🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <holly.224@mailhub.scf.lmsc.lockheed.com> holly@mailhub.scf.lmsc.lockheed.com (Holly Wise) writes:
>
>I think the biggest advantage of year-round schooling is that kids don't 
>forget what they learned the year before.  

I guess this is like the Willy Horton business. No revolving doors.
Lock 'em up & keep 'em locked up. They won't forget what they learned
the year before: sit still and shut up.

I keep thinking about most of the housing developments that have gone
up in eastern Pa. in recent years. Big houses, little to no yard, and maybe
a small collection of swings, slides etc. at the end of the development.
I never see kids on those swings or slides; I never see kids playing in
those yards.

Where are those kids? Watching TV? In some other jail when the legally
mandated ones are closed? I remember spending evenings & summers sledding
or softball playing or bicycling or fishing or reading or star gazing
or doing a million other things for which school only got in the way.
Is this country so out of imagination, curiosity, and compassion that it
quietly discusses locking its kids away for the whole freaking year as
though it were talking about auto inspections or something? Instead of
sending 'em off to internment for another 3 months, FIND SOME TIME & GO
DO SOMETHING INTERESTING WITH THEM! Might be educational for all involved.

The next step, folks, will be 24 hour internment. Don't think I'm joking.
A lot of people seem to want to blow off their offspring to the educational
bureaucrats as much as possible. I don't see why they even bother having
kids. I'm not slandering 2 career families, I'm blasting the notion that
kids' careers--how they spend their days--should be subordinate to the
whimsies & ego trips of a bunch of stupid adults. Educrats who promote
this stuff seem hell bent on creating a generation of kids who've never
had a real childhood, after which those of us who remember spending summer
days fishing & cycling & doing other worthwhile things will die off and any
chance of dissension will go away.

If you want to improve your kids' education, go read 'em Huck Finn.

I can just picture the people who think this is hot stuff. The kind of
lame people I just couldn't wait to get away from when I graduated
high school. I've worked my way through a BS, MS and PhD while working
full-time, so I've earned this little rant. Formal education does not hold
a monopoly on learning. If you want to enhance the prospects for learning
among youngsters in this country, take them somewhere & do something
with them. The schools are fresh out of good ideas for the summer.

This message reflects the sentiments of your's truly, and not any
organization that would have me as a member. Nor does it constitute a
diatribe against good teachers; they deserve the summer off, too.

 Dale Parson, dale@mhcnet.att.com

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|And they made good laws and kept the peace                             |
|and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down,                |
|and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, |
|and generally stopped busybodies and interferers                       |
|and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live.        |
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Account of the post-coronation doings of Queens Susan and Lucy         |
|and Kings Peter and Edmund of Narnia, from C. S. Lewis' The Lion,      |
|the Witch and the Wardrobe, Book 1 in the Chronicles of Narnia.        |
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

In article <1992Oct1.210832.26418@cbfsb.cb.att.com> osan@cbnewsb.cb.att.com (Mr. X) writes:
>In article <holly.224@mailhub.scf.lmsc.lockheed.com> holly@mailhub.scf.lmsc.lockheed.com (Holly Wise) writes:

>	Here's a little statistic that we kept getting thrown at us when we
>	were in college training to be teachers:  85% of what you learn is
>	forgotten within two weeks of having learned it without reinforcement.
>	We were also told that much (not all) of this forgeting is necessary
>	to the healthy condition of a person.  High pressure maintenance of
>	information works for a while, but eventually catches up with the
>	student.  Keep banging on the kid without cease and you will have
>	a stressed out, nervous wreck that may turn suicidal.  Yes there are
>	studies to this effect, no I do not have references handy.  This was
>	all from 10 years ago.
>
>>Any teacher can probably tell you 
>>that it takes months to re-teach the children what they taught them the year 
>>before after 3 months vacation.  
>
>	Not necessarily so.  Kids that were taught well, including having had
>	the right overall environment for learning tend to remember MOST of
>	what they learned the year before.  This is especially true when you
>	run an open book class where students are free to look materials up,
>	even during a test.  When you give then the basic skills required for
>	intellectual pursuits including the proper use of library resources,
>	you give them a virtually unlimited potential for learning and 
>	developing their skills and interests.
>
>	Also be aware that a child need not be a rocket scientist bt the
>	end of the first grade.  If left to their own devices and given
>	good conscientious guidance, they will develop themselves into
>	fine young intellects all by themselves without being man handled.
>
[some material deleted in the interest of paring down the article]
>
>	People are amazingly complex, and so the "bigger hammer" approach
>	will fail every time.
>
>	-Andy V.

Practical experimentation with this idea, that yes, amazingly enough, children
_do_ learn best when not being hammered at does exist. The most obvious
example of this that I can think of off hand is the Summerhill school in
England (running since the early part of the century.) While the circumstances
there are certainly difficult to reproduce, the basic idea that children's
native curiosity is usually the strongest motivator was fairly well documented
there. (The school in effect did not force children to even go to classes
or give out grades.)

My suspicion is that the primary reason more research on this has not been
done is due to the counter-intuitiveness of this - it is practically a paradigm
of our civilization that a child must be forcefed or they will not learn
anything.

	Geoff Tuffli

In article <1992Oct1.220939.29903@cbfsb.cb.att.com> dal3@cbnewsg.cb.att.com (dale.e.parson) writes:

>I guess this is like the Willy Horton business. No revolving doors.
>Lock 'em up & keep 'em locked up. They won't forget what they learned
>the year before: sit still and shut up.
>
>I keep thinking about most of the housing developments that have gone
>up in eastern Pa. in recent years. Big houses, little to no yard, and maybe
>a small collection of swings, slides etc. at the end of the development.
>I never see kids on those swings or slides; I never see kids playing in
>those yards.
>
>Where are those kids? Watching TV? In some other jail when the legally
>mandated ones are closed? I remember spending evenings & summers sledding
>or softball playing or bicycling or fishing or reading or star gazing
>or doing a million other things for which school only got in the way.
>Is this country so out of imagination, curiosity, and compassion that it
>quietly discusses locking its kids away for the whole freaking year as
>though it were talking about auto inspections or something? Instead of
>sending 'em off to internment for another 3 months, FIND SOME TIME & GO
>DO SOMETHING INTERESTING WITH THEM! Might be educational for all involved.
>
> Dale Parson, dale@mhcnet.att.com

I think it is fair to say that the proponents of year-around schooling are
not unanimously in favor of the authoritarian/totalitarian approach to
"education", with which I agree full-heartedly is a monstrosity and a mockery
of education.

My own thoughts are that a year-around schooling system would be beneficial,
but that the school itself should be dramatically cut down on overt structure.
I.e., have the materials available, have the teachers available and offering
suggestions and answering questions (ANY questions - this is one pet peeve
I have about primary education which is that the only questions a teacher will
generally answer at that level during "class" time is what the "material" is
on - after two or three years of this, I think it a wonder that anybody has
any curiosity left.) In actual practice this has been shown to work remarkably
well, and despite the problems inherant in a set-up like this, I think it
would behoove us to examine such a system to some degree, something which I
do not feel has been done to any marked degree in any official or mainstream
capacity.

	Geoff Tuffli