A recent study found that as much as three-fourths of the state schools were holding back the most talented and brightest students because they wanted to combat the scourge of “elitism.” These students were not being given more advanced work even though they were not being sufficiently challenged by grade-level material.
Instead of being allowed to progress at their own pace, the students were often asked to simply mentor the other students. The Ofsted study found that the school treated academic gifts as “not a priority” for teaching and that allowing them to work to their full potential would “undermine the school’s efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils.”
Stephen Hawking, it appears, would have been a threat to the educational mission and told to eat glue with the rest of the kindergarten kids. Shakespeare would be told that he needs to return to those word group “mix and match” exercises and stop composing sonnets on the school computers.
What is interesting is that England has a gifted and talented program for the top five to ten percent, but these schools are choosing to ignore that policy.
With kids in the gifted and talented program in Fairfax, I can say that this view is inimical to the development of such children. These kids can actually do worse over time in standard lessons because they are not challenged and they tend to slip in their skills and interest. More importantly, by holding them back, you are denying them the opportunity to develop to their full potential. It is not more “elitist” in the pejorative sense than selecting the fastest kids for track and field competitions. Children have different skill sets and aptitudes. Finally, while such kids can be viewed as an elite group for their area, it does not make them elitists in the sense of people who believe that they are superior to others.
We have previously discussed the dangers of a “nanny state” with our close cousins in England. This would appear another such example of those dangers.
When talented children are not challenged, they can turn to less productive activities:
For the full story, click here.
Mike.
What has Jesus got do do with Christianity?
Buddah, Elaine.
I used to suspect that I may have had aspbergers as I did not develop any facility with social interaction until well into my thirties. After reading your comments I must conclude that I did not have it at all. Maybe living amongst fools gave me such contempt for humanity that it turned me off wanting to socialize.
Tootie.
I will say one more thing before discontinuing the conversation with you. You are a conservative and nothing that I say is going to change your mind any more than will anything you say change mine. Communication between us is not possible because although we both speak English your English and mine are different languages.
The one more thing (for the benefit of those who might understand rather than for Tootie) is about whole language. I agree there is a problem here but it is not with the use of whole language but with its over use. Rote learning of phonics rules is boring and if children don’t need it subjecting it is wasteful. However it does not work for all children and these need explicit instruction in the rules to convert from spelling to sound and from sound to spelling.
Some languages are phonetic and the same character (or combination of characters) always stands for the same sound. Apparently Finnish is like this and it is easy to learn. English however is a mess, it is only about 60% phonetic. Some children thrown into the deep end of the reading pool will have no problem. Perhaps they have large memory capacities and remember both the sound and spelling of each word individually or perhaps they unconsciously deduce the rules of English phonetics. I think this must be my case, I can’t remember whether I was taught phonics but I have sometimes thought of attempting to write an essay on this subject but whenever I think about it I feel daunted by the size of the task. After considering just a few of the things that would need to go into the essay.
In English the same sound may be represented by different spellings, eg “There” and “their”, the one spelling may represent different sounds eg “bow” and “row”. Letters are sometimes silent like “k” in “knock” and “b” in “lamb”. Obviously I understand the rules of English phonetics because I am doing the conversion all the time, somewhere in my brain are neural networks that represent the rules but I have difficulty in explicitly recalling these rules. Obviously some children are failed by whole word, perhaps they develop false ideas about the rules and fail to modify these internal rules despite proof that they are not working. Possible false beliefs are that the same letter always has the same sound or that a letter always stands for a sound. One might imagine a child who persists in trying to pronounce “th” as “t” followed by “h” or one ho thinks “c” sounds as in “cat” and therefore pronounces “ceiling” as “keiling”.
Maybe part of the problem is lack of a quality control system. there are tests but nothing is done to fix the problem when a particular child is found to be struggling. If a test shows a child lacks necessary knowledge which is required for understanding of concepts to come it would seem logical for the teacher to give remedial attention to that child, but my experience is that this is not normally done. It is the responsibility of the child to recognize the gaps and fill them in and if he won’t or can’t then tough gorgonzola.
I remember being in this situation with maths in early high school and was lucky that a teacher, the head master in fact, took time to tutor me in the gaps in my knowledge, but this was definitely not normally done. i have read or heard somewhere that schools in Taiwan are careful to monitor each student and give remedial attention where necessary. In anglo countries this is not done.
