I wanted to get into a bit more detail about some education ideas I have since I talked about education last time and made comments that we need improvement. I talked about how standardized tests don't work and then lo and behold the Atlanta paper comments on widespread cheating going on with standardized tests. Yes the report is somewhat set up since the Atlanta school district is being investigated for cheating, but I believe the paper's report probably has some serious truth.
Anyway so that is my pseudo vindication and now to a bit more.
Changing how we think about education is very important. I want to create a framework for some ideas, yet by no means is this a complete program. It is an overhaul of how we think about education. This is the beginning of a philosophical change in how we approach educating our children. This is not completely unique and encompasses different ideas from various sources over the years. An aside here, I don't blame teachers, educators, administrators for our current system, it is what we inherited. There are good educators etc out there, it is the programs and systems that are failing.
It seems we start educating our children younger and younger, when I started school we began at first grade. Kindergarten was more something you started extra, not normally part of the public school system, eventually kindergarten was incorporated and now you see many more pre school programs part of the actual education process. It would be nice if we could keep our children at home longer, but with our economy and parents needing to work more than one job, this trend will probably continue. So lets start with preschool.
Many studies show children learn language at an early age. Let's take advantage of that for preschool. The program for pre school needs to include heavy language development and not just one language. Yes there is the debate about English only etc, but put that aside and realize learning more than one language is beneficial to the individual. The focus in preschool should be language development, reading, music, and arts. It should be stated that I am referring to ages 3,4,and 5 as preschool ages which incorporates traditional kindergarten age. Playtime is important for this program, also. The program shouldn't incorporate much more. Language and reading skills need to be the emphasis. This is important to help the children with all their education steps going forward.
Grades 1-5 is where I really think we need to make serious changes. We do not need to change the concept of grades 1-5 to move the students through the system, but change how we educate and measure progress. First and yes I know we love our competitive nature in our society, but we need to take competition out of education at this level. This means no grades. We need to completely overall the concept of A's B's etc. And if you think this is wrong to change, then stop and think about it for a second. Our goal is to give our children an education, we should focus on the end result, not the day to day measurement.
I mentioned in earlier post that we should work more with aptitude tests, not standardized tests and for these grade levels this becomes even more important. Next change to digest before trying to put it together in a practical way. We start giving serious aptitude tests to all the children before 1st grade. We then use these tests to determine class selection. Stop again, this doesn't mean we segregate high achievers from low achievers, these are aptitude tests, we use them to better educate each child. We look at how each child does on each test, then we make determinations which I am coming to in a moment. First I want to say the current way of randomly putting 25-30 children in a classroom and trying to educate them at the same pace really doesn't work well, ask most teachers. And the difference is:
To create the framework, lets say each grade has four classes per grade (remember this part is very general) and lets say we are going to focus on just a few subjects for grades 1-5. We will keep language arts, reading, and add math. We include exercise/play time for health, and add some rudimentary classes on most other topics, but we will not focus on them anywhere near as much, well arts and music will have some serious time included. The difference from the current situation is (we do segregate a bit here though) is to put high math achievers in one group, middle achievers in another, and lower achievers in another. Stop and think, yes it sounds contradictory that I said we don't segregate and I just did. The groups focus on the individual levels together, we put the children back together for other topics. So if you have four classes you can break up three groups, the high achievers in math spend a portion each day working together in math class, the middle group breaks out into two classes and the lower aptitude achievers work together. The goal is still to still have all the children learn the basics they need to for each grade level, but you are not hindering the high achievers from the aptitude tests and leaving behind the low achievers. Each group is allowed to move at the pace that best benefits them. At some point the high achievers may get ahead and learn more for the grade level, but we don't look at this within the current competitive system of students getting A's vs. C's but rather what they can accomplish. Each group can feel positive about their accomplishments and by the end of the year all groups can master grade level work. And no we don't standardize test them at the end of the year.We reevaluate. This is done for each subject so different students may end up in different potential higher achiever classes etc. At the end of the year we measure again and if we need to rearrange the classes we do. Individual effort will affect how each student does within each achievement group so we need to adapt to year by year growth. This is just a framework and there is much more development to be explained, but I want to get to the next level.
