- 01 Dec 2019 09:37
#15052030
Education has more of a problem with politics than most issues. Start with BS, while at least half of what is said these days is utter crap, in education it's somewhere north of 90%. Some days I think it's a lot more than 90%.
My mom was a math teacher. Back in the 70s, she started reading books about education reform. I'd come home from college, and wound up reading them. I used to read a lot.
That started me thinking about education reform. Close to 20 years later, I figured it out.
Americans hate education reform.
That requires some explanation, but it's outside the scope of this post.
As an intellectual exercise, reform is easy.
Step 1) National Pre-K
Step 2) Ban competitive sports (no country with good secondary education throws away education money on recreation, we throw away a lot! Those countries have tons of sports clubs, just not on the public dime).
Step 3) National standards and funding. Successful systems have national schools or national standards. Take your pick.
Step 4) Eliminate teaching degrees, require competence, and require mentoring. IOW, you want to teach math, you get a math degree.
Step 5) Mandate the basics. This is national standards again, we need to require high schools to have science labs, civics classes, etc.
Step 6) Making it all work... fixing broken education systems means helping them. That means money. A lot of communities are not going to be able to afford labs and skilled teachers without help.
Education is crucial to economic competition. Unfortunately not much is going to change. Empires short change domestic needs to fund their military ambitions. Britain still does. I think we will be like them, short changing their country chasing a past that is long gone.
No, ours isn't gone yet, it's just going.
My mom was a math teacher. Back in the 70s, she started reading books about education reform. I'd come home from college, and wound up reading them. I used to read a lot.
That started me thinking about education reform. Close to 20 years later, I figured it out.
Americans hate education reform.
That requires some explanation, but it's outside the scope of this post.
As an intellectual exercise, reform is easy.
Step 1) National Pre-K
Step 2) Ban competitive sports (no country with good secondary education throws away education money on recreation, we throw away a lot! Those countries have tons of sports clubs, just not on the public dime).
Step 3) National standards and funding. Successful systems have national schools or national standards. Take your pick.
Step 4) Eliminate teaching degrees, require competence, and require mentoring. IOW, you want to teach math, you get a math degree.
Step 5) Mandate the basics. This is national standards again, we need to require high schools to have science labs, civics classes, etc.
Step 6) Making it all work... fixing broken education systems means helping them. That means money. A lot of communities are not going to be able to afford labs and skilled teachers without help.
Education is crucial to economic competition. Unfortunately not much is going to change. Empires short change domestic needs to fund their military ambitions. Britain still does. I think we will be like them, short changing their country chasing a past that is long gone.
No, ours isn't gone yet, it's just going.
Facts have a well known liberal bias