I suspect that some of the controversy over whole word is the result of both sides retreating in to their ideological bunkers and refusing on principle to acknowledge that the other is at least partly right. Conservatives are right in pointing out that whole word on its own without monitoring students and giving remedial attention to the laggards does not work for a proportion of children. However proponents of whole word see conservatives as opposed to the whole concept (which of course they are) and therefore resist giving any ground. Liberals on the other hand are correct in saying that whole word being thrown in the deep end of the reading pool works for most and gets the reading quickly to reap the motivational rewards of acquiring the power to make ink on paper come alive while bypassing the study of rigid rules.
Elaine M:
I don’t want someone ever telling me I cant read something or associate with someone or I cant have a drink or eat fast foods.
Some liberals and the religious right want to shove their views right up my a . . ., I say live and let live or laissez faire (let it be).
I don’t think people like Tootie understand that they are no better than the Marxists they profess to hate. Subjugation is subjugation it matters not which side of the aisle it comes from.
Byron–
You’re correct–I didn’t. I think children should be presented with all sides of a story. How else will they learn to think for themselves instead of becoming dittoheads? I didn’t want any teachers–whether they were conservative or liberal– indoctrinating my daughter with their ideologies.
It’s funny the way we throw conservative/liberal labels around. I find I have a liberal/progressive perspective on most issues–but a conservative perspective on some others.
Tootie:
My wife and I talk about that all the time and from what she says you are wrong.
Most teachers remain neutral and here in Fairfax County our children, for the most part are getting a good education. They also have a GT program and an IB program which is very good (my son went through that program so I know from first hand knowledge).
My son did have a couple of liberal teachers but he usually tore them a knew one so he is no worse the wear and probably a little better off. If you only get the conservative or liberal side you are not seeing the entire picture. And quite frankly I think both sides have good points and bad points.
I doubt Elaine M. told her students how to think and I know my wife doesn’t. Do some teachers, you betcha, but I think most try and keep their opinions to themselves.
You have been reading too much Dobson as in Focus on the Family. I say “focus on your own damn family” and leave mine alone. Busy bodies are busy bodies whether from the left or the right.
“If there is a problem in education it can ONLY be because leftists are running the show.”
Purported Christians who believe Jesus was about Conservative philosophy/policy = hypocrites who lack the ability to understand that which they consider holy writ and/or consumed with their own sense of selfish greed.
CM,
A good friend has a son with AS. I assure you, his intelligence in some areas is not the primary factor in his difficulty forming relationships. He simply can’t sometimes. While a lot of human interaction is irrational as you point out, not all of it is. Emotions have a certain fuzzy logic. He is sometimes simply incapable of making those logics reconcile and internalizing his actions/reactions. His brain misses little things ours pick up subconsciously if nothing else: pitch changes in voice and some expressions just don’t register sometimes. In fact, in his case, it makes it doubly awkward because as a math/science prodigy he sometimes can see he’s missing something in a transaction but is still unable to do anything about it. That leads to frustration. Very often he cannot put his finger on what he is missing either. It doesn’t register. We were all concerned about his recent entry into high school, but thankfully, it has all gone as well as possible. But you misunderstand the nature of AS if you think miscommunication is solely a function of increased intelligence. It’s an actual “blind spot” people have to learn to work around.
Well, apparently it is in your best interests to demonize the people who are NOT destroying the public schools in America by attributing to them the characteristic of the people who are.
Fine, have at it, your intellectual inconsistency follows after you, not me.
How interesting it is that you refer to government workers (teachers) as if they were victims of evil conservative businessmen (employers) who had to defend themselves by forming unions. Put any spin on it you like.
It sounds like you think someone forced those poor teachers to become educators, then those evil “conservative” “employer” businessmen just kept cheating their “employees” out of pay! I guess you need to spin that too.
Our education system is run–top to bottom–by mostly liberals/leftists: from pre-school, to the PhD level, from boards of education which run the public schools locally, to accreditation organizations which drive the curricula of the colleges (including the teachers’ colleges), and admissions committees at all the Ivy League schools, and so on and so forth.
We spend more per capita among developed nations than most, yet our results are not so good, we are near the bottom. It isn’t about the money.
If there is a problem in education it can ONLY be because leftists are running the show. Bone-headed denial of this FACT is WHY conservatives have called for vouchers. It was done out of sheer frustration at the stupidity of those who refuse to consult the evidence about what does or does not work in education.
I you need my permission to base all your erroneous assumptions or conclusion on all the fictions you need to invent in order to demonize those who are not the cause of the problems, you have it. But you will protect those who are causing them and making yourself look bad.