Grades 6-8 traditionally considered middle school. Children at this age go through many changes and one of them is they become more inquisitive. Our education system should focus more on this stage of their development. The focus now moves to science, philosophy, logic, civics,ethics, social studies and history. With this change you can see why reading development in grades 1-5 is primarily important. There is two types of learning for this level, one is traditional fact base, the other is to use their inquisitive nature to explore their world and learn how to ask and answer questions about their world. We spend so much time in primary grades on things like science fairs and projects that require potentially way too much of the parents doing the work. It would be better spent at this time. Students at this level are now ready to take on complex projects, research projects, and experiments. Our education system should stress these skills, not just memorization of facts. To truly develop an educated child we need to show them how to question, research, interpret data, and make conclusions based on use of fact. And not just in physical science, but in social sciences too. The strength of our country is based on how well the electorate can interpret what is going in our society and make informed decisions about what needs to be done and what is being told to them by our government and the people running for office. If you want democracy to thrive, you need a strongly educated society. This is the time to instill the values of learning into our youth so they can move forward into the next steps.
High School for this system falls more into what we currently do. Hopefully everyone is better prepared though to take advantage of their ability to put everything together as they prepare for adulthood. Now it seems I have completely lost sight of standardized tests, not necessarily. We do need to measure how well we are doing so at some point we introduce them along the way to make sure we arrive at where we should be. We take away any emphasis on them as the sole way to measure progress though.
High school becomes a preparatory step for what a child becomes as an adult. Yes this does include career type choices, but also how well they can do in making career type choices. We continue to use aptitude tests and now we use them to determine where they have strengths. This does not mean we pigeon hole them into only certain areas, this is a democracy with individual rights, but we help them choose areas where they can potentially thrive. A person can always choose what he wants, but at least he realizes he will have to work harder in certain areas to make up where his natural talents may not be the strongest. The student chooses though, not us, yet the student chooses wisely. Structurally though we can keep most of what we have for grades 9-12. A selection of courses from all areas such as math, reading, science, language arts, social sciences, etc is included with electives, but now electives can be for extra learning or to enhance the skill set a student may want to use in career or college preparation. And at this level we incorporate both a grading structure to help students learn to work hard to be successful and we put it all together from all the previous learning that success in one area does not make that person a better person overall, a well grounded respect for each other should be developed through all the grade levels and that each young child learns to accept who they are and who each student becomes. This way a person that shows great aptitude for a doctor is recognized for this, but overall the whole student body is respected for who they can become.
Okay this has been a bit much for a blog, and there are many questions that need to be answered, but again the above is the start of a framework for something better, not all the answers. Yes you may see holes in some of the philosophy above, but many of them I could try to answer and they are there because I am not writing a dissertation, but some quick ideas.
I previously talked about poverty in our society becoming much worse than traditional poverty has been historically. Nowadays we see an exponential growth in problems coming from poverty than the historical problem poverty has been. Improving our education is one way to start to eradicate the problems that our current situation is growing. The world will never truly get rid of poverty, but we have to address it and find ways to help people grow out of it. If not it balloons into bigger problems, people need to see hope, (real hope) or they accept what is going on now which is complete lack of faith in our society and way of life. Again some people will always fall into poverty, but there is a difference when people manipulate others for their own gain and with the drug cartels etc becoming governments in their own right, bigger problems will exist. The quick example of the difference is: at one point the immigrant population would come to our country and group together, yes many struggled and were at the poverty level and we had corrupt people taking advantage of their situation. The difference being that they saw hope, they carried their belief there was something better and eventually they grew into part of our middle class and even more success. Poverty still existed, but was a small part of the population, nowadays it is increasing and less people have hope. This brings about alienation etc from society which causes the bigger problems starting to develop.
And I have beat the horse to death about democrats and republicans not getting it, but as a conservative I find more derision towards the republicans because it is tiring to watch the republican leadership and fox news constantly twist facts around without any regard to the truth just to try and get their way. If you want to truly help our country deal with the issues and come up with solutions, just trying to talk your way into the white house is a failure for this country. This leads me to continue to stress the need for a new conservative party that looks at solving problems with a true conservative philosophy, realizing of course new ideas are needed.
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