I was at school in England and Sri Lanka.......wow did we have to work hard. Maps/Geography/World History/Poetry/literature Grammar/Biology/Chemistry/SCRIPTURE/Math/Latin.
Then my daughter was mostly educated in the US...............absolute shit learning and constant testing (which I think was when a lot of good teachers left)
Because American educators are treated as functionaries of the state and business. Can't teach truths, let alone skills, as little Johnny or Jenny might be triggered or overly challenged by actual history or science.
Plenty of teachers try to reject that role but face two hurdles -- standard curricula, which are definitely corporate functionaries as you so eloquently point out; and then the ire of colleagues for "rocking the boat". I saw it only from a short distance as college faculty trying to assist HS science teachers with curricula. It's a bloody jungle in there.
I’m not sure if this is relevant today, but parochial schools back in my time provided a far superior education than did public schools. Whether nuns or lay teachers, they made us WORK. Oh, and that terror of the nuns’ disapproval, lol.
When I’d completed tenth grade, the local Catholic high schools closed and consolidated into one large one, which happened to be on the opposite side of town where we lived, so I attended the local public high school for 11/12 grades. I saw the difference immediately when I signed up for third-year Spanish; it was exactly the same as second- year Spanish at St. Matt’s. I dropped the class.
And I actually wasn’t allowed to take a course called “Harlem Renaissance”. I wanted to read the Black writers and would have been the only non-Black in the class. But the school principal told me, The boys are gonna hit on you, and the girls are gonna want to beat you up.
Yes. Catholic Schools had a good reputation for actually teaching.
Sorry you went to such a hopeless High School.
My daughter had a wonderful Education at Primary School in our Canyon but then Junior High happened. One of the largest schools in LA School District with police on the campus.
Arrgh, penguins. They were usually better teachers, I admit. But they shoulda seasoned the younger ones before sending them out into the older grades, 6, 7, 8. Oh the stories I could tell. Sweet-faced Sister Christine, maybe 21, who thought she could single-handedly stop the 6th grade boys from smoking cigs behind the church. NOT!
Our public school system is labor intensive because it's 100% adultist; also known as 13 years of obedience training. Students must get permission from adult authority for literally everything they do. Teachers' unions like this because it generates maximum jobs but, ironically, it's a recipe for burnout. The cure is self-directed education, wherein children and teens design their own "curriculum." Because they have control over their own education in this model, they're happy and they learn infinitely better and most of the discipline problems disappear; teachers are facilitators, not cops or firefighters. There's no cure for our failed system as long as liberals and the left continue to believe the system is noble and necessary. It's not. It's thoroughly retrograde and critical to keeping us on the imperial path. It alienates so many of its captives to the point that they throw their support behind terribly regressive political movements. Those who don't merely believe, many for life, that math and reading and history are horrible. That is to say, these things suffer from their association with school. Sadly, the vast majority of critics of the system call it out for its miserable politics and service to empire, correctly, but not for the shitty way it treats young people. Talk about denial...
"as long as liberals and the left continue to believe the system is noble and necessary..."
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Of course a good public school system is "noble and necessary" but over the past 60 years the right has continually chipped away at the institution both from without and within. And if you think school vouchers and charter schools are going to fix the US education system, you're either a cult member of the rich/right or you've been lied to. At BEST vouchers are a coupon for already rich people who already send their kids to private schools. At worst, wait until thousands of poor people suddenly find out that their voucher isn't sufficient to cover their kids' tuition at the for-profit private school which replaced the public one that had to shut down, and they have to turn to Wall Street for a loan to get them through high school.
What's nonsense is jumping to the conclusion that I'm pro-voucher and that I was condemning the ideal of public education and not the system we have. You could have asked, "Do you mean to say public education is an ignoble idea?", but instead you saw an opportunity to rant against vouchers, about which I said NOTHING. So, for the record, my beef is with the industrial school system we have, not the idea of public funding of education. The system we have is a choice (largely molded by the education industry), not the inevitable way schooling has to be designed or managed. It is, in fact, anti-child, ineffective, and expensive, not to mention something of an international joke. The one thing you got right is that the system used to be more effective 60 years ago and prior (though it was never very child-friendly), but you don't appear to understand what happened. To remedy that, I recommend you read "Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms," by Frank Smith. It's old and out of print but he lays out what happened well. The only other critic I know of who understood what Smith did was John Taylor Gatto, whose work would also bring you up to speed and which is easy to find. In his case, I suggest starting with "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling."