Teacher pay is just another bone-headed complaint by the left which is without merit or evidence. Apparently leftist/liberal educators do not feel obligated to prove the stupid statements they continually make. They never have to prove their theories work.
As Professor Harold Stevenson (who wrote The Learning Gap, a small book summarizing his ten year study of schools in Asian nations and America) shows teacher pay is not the problem. Curricula is the likely culprit, as is the lack of coordination amongst teachers inside the classroom (Stevenson discovered that).
Also, the failure to expect more of children is a big problem which I already mentioned. And this dumbed-down expectation is SOLELY a left-wing phenomenon (don’t hurt Johnny’s feelings by making him struggle with hard lessons, blah, blah, blah, blah).
A study done in Boston (I think), monitored by Johns Hopkins, if I remember correctly, indicates that teacher pay is not the issue either. Inner city kids were given the same curricula from a famous private correspondence school (Calvert) to see if that would help. It did!
Nothing changed in the lives of the children or the teachers BUT the curricula and better student achievement. The curricula is critical. And it is the left/liberals/and democrats who have gutted the curricula in the USA, NOT THE CONSERVATIVES!
The absurdity of blaming any of this on conservatives is based on stunning ignorance. You are simply out of your league!
Another bone-headed notion perpetrated by stupid leftists who don’t feel they have to prove their claims is the notion that smaller class size benefits academic achievement. There is no evidence of that. At most it is a corollary based on the well known fact that private school kids in America do better in smaller classes. But public school kids sitting in HUGE classes in Asia do better than that!
Being the poorly educated people they are (not all, of course), educators jumped to the conclusion that class size was the problem, when it wasn’t. Billions and billions were spent, schools were built, tax payers fleeced, and money (always follow it!) flowed into and through the hands of idiotic leftists for their hair-brained schemes that perpetrated onto generations of American children intellectual darkness, thus leaving them with a mind that only a leftist could waste.
Conservatives opposed them at every step!
If things have gotten a little better in American education it is only because of conservatives and PARENTS who insisted on “readin’, ritin’, and rithmatic'”.
And we cannot really judge student achievement so well since the corrupted data leftists are fond of keeping, when they do decide to get of their lazy backsides and collect it has been rigged. Leftists/liberals are desperately trying to abolish testing altogether so they don’t have to held accountable for their fraudulent schemes.
For example, recently, within the last 5 years, I think, the SAT scores were rigged to make it look like SAT scores have not dropped that much over time.
This dishonesty, so well loved by the left, seems to have worked since there is little complaint about how poorly today’s kids measure up on the SAT test in comparison to kids in past. This new cheat by the left works like this. A test score of 1200 today, is what was once a test score of 1100 ten years ago.
THAT is how liberals and leftists improve academic achievement in America.
Conservatives opposed the rigging of the SAT test scores too.
Elaine M:
“I’d like to say that there are still many intelligent, conscientious, and capable teachers working in classrooms across the country.”
I second that statement, my wife is one and there are many others just like her. She does it because she loves to teach. She is very smart and could have done pretty much anything she wanted.
I think Mr. CM doesn’t know where of he speaks. But then as my wife says, those that are not in the teaching profession seem to think they know better than the teachers.
lottakatz:
“But I did end up making a beeline to a technical high school and ended up making a darn good living therefore and it didn’t impede my self-education.”
Truer words were never spoken, had I become a welder rather than an engineer I would, with not a doubt in my mind, be a wealthy man today.
The average plumber today probably makes 6 figures and a machinist probably makes more than most lawyers do. And a person that has 6-12 plumbers or HVAC techs working for him is probably making high 6 figures or maybe even 7 figures.
Now days a college education is usually nothing more than training to become someones bitch.
Tootie.
“Belligerence, arrogance, stupidity, and intransigence” seems to me to be an great description of those who call themselves conservatives.
There is a problem with public school teachers unions both in the US and Australia. Sometimes employers get the unions they deserve and unions get the bosses they deserve. The truth is that the interests of employers and employees are partly in conflict and partly aligned, but sometimes the relationship between them deteriorates to the extent that all emphasis is on preventing the other guy from winning. That has happened in teaching.
Both the US and Australia are countries when income is a major component of one’s perception of one’s entitlement to respect and in both countries the pay of teachers has slipped relative to other professions between the nineteen sixties and the present day. In Australia fork lift drivers get more pay, because they have strong unions who can bargain for wages whereas when teachers go on strike, who cares. Low pay equals low status.
