State education system, is it broken?

[minimathsmouse]

I believe the wheels have fallen off the state education system. You might not agree but I have read so many posts here from parents who have had and are still having huge problems with their child's school. Many people seem to have worries about standards of teaching, clashes of ideology and problems with making up the deficit with tutors and home study. Horrendous SEN provission, huge class sizes, lack of provision for able pupils, the list goes on. It is truely depressing to think so many children are not receiving the education they deserve.

How many people believe the whole system has failed? Are falling standards only due to poor teaching or wider problems that are not being addressed within the system?

www.dystalk.com/talks/50-how-children-can-learn-better

Thank you StoatsRevenge, I have just sat through the lecture you posted, really interesting.

I was shot down for the mere mention of capitalism and education in the same sentence! and drawing on the history of education and the enlightenment of the 18th cenury.When a respected educated person in the public realm can ask these questions, just maybe our political ellite will listen. Education must fit its purpose and the purpose is different now isn't it.

Sorry I lost this from the post

Guy Claxton proposes eight "virtues" or "strengths for "the learning age" , that he refers to as ?The Big 8?. They are: curiosity, courage, exploration, experimentation, imagination, discipline, sociability and thoughtfulness.
what do you think?

Let's hope so mini.

The only problem is that over 60% of our government have been educated in the old public school system and will find any radical changes difficult to contemplate.

And another man who talks a lot of sense. It's precisely my concern for my ds1, which is why I have loved what his teachers have done for him. His attitude has always been that if something is difficult then he can't do it and wants to give up and I can see that this attitude has the potential to lead him into lifelong chronic anxiety. I am so very much the polar opposite in my attitude to difficulty (I confront it and obsess about it and won't give up until I've got over it - which is in itself stressful, so not a perfect solution, either!) that I have struggled to find constructive ways to help ds1 change his attitude. With the help of the school and my own gradual increase in understanding of his mentality, we have made colossal progress and now that I feel I understand where my own ds1 is coming from, I feel that I can help him. And I have stopped panicking that it is too late to help him and the damage was all done years ago or even before he was born. I needed to feel that someone external to me was helping me and him to achieve that, though, and that was where the school came in.

Ooh. Too many messages between when I started typing and when I finished! Hope I still made sense, though - I was referring to what the man in mrz's clip said.

mrz and Rabbitstew earlier

The characteristics mrz summarises (if discipline means graft as well) are the essentials not of emplyment but of academic work. These 'social skills' are essential to every research lab, colloborative project, conference or even single-authored monograph in every university in the country. 'Social' skills are not part of the curricula for their own sake, they're part of the curricula because they are absolutely essential ACADEMIC skills.

I think what I find so depressing about so mnay posts here is a belief in lineality-that teaching the three Rs can be done first, then everything else fitted in, becasue 'basic' skills need learning first. But they are better learnt when learners see the reason, and the youngest learners need a tone set for educatiion which is not set by rigorous whipping of the three Rs into people. Basically, too often, I feel that posters don't really get what an academic standard is...

Research into the EYFS revealed that (positive) Dispositions and Attitudes demonstrated by pre school aged children are a greater predictor of future success than early reading/writing or maths ability ...

I think sometimes "discipline" is seen as a negative thing but to succeed surely we need self discipline

mrz

Yes, which is why I asked about 'graft' (combined with courage, curiosity and exploration).

To take a pointless long term view there is a strange split here which occured at the Reformation-'disciplinia' in Latin, and still in many Catholic countries, means self-control; in Protestant countries it came to mena 'submission to another's will', which was originally 'humilitas'. Education should be about the first, I suspect.

There, who'd have thought that might be releavnt. maybe it wasn't.

Does anyone else here feel that the real problem with the OP is the 'independent' comparison entailed in 'state'?

State schooling is not failing. But whether for any individual child it is better than being taught in smaller classes with huge resources, regardless of teaching quality, is another matter.

mrz

Apologies for the triple posting.

That research also applies at higher levels (don't know the literature 11-16, but do know it elsewhere). Learners who see why they are doing something, or at least see it positively, do better post-16 too.

