(no subject)
Jan. 25th, 2005 12:58 pmInteresting thoughts. And, well, there's this button again. Rather than deluge a stranger with it, though, I might as well say it here.
I'm largely a product of the British educational system, as you probably already know, and so I am quite probably biased on this subject. I was twelve when my family emigrated to the USA, and when I was tested, I was doing college-level work. I come from one of those lamented systems where we are taught a lot, very quickly. We go through the equivalent of American high school in five Standards, and finish those at the age of nine-eleven, depending on birthday. At the end of Standard Five, we sit the Common Entrance Examination, which is used to sort us into secondary schools; competition for those slots is always fierce.
While I debate the value of sitting one big test to determine your whole educational future at so young an age, I have to say that the curriculum and pace were not joyless or crushing! We gave as much effort to physical recreation as we gave to any other subject, and I seldom, if ever, had homework that took more than two hours to complete -- not even in Standard Five, let alone in the earlier years. I think it's very possible that both complaints are valid -- I can certainly say that I don't believe enough material is presented in American schools, since I waited four years for my American classmates, who were two years older than me, to catch up to where I had been when I was twelve. More, what material is presented is not often presented effectively.
The subjects mentioned -- reading, mathematics, history -- aren't given enough emphasis and/or aren't laid out in a logical progression. My history classes here skipped from the Civil War to European conflicts to present-day issues in a truly haphazard fashion. This is not to say that each teacher was incompetent; I was very lucky, and I had wonderful teachers. But the curriculum requirements make no sense to me now, and made even less sense then. Instead of a sense of a grand story unfolding through time, we were given the bits and pieces someone thought we had to be able to get right on a test. That works a bit better with mathematics, I think, but not at all well for history.
I almost don't want to discuss English. The first thing I discovered in high school was that most of my classmates were barely literate. The second was that the teachers did very little to correct that at high school level. My youngest sister was of the right age to start kindergarten the year we emigrated. She did not learn to read until first grade -- and only then because I taught her myself. How does someone who cannot read learn anything further? Even the blind have to learn to read before they can hope to make much progress, or before they have a hope of learning independently. If you cannot read, you are dependent on the spoken word and the whims of others. (If you can read, you're still dependent on the whims of others, but it's easier to find a book than to get someone to sit down and tell you a story orally.) Our classes back at home stressed reading comprehension. We read aloud to each other every day, and would question each other on the passages we read, since our teachers felt that true questions from our classmates were a better drill than canned ones from a book. And we wrote constantly -- Composition was a class in itself, one we were given as often as any other class on our schedule. In American high school, we were assigned perhaps five essays a semester, and those were looked on almost as punishments. Even the college standards for what constitutes a course heavily skewed toward writing is nothing near what children are accustomed to under other educational systems.
It truly is not that children here are not developmentally ready for the material that's presented. It is more that the foundation necessary to allow them to grasp the material isn't given to them. I was reading at three. By five I was reading anything I could get my hands on -- including the literature excerpts in my older cousins' school textbooks. By ten, I was devouring Shakespeare and Wolfe, and by twelve I was ready for Dostoevsky. I could do that only because at each step of the way, I had been taught the skills I would need to go further. And I never had the love of learning extinguished because of the pace. Schools at home begin at seven or eight, let out at two or three, and we celebrate so many holidays (Hindu, Christian, Muslim) that I'm sure we have fewer school days per year. A quick check shows 185 school days on the 2004 - 2005 calendar at a typical school. That leaves children out of school just under half the year. It really is possible to educate them well without sacrificing their childhoods to education. Unfortunately, the present system here is trending toward the latter without accomplishing the former. That's frustrating, to say the least.
I'm largely a product of the British educational system, as you probably already know, and so I am quite probably biased on this subject. I was twelve when my family emigrated to the USA, and when I was tested, I was doing college-level work. I come from one of those lamented systems where we are taught a lot, very quickly. We go through the equivalent of American high school in five Standards, and finish those at the age of nine-eleven, depending on birthday. At the end of Standard Five, we sit the Common Entrance Examination, which is used to sort us into secondary schools; competition for those slots is always fierce.
While I debate the value of sitting one big test to determine your whole educational future at so young an age, I have to say that the curriculum and pace were not joyless or crushing! We gave as much effort to physical recreation as we gave to any other subject, and I seldom, if ever, had homework that took more than two hours to complete -- not even in Standard Five, let alone in the earlier years. I think it's very possible that both complaints are valid -- I can certainly say that I don't believe enough material is presented in American schools, since I waited four years for my American classmates, who were two years older than me, to catch up to where I had been when I was twelve. More, what material is presented is not often presented effectively.
The subjects mentioned -- reading, mathematics, history -- aren't given enough emphasis and/or aren't laid out in a logical progression. My history classes here skipped from the Civil War to European conflicts to present-day issues in a truly haphazard fashion. This is not to say that each teacher was incompetent; I was very lucky, and I had wonderful teachers. But the curriculum requirements make no sense to me now, and made even less sense then. Instead of a sense of a grand story unfolding through time, we were given the bits and pieces someone thought we had to be able to get right on a test. That works a bit better with mathematics, I think, but not at all well for history.
I almost don't want to discuss English. The first thing I discovered in high school was that most of my classmates were barely literate. The second was that the teachers did very little to correct that at high school level. My youngest sister was of the right age to start kindergarten the year we emigrated. She did not learn to read until first grade -- and only then because I taught her myself. How does someone who cannot read learn anything further? Even the blind have to learn to read before they can hope to make much progress, or before they have a hope of learning independently. If you cannot read, you are dependent on the spoken word and the whims of others. (If you can read, you're still dependent on the whims of others, but it's easier to find a book than to get someone to sit down and tell you a story orally.) Our classes back at home stressed reading comprehension. We read aloud to each other every day, and would question each other on the passages we read, since our teachers felt that true questions from our classmates were a better drill than canned ones from a book. And we wrote constantly -- Composition was a class in itself, one we were given as often as any other class on our schedule. In American high school, we were assigned perhaps five essays a semester, and those were looked on almost as punishments. Even the college standards for what constitutes a course heavily skewed toward writing is nothing near what children are accustomed to under other educational systems.
It truly is not that children here are not developmentally ready for the material that's presented. It is more that the foundation necessary to allow them to grasp the material isn't given to them. I was reading at three. By five I was reading anything I could get my hands on -- including the literature excerpts in my older cousins' school textbooks. By ten, I was devouring Shakespeare and Wolfe, and by twelve I was ready for Dostoevsky. I could do that only because at each step of the way, I had been taught the skills I would need to go further. And I never had the love of learning extinguished because of the pace. Schools at home begin at seven or eight, let out at two or three, and we celebrate so many holidays (Hindu, Christian, Muslim) that I'm sure we have fewer school days per year. A quick check shows 185 school days on the 2004 - 2005 calendar at a typical school. That leaves children out of school just under half the year. It really is possible to educate them well without sacrificing their childhoods to education. Unfortunately, the present system here is trending toward the latter without accomplishing the former. That's frustrating, to say the least.
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