When I went to school many competent people taught there, people who could have succeeded in any profession since teaching bonded scholarships paid their way through university but some time in the seventies university became accessible regardless of means and people who would have gone towards teaching as the only option could try for law or pharmacy or something else high paying and high status and the subsidy to public schooling as bright children of the working class were channeled into it ended. In both countries their is a strong level of contempt for those who persist in teaching represented by this quote, “those who can do, those who can’t teach and those who can’t teach teach others how to teach”. It is one of those caring sharng feminised professions with low pay.
Now days teachers know that both the children and the children’s parents know that they are losers who can only be teaching because they do not think they can get anything better. If there are any competent teachers left, they should be suspected of pedophilia because no one who could do better would remain in a profession where they get neither money nor respect. The war between teachers’ unions and public school administration is the result of a critical crisis in teaching morale. Most of the disputes are not actually about what the participants say they are about. It is a chicken or egg question. If you only pay peanuts you will only get monkeys, but if only monkeys apply how can you justify paying them more than peanuts.
Enough for now I will continue later, maybe tomorrow maybe not. I have to do my northern hemisphere winter solstice festival shopping.
Tootie.
Obvious to whom? Well obvious to me for one. But then I am one of those contemptible liberals.
One of the most common human fallacies is the single cause fallacy. This says that anything defined as a problem must have one and only one cause. One gets a situation in which one group of people says the cause is A and we must implement a solution based on this while another group shout loudly “NO the cause is B and we must implement a solution based on this”. Then both groups engage in a tug of war each group trying as much to prevent any changes based on the other side’s hypothesis as to implement one based on their own. In fact it may be that both A and B contribute to the problem as well as C, D, E….. that neither group realizes to be causes.
One tug of war is between authoritarians (they call themselves conservatives) and liberals. The former advocate that schools be in the traditional model with a curriculum based on readin, ritin, rithmatic and flogging. The liberals on the other hand want to eliminate ever telling the poor little children that they got the answer wrong in case it does permanent damage to their fragile self esteem but they want to make education less rigidly structured and authoritarian so that students are motivated by the intrinsic interest of their subjects and are allowed to proceed at a pace appropriate to their talents and abilities.
Actually a system based purely on the authoritarian model or purely on the liberal model would work to some extent. However when the system is being constantly changed as first one side and then the other gets dominance in the tug of war achieves nothing.
Authoritarian schooling works for children with some personality types but fails for others who become alienated and oppositional.
I would say that I am one of those for whom it did not work. I hated every second of my school years, the dominate effect of schooling was that I left the education system with a hatred of everything taught there music, dancing, Shakespeare, poetry and this hatred is only slowly wearing off. I was lucky that science fiction was not on the curriculum back then as if it were I would hate it as much as I hate Shakespeare and be illiterate. When I should have been doing my homework I was reading SF and was ashamed of doing so, I considered it to be trash. I did not notice until later that many science fiction writers are good as writers of the English language and as conveyors of thought provoking ideas. But I never touch traditional literature, I had it crammed down my throat in high school and I would never read it now as a matter of principle. I imagine myself saying to my former teachers, “you forced this crap on me when you had the power to do so but now I am free of you and to spite you I will never touch it again”. I did not discover that learning things could actually be fun until at the age of 40 years I started studying mandarin after marrying a girl from China.
The fact is that the things taught at school are intrinsically both useful and interesting, but schools working properly manage to conceal this from their students and then after making it as boring as possible force it on them. Schools fail to recruit the intrinsic usefulness and interest as the strong motivating factors that they can be.
I am not gong to answer all your points in this post, but will answer the matter of vouchers. Vouchers would be a great idea if the covered the full cost of sending children of poor parents to a decent functional private school but the do not. They are coupons redeemable at a school to pay part of the tuition, but poor parents can not use them as they cannot afford to bridge the gap between the limit of the voucher and the full cost of tuition. Parent who are not desperately poor however can use them, so a program ostensibly aimed to help the desperately poor in fact subsidizes the middle class to flee from public schools and their minority population. I suggest you peruse the archives of investigative journalist Greg Palast’s site using this search.
http://www.google.com/search?q=No+child+left+behind&sitesearch=gregpalast.com
Carlyle Moulton
You wrote:
“In both the US and Australia the intention of “conservatives” to destroy free public education is very obvious.”
