they realise they had sold themselves short and many I knew went on to get GCSEs and A levels (or tech trade equivalents) and I know quite a few have progressed onto degrees, masters and in some case PhDs. In fact one of those was someone I quoted in my own PhD thesis, who'd joined up as a squaddie, trained as a PTI, realised he was brighter than he (and the Army) thought he was and studied all the way to PhD. He's now an associate professor in Sports Science.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Feb 21, 2024 15:14:23 GMT
I think the problem is it is one of those mechanisms which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The disruptive kid may have been so classed at an age where he did not have his wits about him. At the age of 7-8 you really don't know what is going on and it is hurtful to be classed as such and such, especially if you feel you don't deserve it. All that has happened is they put a standard program in front of this array of individual people and some found it interesting and some found it uninteresting. Standard human psychology states that if you don't find something interesting you will lose attention, discard it and forget it, and then you would try a different approach, only at school he can't try a different approach. This then leads to a negative spiral in the more the teachers think he is dumb the dumber he will get because now they are teaching even more mickey mouse stuff to him. It's the same uninteresting stuff, but spelt out one letter at a time. Now what is he to do as the lessons are even more tedious. The boredom is getting intolerable, so he thinks of anything to change the status quo.
One trick employed at our school was to set the fire alarm off. They learnt this really helped change the boredom of the situation. In fact the act of doing that gave the pupil actual power and autonomy, because the teachers were instructed to act according to something they had been instructed to do on the command of the kid, as the kid has his finger on the button. As for punishment deterrents, well the lessons feel like punishment anyway, so it is bye the bye.
I wasn't very specific - i think the levels of misbehavior need to be quite high. I don't think a child should have his future ruined for being a pain in the neck and getting into a few fights. However, in the absence of corporal punishment or parental discipline, there is a level of shitty behavior that a educational facility simply can't deal with - one example would be assaulting staff I have never in all my school days ever seen anyone fight a member of staff, although what the hell assault means these days could be just about anything. At railway stations now there are posters which warn it is a criminal offence to look at a woman the wrong way.
I recall at my first school the kind of thing which would get you a detention was not doing what a teacher ordered you to do, and some of these bitches took it upon themselves to abuse the little power they had and treat the kids as their servants, where in actual fact it is the kids who are paying their wages via their parents. Detention would be levelled for walking on the grass and sitting on the wall, which was about 2ft high and the border of the playground. There were times when I simply felt like fuck you. The idea of the detention was to humiliate you and make you feel really sorry in front of all your highly superior superiors. So you see this builds resentment.You could explain it that the way the teachers treat kids causes them to retaliate. Maybe it has got far worse now. I'm very out of touch with the current school system. I know the job is extremely stressful and no one wants to do it.
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