cultural differences?
IQ?
class differences?
general apathy?
bad teachers? (too strict, too loose, etc?)
Not enough funds?
Private sector competition? (bookstores, internet, jobs,)?
Bullying?
All of this is connected to statism as the ultimate cause but I wanted to muse on more particular causes.
I’ve always felt that the greatest detriment to ‘quality’ education is its compulsory nature.
going from a 3a public school where around 90% of the student population would rather be elsewhere to a private school where 100% of the student population were exactly where they wished to be illustrated this. the quality of funding or teachers or whatever else will not matter if the students could not care less.
To answer what is the biggest cause of bad education you must first define good education otherwise you’ve got no criterion for success or failure.
Are you talking about differences in educational achievement between individual people? Or between groups of people? Or between public schools and private schools?
A
Bad teachers (with bad knowledge and bad personalities) and bad materials.
Put Walter Block and Hans Hoppe in my classroom when I was 10 years old and I’d be the first one there every day.
B
Another massive problem is that schools in no way adapt to the varying interests and energy each individual has throughout any period of time. I might be really into history for a few weeks, and then I might want to dive into something really technical like engineering or information systems. Instead they just steamroll you endlessly through inane curriculums.
Combine A and B and you get the prison-like ‘educational’ environment you have today.
Of course, fakename is right in that the ultimate cause that fathers all other problems in the system is statism, which is to say force is the problem. I taught for five years in the public school system before I had to get out, and what was most noticeable to me was that, because of the compulsory nature of public schooling, teachers and administrators have an incredible incentive to dumb down the curriculum. First, when so many kids, each with his or her own strengths, interests, and experiences are thrown together the system is compelled, out of sheer necessity, to aim for the lowest common denominator. This naturally bores the hell out of a majority of students, who wind up hating school because it does nothing to stimulate their intellect. Secondly, to counteract this problem, teachers resort to gimmicks and psychological manipulation in order to get these bored students to like the class or the teacher, and as a result we get all kinds of nonsense games and low level distraction. Just look at how the average teacher sets up his or her class - posters, motivational sayings on the wall. The predominant complaint from teachers is that the kids are disinterested, and so educational theory is predicated on how to “engage” the students not through subject matter (nobody in education cares about that anymore) but through progressive gimmickry, cooperative learning, making arts-and-crafts style posters about mundane trivia, “student-centered” techniques and so on. Modern educational theory is an implicit admission that it is impossible to teach those that do not want to learn, so we have to trick students into it somehow. Sadly, few people caught up in the system realize this is what is going on. Because it’s happened for so long, teachers think that’s quality education.
So you get grade inflation because of the ease of curriculum, which teachers discover always works in their favor. If everyone gets an A there are no complaints and you look like a dedicated, inspiring teacher. Everyone likes you, and they like school, which makes it easier for the system to accomplish the conditioning for which it was designed. When people open the paper and see how many straight A students there are, they think that quality education is happening. Parents come to think their children are Einsteins and all is well with the world. There is no incentive, of course, to expose this for what it is from the inside. My experience was that there were a number of teachers that knew all this, but they quietly went about their business, handing out praise, candy, and straight A’s because, after all, that was what they were expected to do.
This creates monsters. Behaviorally, bored kids do not sit with their heads on desks snoozing all day long. They act out. They look for ways to stimulate themselves intellectually, and so they target other students as the object of their wit, or they target teachers who haven’t figured out the game, because if the kids learn nothing else, they learn that the semblence of obedience to authority, playing ball and doing what they are told is the way to advance in life.
My thoughts during school were along the lines of, “I’d rather be skating”.
History was the only course that interested me, but they half-assed the hell out of it. In high school if I wasn’t in an honors class I was in a class of dullards and deliquents. The honor’s classes in reality just seemed to be segregating yourself from everyone else, the curriculum was no more difficult.
Yet, the things I did in high school (mischief wise) couldn’t be topped. Constructive trickery.
thanks for answering my questions! I plan to reflect on them and respond to them soon.
One that immediately comes to mind is, that never has cultural or income differences affected your ability to interact or learn from the teacher?
I suppose that if it had, what was stopping you from bridging that gap -there’s an incentive to try to do so and the fact that this difficulty wasn’t solved by what can be called free exchange (of ideas, of sympathies) is interesting.
The entire conception of what education is. The logistics are insignificant. I skipped a lot of grades in school, never studied, never did homework and goofed off in class as much as possible. Still knew more than everyone else and had the highest test scores. Of course, no teacher ever had the slightest interest in what I did differently from everyone else. Because they don’t give a flying shit. All they care about is filling a building with pencil pushing robots for 6 hours a day and collecting a paycheck at the end of the week and striking to get raises. Then, when some prize student brings honor to their little hole for no reason pertaining to them, they bask in boneheaded adulation.
IMO as well.
I’ve been wondering about what you all have said and I can’t help but wonder, with all the angst generated in school, why doesn’t the student body want out? I think that they’ve found an equilibrium in day dreams. If they can’t get out of school, and if goofing off is too hard for the average kid, then just being bored and thinking about whatever is the prefered thing to do.
Some further reflections:
Bad neighborhoods are generally blamed for creating bad schools but is it rather that schools create bad neighborhoods? Every school is essentially an expansion of state power -the drug war, the forced education, gun laws, taxes, etc.?
Also, a meditation on lowering student ratios -could this pertain to the boredom students feel and their need for funny, easy, unserious (vis-a-vis work) teachers? My idea is that their discontent with some teachers causes them to have a higher demand for other teachers and that this results in large class ratios in the classes of those teachers -essentially it results in more popular teachers. So the restrictions on class size are essentially protectionist measures designed in favor of “bad” (however that is defined) teachers. Is that a probable analysis?
Finally, in light of the difficulty many students have in school, assuming we can’t just deregulate the whole thing, why not just allow cheating? It could hugely raise grades and it would be a triumph of coordinating the different interests and abilities of distinct individuals -better than a dumbing down.
I know of no theory explaining how “bad” people from abroad are attracted to move into ever closer geographical proximity to each other. Schools are the only unifying force in a neighborhood between “good” and “bad” people.
I know of no theory explaining how “bad” people from abroad are attracted to move into ever closer geographical proximity to each other. Schools are the only unifying force in a neighborhood between “good” and “bad” people.
Good and Bad sides of town will exist with or without public schools.
Evidence:
Evidence:
Slums that have existed in virtually every city. There are and always have been desireable places to live and undesireable places to live.