Obvious to whom? The uniformed? It was only the conservatives who offered any meaningful reform in US public school education over the past 30 years. They led the way in that effort and it had nothing to do with abolishing the public schools or providing vouchers, but had everything to do with reforming the public institution most of them attended as children.
It was only after liberal belligerence, arrogance, stupidity, and intransigence that conservatives began to entertain a solution beyond the public schools.
It was liberals who promoted the absolute failures and frauds perpetrated on American children, such as Whole Language, New Math, and New New Math. Conservatives fought against these ruinous frauds until they could not longer stand it. The results are especially tragic since most criminals in federal prison are functionally illiterate, but only after having attended liberal controlled public schools well past the age when they should have learned to read. Too many of them GRADUATED and received a diploma unable to read only because liberals made it so.
It wasn’t until liberals became unmovable in their destructive tendencies, that conservatives ever began to entertain the notion of abandoning the schools for the sake of the children.
It was leftists like John Dewey and the Progressives who have assaulted the public school system, not the conservatives.
Early on in the last century, Progressives passed on their destructive ways to the liberals who then insured that the academic requirements for teachers colleges were gutted. It is liberals who made sure that when teachers graduate from college they are among the least educated graduates. It is liberals who select rotten curricula, and it is liberals who keep blacks in their place by denying them better textbooks or vouchers.
Conservatives tried desperately to prevent this!
As far as “free” goes there is nothing “free” about American education. First, someone pays for it (the tax payer). Second, a “free” people do not compel children by law to attend school. That is something communists do. It is enslavement to the state and a very evil thing.
You wrote
“The previous liberal/national government of Australia went out of its way to subsidize private schooling and to starve the free public systems to the extent that anyone who could afford to send their children to private school is forced to do so lest they condemn them to a bleak low status future. In the US this intention is more obvious and the race based malice against Negroes is a major driver.”
Geeze, you are just making stuff up.
This has been happening in the US public schools for decades. This explains why AP courses are usually a joke (baby sitting classes for bright kids who cool their heels while the slower or not so bright kids finish getting business done).
Thomas Sowell has written about this. Chester Finn, Diane Ravitch, Phyllis Schlafly, Harold Stevenson, and others have all talked about this sort of thing.
Stevenson wrote a great book called The Learning Gap. It was based on a ten year study comparing US kids to Asian kids. Unlike the US, Asian educators believe in challenging the students at the highest levels of their abilities. They don’t “dumb down” the curricula because of the slower or less smarter kids. Those kids are required to spend more time studying to keep up.
The Asian model is based on the theory that all kids, unless they have mental retardation, etc., can achieve a high level of education, but some have to work harder at it.
In our system, we pace the school day to the slowest children while the bright (and generally obedient) students get bored. They are then put into AP courses at the high school level or are kept busy doing nonsense like picking up litter and feeding the homeless, or whatever penance they must do because they are bright.
Elaine, I’d echo your comment that: ‘teaching isn’t easy.’
As an ex-teacher myself, there were many moments when I could’ve walked out of the classroom and never come back.
And most teachers have a use-by date and they should leave teaching before they reach it and not allow things like super payouts to lock them into the system.
Cheers.
I’d like to say that there are still many intelligent, conscientious, and capable teachers working in classrooms across the country. It’s easy to dump on teachers as being the major problem with our educational system. That isn’t necessarily so. Teachers bear the brunt of the unwise decisions made by some administrators and politicians. Our educational system today is primarily focused on prepping kids for mandated tests. Most of the teachers I worked with fought against this.
Teachers today are expected to be more than educators. Teachers and schools deal with all kinds of societal problems. AY touched on one of them when he said: “I will grant you that public school have there problems and it stems from the basic parental problems such as teaching their own respect and appropriately employing discipline. Most of the classroom time is spent on children that are disruptive.”
I found in my last ten-fifteen years of teaching that I had to spend valuable educational time at the beginning of each school year working with children to help them understand what was appropriate behavior–and what was inappropriate behavior.
I know there are incompetent teachers. My daughter had a number of them during her thirteen years spent in public school. She also had quite a few exceptional teachers who got her hooked on subject matter and excited about learning.
I can tell you teaching isn’t as easy as some people like to think. There were years when I had classes where the age differential between my oldest and youngest students was almost two years. Some students came to me reading below grade level–and some came reading way above grade level. I was expected to meet the educational needs of all my students–to try to ensure that they all progressed..in all subjects. I’m not implying that I didn’t enjoy my work. I did–but it was challenging.