"international joke" - I'm NOT disagreeing with you Megan! But what I do want is detailed, specific, articulated examples of HOW we have become an international joke and on the basis of what exact expectations!!!
Can you articulate any of this stuff in your own words in the span of a single comment??????
Again, you keep naming books, but you have your own Substack and you have unlimited space to explain what you think here, and all you keep doing is making vague references to the work of others while seemingly intentionally avoiding the prospect of explaining exactly what you think is wrong and how to fix it.
You are being SOOOO vague!!
And one last question: You have a few kids, if I understand correctly. Are either or both successful STEM students going for degrees or masters/doctorates in science, technology or engineering/medicine? If so, I am so glad for you, but if not then why? Please explain - and don't misunderstand me: I am equally happy with degrees or just full courses of study in philosophy and the humanities. I just think you're holding people to a different standard and want you to defend it if you're willing.
Megan, if you don't mind, would you please try elaborating on your own understanding of the US public (pre-K12) education system's history from, say, mid WWII to the present? At the same time, could you also articulate what and where things went wrong, in as much detail as possible?
Look, as I mentioned prior, it would be great if it was an acceptable and effective form of debate to simply refer one's interlocutor to a list of books and essays and say "if you just read these things you'd know!" but that isn't how life or debate work. I'm guilty of the same thing as a younger person. I wish I could just say to any stupid American exceptionalist capitalist worshipping moron "GO READ WILLIAM BLUM'S "KILLING HOPE" and you'll know that the US is a FRAUD and HYPOCRITICAL LIAR in terms of who has killed how many people!" - But I know that I can't.
Have you read any or all of Marx? Michael Hudson? Have you read long defenses of the original intent of most US public education defenders? Most likely not. And I'm not faulting you for it.
So please just try to defend or advance your own opinions in your own words here without the cop-out of making it seem like none of us will understand what you're trying to say without reading multiple 300 page book-length treatises on the topic!
Articulate it yourself, and with brevity! Brevity is the soul of effectiveness!!! (Hope you're teaching your kids that in a meaningful way)
Define the "education industry" - Please, I think that will be very telling.
Providing a list of "recommended" reading in the way of long-form books in a comments section is a rather disingenuous or at least sort of unrealistic way to address points. Trust me, I also have a long list of reading material that I wish you and anyone else with whom I exchange comments here or any other online forum would have read in advance.
You make a fair point that YOU didn't raise the topic of vouchers or charter schools; it's just that there is literally no separating those topics from the current state of the education debate in the US right now.
But please try to articulate in your own words, in the here-and-now, why the US public education system, or any government mandated or funded PES, is by its very nature so flawed as to require complete abandonment.
Lastly, so that this may be a more productive exchange - could you please also explain your own political/social philosophy? Are you a libertarian, social democrat, conservative, left-anarcho-libertarian, right-anarcho-libertarian, arch-capitalist, etc? I'm just curious and I think we need to set the terms and understand one another.
Great model, one guaranteeing maximal resistance from the established "order". There are compromises. A colleague and I used the TAPPS (thinking aloud pair problem solving) method in our large classes (supposedly "lecture halls") of 150-175 college freshman bio/chem integrated curriculum students, with both he and I (the chem and bio professors) and four or five grad students circulating through the hall to listen to the students converse. While it was hardly ideal, it was a wonderful dent in the status quo of passive "learning", and a great way of identifying misconceptions.
For physical science teachers, I also recommend Arnold Arons' book, A Guide to Introductory Physics Teaching, also a nice source of student misconceptions in physics.
Thanks for the link. I'll take a look....Self-directed education is definitely hostile to the status quo, which is why I advocate abandoning the school system instead of sinking another century into "reform." If the elites were smart, they'd ban homeschooling and flood the system with cash, since the more money it has the dumber it gets.
My guess is they have much more in common than you'd like to believe, at least from the perspective of young people, whose feelings don't tend to enter into adult considerations of whether a system is "good" or not. Certainly French schools are much more rigorous than those of the U.S., but there's still plenty of pressure and fear of failure put on students, and little decision-making power given them. At the end of the day, it's a conventional, western system with all the hierarchy, authoritarianism, and punitiveness of any other western school system.
As I indicated, in terms of critical thinking, there's nowhere to go but up from American public schooling, but you skipped over my characterization of all western schooling, including France's, as hierarchical, authoritarian, and punitive. The movie linked above, "Schooling the World," is well worth its short viewing time, as is the director's essay, "A Thousand Rivers," for those who have a hard time imagining alternatives to coercive education, which seems to include nearly 100% of social activist types. Let me get you started: "rigorous" and "humane" are two completely different qualities in education. Both are important, and not mutually exclusive, but different.
