An Insight into American Education

And what do we see? Anxiety!

Here's a bit from a post by Robert X. Cringley on his worries about his own child and the excessive homework the poor kid is sent home to do each night:

American education, perhaps because of the No Child Left Behind Act, has become a testing nightmare. Metrics are everything and much of the curriculum is now intended not to educate but rather to pass the damned tests. It is precisely analogous to what I discovered thirty years ago investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, where reactor operators were trained to pass the operator test, not to actually operate the reactor. When things went wrong — when they went beyond the scripted scenarios — the operators had no idea what was happening inside that containment. Channing’s curriculum, too, tends to be 100 miles wide and an inch deep.

We’re being told our kids lack critical thinking skills, yet this curriculum doesn’t seem to teach those skills, at least not that I have seen.

Worse still, most of the homework is busywork. It teaches nothing. Worst of all, our child-centric culture has parents digging-in with their kids to do that homework, wasting all of our time and ultimately pitting adult against adult as surrogates for their exhausted kids.

What’s wrong with this picture? Everything.

When I was Channing’s age, 50 years ago, my parents’ attitude was one of benign neglect. They were busy doing whatever parents did back then (drinking and smoking cigarettes, mainly), but it sure didn’t include helping me with my homework. Somehow my siblings and I survived just fine. Yet today we’re supposedly faced with plummeting test scores and surging dropout rates despite whole generations of parents slaving away every night on homework. What gives?

Well one thing that gives is something I learned during my many years experiencing droughts in California: public officials don’t like good news, seeing it as un-motivating. If we had a dry year it was bad, they’d explain, because there wouldn’t be enough snowmelt, the reservoirs would be down but, most importantly, the forests and grasslands would be tinder-dry, increasing the danger of forest and wild fires. But if we had the occasional rainy year their line changed. Now the reservoirs were full (though that could change in a moment so don’t take any extra showers) but the extra snowmelt meant extra forest and grassland growth creating more combustible material making forest and wild fires even more likely. No matter what happened it was bad according to these guys because they didn’t want to ever give up the chance to preach down to us. They were determined to remove whatever joy there was in life.

Same thing in education. We aren’t as good as we used to be and that’s going to have a major impact on, well, everything. So the answer is always more resources, more testing, more consultants. Oh but no more art or music — those are too expensive.

Frankly I’m not sure any longer exactly what is the truth. Things might be getting better or worse, I don’t know. But I know I don’t generally trust the idiots who are telling me what to worry about.

Here's what Cringley finds to be strange about the American obsession about "falling behind" in the homework gap (an homage to the late 1950s/early 1960s "missile gap"):

German students have plenty of homework, too, and they go to school an average of 220 days per year to our 183. German kids go to school on Saturday. That should prove the point, right? Because nobody is saying the Germans are falling behind. Heck, they are the economic powerhouse of Europe.

But wait a minute. School in Germany starts at 8AM and ends each day at noon. Even the high schools follow that schedule. German schools don’t serve lunch because the kids have all gone home, I suppose to do their homework. But if you get home at 12:30 there is plenty of time for homework, eh?

Channing will spend this year 1,372 hours in school not counting basketball practice or chess club while the average German third-grader will spend 880 hours in school.

Personally, I was happy to be raised in the 1950s/60s environment. I did very little homework. The only thing I can remember were those essays that were assigned that I would finally sit down to write at 9:00 PM and finish around 2:00 AM all bleary eyed and strung out. It was no fun! And I didn't learn anything except that procrastination was painful. Ah... but that like high school typing were the two greatest, most useful, things that I learned.