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Am I the only one who grew up in a place that just had good public schools? Maybe it required living in a mildly conservative and middle class to upper middle class suburb but I really don't have any grievances with my schooling growing up and would happily send my kids to the same schools. It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.
I did, but I was in the third richest public school district in the country, locally recognized as a stealth private school.
By the time I graduated, I could see that bad times were ahead, even there.
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It's also the curriculum, teachers and administrators.
I would happily send my children to my elementary school too, in 1980, when I started half-day kindergarten.
The reality of school today is very different even in top decile areas than 1980. We've found our high performing public school to be insufficiently academicly rigorous. Our school committee feels more like PR or cheerleaders for the superintendent and faculty, who are products of post-modern education academia.
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I also don't have too many complaints about my education, but to be fair I spent the last few years of it at a magnet school with a lot more freedom and higher quality students than is the norm. Being familiar with some East Asian school systems also colors my perceptions, and while I have always been somewhat bemused by Libertarians in the US raging about how schools are prisons for children, their arguments are perfectly valid in places like China or Korea.
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Had some rough times but past that I just remember constantly being tired in school.
Feel like school could get a lot better if we got away from school as babysitting. Give the lecture once or twice on a subject instead of 5 times. Fewer hours at school. Trust the kids to do the work at home.
The being tired bit was it’s own torture.
And this would, indeed, be a major improvement for middle class kids with IQ’s of 105+. But public schooling is all about serving all kids, and those are a minority.
Ideally you could walk and chew gum at the same time. Product differentiation isn’t an issue everywhere else in America
Ok. Figure out a way to let middle class kids with IQ’s above 105 do it your way, without breaking any laws, and not making things worse for everyone else.
Because what you’re describing is ‘homeschooling’ and it works really well for the sorts of people who homeschool. But it isn’t a replacement for public schools and the reason it hasn’t seen much adoption among middle class families has at least as much to do with stigma as it does with lack of practicability.
Probably charter schools. Overall we just haven’t had experimenting in schooling because of the dominance of public schools and the unions.
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The core issue is that students are no longer allowed to fail, or even to feel badly about themselves. When half or more of the population did not complete high school, and vanishingly few graduated from college, those degrees were an actual signifier of merit. Now that they are essentially birthday gifts, withholding them seems unfair. I wish that was fixable but I cannot see the path.
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You’re good at learning the lecture material and homework so schools should just trust all students to be good/responsible at that. You’re bad at going to bed on time so schools should not trust students to go to bed at a sensible time.
Why should your strengths and weakness just be presumed to apply to all students?
True I’m more of a late person. Ideally you wouldn’t need to offer just one program.
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I do remember being quite tired, but I've always credited that to not listening to this wisdom of my parents and constantly staying up super late. There probably is something to scheduling in a way that affords students more sleeping time.
It probably says something that the one education policy that actually literally everyone agrees on is to have high school start later.
When high school starts depends on when the busses from other schools are available. If high school starts later, elementary school may have to start earlier, and that may be worse.
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I went to what was considered to be one of the best public schools in the area, possibly in the country, and I didn't hate it at the time, but in retrospect, I do think that there really should be better alternatives.
Regarding interactions with other kids, I wasn't beaten up, and I had friends, but there is a degree of psychological bullying that happens there regardless. Your popularity was determined by how little you cared about anything. Being passionate about hobbies made you vulnerable to ridicule by the greater school body populace of the cooler kids, and people thought you were lame for it. That seems perverse, as we should be encouraging people to pursue their passions, not ridiculing them for it. I think trying to fit in with that system did leave some lasting personality problems for me. And I was very shocked in college that the opposite was true, and the people who did nothing but ridicule others for being passionate were not considered the top of the popularity chain.
Then there's the education aspect. I was in every advanced class that I could take, and it was still entirely underwhelming with regards to what I learned. I feel like if I was challenged and allowed to grow, I could have learned at least 5 times as much as I did. Instead I wasn't challenged to really learn, and instead was swamped with tons of busy work every day.
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I think that most of the binary polarization around public schools depends on whether you were a 'cool kid' in school, or not. I made a bit of a transition from cool to uncool during my high school years, and it was like being on a totally different planet.
Like @DuplexFields says below, schools have likely changed since we were in them as well. I'd imagine kids nowadays don't have to deal with the same brutal physical beatings that nerds like myself went through in public school, but it seems that the social ostracization(sp?) is perhaps even worse due to social media and other factors that have been accelerating.
Not to mention the rise of internet pornography, the redpill sphere, etc. Growing up as a young man in public school must be a minefield nowadays, even outside of trying to figure out how to act in a socially acceptable manner.
I really wasn't anything like a particular cool kid, I had a couple social groups but frankly in retrospect a kind of an outsider complex that made me feel like a victim even though I probably wasn't. I was a bit of a geek, more into wasting time in video games than much socializing. albeit most of the time was playing those games with people I knew so socializing in a way.
I definitely had some social complaints but talking about the schooling itself? My teachers were professional and seemed happy and engaged in teaching the subjects, with one exception or my chemistry teacher that I think had to do with a last minute replacement for someone who quit. My fellow students mostly weren't disruptive and did what the teachers asked of them without much question. By highschool we were given quite a bit of freedom and had access to a wide range of elective options at either a community college or a career and technology center that many high schools shared(I took a couple CISCO certification classes, a video game design class and an mobile phone programming class).
People are talking about above and beyond improvements like better sleeping hours and even more accelerated options. These might be worth considering in their own right as an improvement on something that already works. But as far as doing all the basic stuff right I think I've personally seen it work given you have the right student population.
But yeah, the separate question of whether schooling itself is oppressive or the tyranny of teenaged social interactions ring somewhat true. Making young people going through puberty not be total assholes to each other constantly as they figure it all out just doesn't seem like it could reasonably be in scope in a discussion about improving schools in a country where, just to pull the first depressing stat I could find, 63% of high school seniors can't read at grade level.
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I had a decent, if lacking, public school experience here in Albuquerque. From the teachers, that is; the kids teased and hectored me to the point of tears quite regularly.
But the future is a foreign country, and those schools are not the same, even if housed in the same buildings.
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I doubt you're the only one, but the opposite experience seems to strike a chord with many, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (set in just such a suburb) wouldn't have been the hit it was.
Yeah public schools are a cesspool of misery and frankly, evil. @aqouta you're lucky you avoided the worst of it my friend. No wonder you're such a chad.
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