Rethinking School Chapter 3: You can't make the earth go around the sun faster

 You can't make the earth go around the sun faster

If your child is struggling, there may simply be an incompatibility between the child's maturity level, and the grade/year of school in which they're placed.

Even the most rudimentary observations of the natural world reveal that biological organisms mature at widely varying rates.

We've been so conditioned to accept the pattern of infancy, toddler, preschool, elementary, middle, high school, college that it's almost impossible for us to break out of it and think: What makes me think that this tiny human being should mature on the exact same schedule as the rest of the tiny human beings born at the same time?

Why age = grade? It's Prussia's fault.

Beforw about 1850, teachers in American schools taught mixed-age groups together, in one room, with no standard curriculum. Students just moved to more difficult material when they were ready, at widely varying times. But over in Prussia, a new system had been instituted in the early 1800s: smaller classrooms where students were grouped by age and led by a single teacher. This strategy wasn't driven by educational research; it was an attempt to try to restore Prussian military might, after a humiliating defeat by Napoleon. Struggling to rebuild, Prussian statesmen decide to organize schools like military units, in order to instill the will to fight and build pride in Prussia's pugnacious national culture. Students were organized into platoons by age and assigned to a single 'squadron leader," a system that made the transition into military service quite straightforward.

In 1843, Horace Mann, Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts, visited Prussia to tour its schools. At that time, multi-age classrooms required huge resources, and scores of talented, energetic, and flexible teachers. The Prussian system struck Mann as the perfect answer: the very best way to channel a large number of diverse students into a single institution with maximum efficiency. With Mann's support, the Prussian system was introduced to Massachusetts in 1847, when the Quincy Grammar School was built with twelve separate classrooms, each room for a single, age-graded class, led by a single teacher.

The new plan did indeed turn out to be highly efficient (factories generally are), and age-graded schools were soon spreading. By the turn of the century, age-grading was the norm in almost all of the nation's "common schools."

Here's your first task: Try to put aside your Prussianized assumptions about grade level, and ask yourself, "Does my child belong in another grade?"

Three questions for evaluating maturity

When confronted with schoolwork, does your child shut down, show anger, cry?

Does your child struggle in some areas and sail through in others?

Is your child small or large for his or her age?

Age-grading is based in a mean, mean is simply one way to express "average." In math, you find the mean by adding a list of numbers together and dividing then by the number of numbers. Here's what's important about that: Often, the mean is a number that didn't even appear on the original list. There may be no students who are actually at this mean. 

Action plan

Forget about a single age-grade calculation, and take some time to think carefully about your child's maturity levels. (Use Bauer's Maturity Levels Table).

Consider your options for single-subject acceleration or deceleration.

Consider your options for "gapping" your child.

It's much better, both for the child's self-esteem and overall development, if you can allow them to step completely out of the system for one year and do something else, and then guide them back into it with an additional year of maturity. A gap year is not the same as being "held back"; it is a positive step forward.

Saduran dari: Bauer, Susan Wise. 2018. Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education (Chapter 3).

Rethinking School Chapter 2: The three biggest myths about school

 The three biggest myths about school

My kids should attend an accredited schools.

The US Department of Education doesn't recognize, on a national level, any K-12 accreditation. Accreditation of elementary and secondary schools is purely a state issue. No state requires private schools (or home educators) to be accredited, which means private and home schools do not have to meet state or Common Core standards of learning.

My child has to take English, math, science, and social studies every year.

Actually, it doesn't matter what specific classes your student takes before high school. Nor does it matter what the final grades are. Or even if there are grades. Transcripts and records from grades 1-8 are only useful for students and teachers within the secondary system, as a way of evaluating whether students are ready to move on to the next level. Even state and Common Core standards of learning don't mandate particular classes -- they only define skills that students should master, not courses that need to be taken. Elrmentary school is even simpler. Elementary students need to know how to read, write, do arithmetic, and carry out basic critical thinking skills. There are no particular classes that elementary students have to take.

My high-schools student needs to earn a diploma.

A diploma is supposes to certify that you've fulfilled standards set for graduation -- but the United States has no national high-school graduation standards. College admissions officers look at transcripts and test scores. They don't give a flip whether a diploma has been issued.

Saduran dari: Bauer, Susan Wise. 2018. Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education (Chapter 2).

Rethinking School Chapter 1: The way we do school

 The way we do school

By "school," I don't simply mean the buildings where children go to sit in a physical classroom and learn. I mean our entire K-12-plus system, the one that we tend to think of as normal: Classify yourself by the month and year in which you were born; group yourself with those born within twelve months of you; study seven or eight unrelated subjects in blocks, four or five times per week; do this for twelve or so years, but not usually during the summer; at least once a year (usually much more often), fill out lots of bubble sheets with a #2 pencil; after twelve years of this, go away and live in a group home with others born within four years of you, while attending lectures and choosing a major that doesn't necessarily line up with any particular adult pattern of life.

The physical institutions of local elementary, middle, and high schools add an additional layer of artificiality: Leave home and travel to a place, where you sit in a room with that group of others who were born within twelve months of you; do this from September to June, unless it snows; study your subjects in fifty-minute blocks, four or five times per week; listen to someone at the front of the room, and then go home and complete a series of randomly assigned tasks.

This has nothing to do with the way that actual human beings acquire knowledge. Realize that the way we do school is entirely unnatural.

"Only a few children in school," wrote John Holt, "ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged." 

If your child falls anywhere on this mismatch spectrum, there's a very good chance that the problem is school, not your child.

Our current school system, as Sir Ken Robinson explains in his wildly popular TED talk "Do Schools Kill Creativity?," was designed to produce good workers for a capitalistic society. Deep in "the gene pool of public education," is the unquestioned premise that "there are only two types of people -- academic and nonacademic; smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not, because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind ... this model has causes chaos in many people's lives. It's been great for some; there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it. But most people have not. Instead, they suffer."

Conversations about school reform have to keep happening. But as of right now, only a few innovative schools seem able to movr ahead with them. If your child, right now, weeping in frustration over homework, or staring blankly into space, switched off, I can guarantee you that school reform isn't going to happen soon enough to make a difference to you and your child. Instead, you're going to have to take control of the K-12 years yourself, and use your own ingenuity to bend the system to fit your child.

Saduran dari: Bauer, Susan Wise. 2018. Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education (Chapter 1).