Carlyle–
Although many of the characteristics may be typical of children with Asperger’s Syndrome–not all of them are. For example, kids with Aspberger’s are unlikely to be leaders–and many may not be good at sports. They’re not necessarily sensitive–at least to the feelings of others. That’s what I gathered from my experience as a teacher.
From NIH:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001549.htm
People with Asperger have problems with language in a social setting.
• It may be difficult to choose a topic of conversation, their body language may be off, and it may be difficult for them to recognize that the other person has lost interest in the topic.
• They may speak in a monotone, and may not respond to other people’s comments or emotions.
• They may have difficulty understanding sarcasm or humor.
Other symptoms may include:
• Problems with eye contact, facial expressions, body postures, or gestures (nonverbal communication)
• Singled out by other children as “weird” or “strange”
• Difficulty developing relationships with children their own age
• Inability to respond emotionally in normal social interactions
• Not flexible about routines or rituals
• Lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people
• Do not express pleasure at other people’s happiness
• Preoccupied with parts of whole objects
• Repetitive behaviors, including repetitive behavior that injures themselves
• Repetitive finger flapping, twisting, or whole body movements
• Unusually intense preoccupation with narrow areas of interest, such as obsession with train schedules, phone books, or collections of objects
Symptoms
By Mayo Clinic staff
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/aspergers-syndrome/DS00551/DSECTION=symptoms
Signs and symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome include:
Engaging in one-sided, long-winded conversations, without noticing if the listener is listening or trying to change the subject
Displaying unusual nonverbal communication, such as lack of eye contact, few facial expressions, or awkward body postures and gestures
Showing an intense obsession with one or two specific, narrow subjects, such as baseball statistics, train schedules, weather or snakes
Appearing not to understand, empathize with or be sensitive to others’ feelings
Having a hard time “reading” other people or understanding humor
Speaking in a voice that is monotonous, rigid or unusually fast
Moving clumsily, with poor coordination
Having an odd posture or a rigid gait
Elaine M.
All the things you cite are symptoms of asbergers syndrome. The problems that asbergers “sufferers” have may be that their intelligence intrudes into and sabotages humans normal intrinsic stupidity that dominate human social interaction.
In various nations the ruling classes have different ideas about the purpose of education, especially free public education.
In nations that see themselves as needing to compete with other richer nations the intent behind education policy may be to maximize the potential of human capital. However in others where the interests of the ruling class are focussed on the problem of preventing upward social mobility from the unwashed masses creating unwanted competition for those at the upper levels of society the dominant purpose is to handicap the children of the poor so that they can aspire to at best a life of low wage McJobs or even better prison.
In both the US and Australia the intention of “conservatives” to destroy free public education is very obvious. The previous liberal/national government of Australia went out of its way to subsidize private schooling and to starve the free public systems to the extent that anyone who could afford to send their children to private school is forced to do so lest they condemn them to a bleak low status future. In the US this intention is more obvious and the race based malice against Negroes is a major driver.
There are other problems, the adversary relationship between public school administrations and teacher unions adds a goodly dose of dysfunction to the mix.
Another function that is obvious in American schools is to condition its products as docile citizens of the police state, to get rid of any sense of entitlement to fair treatment by the powers and to extinguish any capacity for critical thinking.
I do not know about Britain, I suspect that misguided egalitarianism may be a major problem rather than class war.
As a baby boomer schooled in the fifties and sixties I was lucky to receive a good free education from competent teachers. Public school children to day are not so lucky, since everyone sees teaching as a low status job for losers incapable of earning more money driving fork lift trucks the only competent ones in the profession should be investigated as probable pedophiles.
With lottakatz I sympathise. I hated every second of my school years. Were I to come into possession of both a time travel machine and and one of those gatling mini-guns as used by the Terminator I would be off to nineteen sixties Katoomba high school to get a little pay back for all the bullying, the insults and the sarcasm.
If allowing children to maximize the potential of their various talents, recruiting the inherent interest of the subject matter to motivate learning were considered important goals then schools have always been a dismal failure, but schools today are much bleaker places than they were in the past. Consider this atrocity story from Radley Balko http://reason.com/blog/2009/12/11/sexting-hysteria-drives-teen-tand from Syliva has a problem http://sylviasproblem.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/what-happened-to-hope-witsell/about a girl bullied into suicide because she was caught sexting. I left several comments on this thread but most failed moderation as evidently my weapons of mass destruction level sarcasm was interpreted as trolling.