Problem at the higher end goes back to self vs other but isd, I think, analogous: is a positive disposition a belief, for example, that reading opens up new worlds you might be interested in, or a belief that Daddy will be happy and give you a sweetie for progressing through the reading scheme?

I do think individual children are "failed" in both sectors but would argue that isn't the same as either sector failing by any means

It's what I always thought when people told me not to worry about my ds1, because he was clever, so would always do OK. He so obviously would not do OK just because he was "clever." He wasn't emotionally or socially clever. And he was so anxious, his cleverness was quite rigid. In the last year, however, he has suddenly started to question things, get interested in things, develop the spark that I was longing for so that we could share a mutual enjoyment of the world and all that there is on offer within it. I love talking to my ds1, now - he isn't lost in a little world of obsessional self-comfort, or seeking a sense of identity from me rather than from within himself.

The only problem is, some people will only believe things to be the case if they are backed up by statistics and precise measurements, and it is quite difficult to devise precise measurements of all the things we desire to see from a well rounded person - and possibly also, potentially, a bit destructive to believe we can be that precise, since at the end of the whole process we will not all be universally perfect, rounded individuals. We don't really want to be seen to have passed or failed a test in each area, we'd rather be seen as having particular strengths and weaknesses, but with sufficient strengths to make a useful contribution. And we don't want to be typecast too early on as being strong or weak in a particular area, so that developing our weaker aspects is given up on too soon and our strong points are focused on detrimentally in comparison to the rest.

Which brings us back to asking how we get everyone on board if they refuse to accept the word of those with the most experience?

Are our standards falling if we point out re:OP that truly lacks an 'e'?

Not being mean, just making the point that the questions posed by post are not invalidated as a result, so why should a youunger learner not being so corrected indicate 'failure'?

or indeed my obviously intentional youunger

Too much going on all of a sudden! I had a couple of days of free rein around here (or is that free reign?!). My posts aren't making any sense at the beginning unless you refer back to where the board was at when I started typing them.

ps AdelaofBlois, could you please clarify your post of 18:09???

Oh no, sorry, I think I understand... that spelling mistakes do not invalidate the entire content?

I would also add, in a blitz, that one of the problems is that 'teaching' is not amenable to testing for method. All educators reflect on their practice, but I know from experience that what might work with one seminar group might be dud with the one that follows, despite similar abilities and ages.

And I've seen lots of primary teachers teach in very different ways with similar positive results, some calm empathy, others inexhaustible balls of energy, some total disciplinarians, others rolling with the distractions. And the worse teaching I've ever seen is people trying to do what they 'should', even though they don't understand or believe in it.

Which is yet another reason to respect tecahers' professionalism in judging what works best for them and learners, providing they are willing to justify and explain it.

rabbitstew

Yes, that when posters point to a 'decline in basic standards', particularly around literacy, they are applying standards which they would not accept in everyday life for adults, that is that they use a defintion of 'academic' or 'intellectual' for kids which in no way maps with their implicit understandings of thought and literacy in the adult world.

AdelaofBlois, could you spell check all of my posts?

Was I failed at primary level? I spent most of it staring out the window and although you can tell from my literacy or should I make that iliteracy! you would never guess from my great social skills

Should teachers mark their pupils work with more vigour? Would this create anxiety and stifle their interest in learning?

Well, if all my teachers had had similar personalities and exactly the same techniques, it would have been rather boring! I think it does need to be recognised that different teachers have different strengths, too, and exposure to more than one teacher is therefore likely to be a good thing! Which is why we can't be constantly measuring things as we go along and expect standard results - it is normal for them to go up and down, as children develop at different rates and get exposure to different teachers. This is not necessarily worrying.

rabbitstew

Have you ever thought about your sons lack of natural development when time was spent at 3 years old learning non - developmental skills.
Reading and writing are not natural human developmental skills.

It is only societies that use a version of a man made communication system, the visual notation of speech, which teach their children reading and writing to enable their children use this man made communication system.

Children need to develop their own cognitive information processing systems so that can learn the many skills developed by man to survive in our culture.

just a thought