Just saw this, gyp dear. This is why first class day, first semester freshman bio I saw so many duuh blank stares at the syllabus. And I thought: why are some of these folks here? But it was at least partly what you said -- many were shocked by what the workload expectations looked like.
At some point American public schools substituted "passages" for actual texts, and teachers became less and less capable of handling the latter. (It likely coincided with the entry of Big Education into the market in the 1960s. All you needed was a library before that--free; after, you were dependent upon the pablum coughed up the publishers--profitable.) I've seen a high school yearbook from a school in Texas which indicated that kids used to do work that would be considered advanced for college students today, and their extracurricular clubs couldn't be handled by grad students today. Palpable dumbing down that appears to have been no accident...
I never used a standard textbook in any course I taught, but rather gave students my "notes" and embedded in them questions for discussions via the TAPPS method I alluded to earlier. Standardized texts, in trying to be everything to everyone -- including performing to the satisfaction of the often prominent scientists on their advisory boards -- end up generally serving mostly publisher pockets. Never found a single one I l really liked. I'd put several on reserve in the library for students to reference, but no requirements to buy (some nervous ones did anyway). Re: what you describe, I'm not adequately familiar, so can't really comment, but I can see that many of my collegiate colleagues would have felt naked without a course textbook aligned with their syllabus.
Good for you, but then it sounds like you yourself got an actual education and so had the knowledge base to go outside the standardization model. I think that's key: that the more dumbed down the system gets, the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources. As for the scourge of "passages," I recall wanting to read my challenging library book in 5th grade in the 1970s (before the Department of Education was born) but being required to put it down to go do the SRA garbage from IBM. An unforgivable insult to my intelligence, it consisted of brain-dead passages (you'd have to TRY to make something so boring and meaningless) which I had to read and answer questions on. Utterly pointless, but...the district had signed a contract with IBM and so it had to put us all through this dumbed-down ordeal that stole many hours from actual learning from actual books. (If it's true that you value what you give attention to, kids are correct to take away from school that reading doesn't really matter: no time is given to it, no matter how much a kid just wants to curl up with a book.) It's one reason I caution against throwing more money at schools: they tend to waste it on admins and contracts for the corporations that fund the campaigns of our Congress critters. Kids? An afterthought on a good day. (The people who think the system was just GREAT before No Child's Behind Left are completely out to lunch, but then it does serve their political agenda, which appears to be the whole point.)
"the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources." -- Absolutely so. I once had an angry letter published in the journal Science contesting another letter-writer's opinion about teacher training -- by someone who thought grammar school teachers didn't need such rigorous understanding of scientific principles. You arrogant dimwit, I thought, although I was polite in my letter. That's where the misconceptions are frequently seeded that it's sometimes hell to unearth and undo. Educate those teachers well!
I confess that I'm older than you -- fifth grade, hmm that was late 1950s for me, so I guess I must've missed the specific scourge to which you refer, but your assessment of money thrown away on bogus corporate contracts is spot on.
UK education for me, so to add .... Religious studies (for me = Christian), Physics, French and / or Spanish and of course gym and outside sports.
Funny you mention "constant testing" ... my 2 educated in the EU, seem to have non-stop testing as well, but what gets me even more is the fact that there results are out of 9 or 90% ... err what?
Oh Bob. Please don't envy me. It is so PAINFUL getting old....also I am pretty deaf so conversation with my beloved husband (who mumbles and has a few screws loose) is not fun.
Live your life......50 and 60 were magical for me.
I was at school in England and Sri Lanka.......wow did we have to work hard. Maps/Geography/World History/Poetry/literature Grammar/Biology/Chemistry/SCRIPTURE/Math/Latin.
Then my daughter was mostly educated in the US...............absolute shit learning and constant testing (which I think was when a lot of good teachers left)
Because American educators are treated as functionaries of the state and business. Can't teach truths, let alone skills, as little Johnny or Jenny might be triggered or overly challenged by actual history or science.
Plenty of teachers try to reject that role but face two hurdles -- standard curricula, which are definitely corporate functionaries as you so eloquently point out; and then the ire of colleagues for "rocking the boat". I saw it only from a short distance as college faculty trying to assist HS science teachers with curricula. It's a bloody jungle in there.
I saw and lived it in many modes over many years. It's a jungle alright, wherein even Tarzan might likely not survive.
Certainly the teachers were not teaching much at that time. Mostly they were policing a huge class and getting kids ready for the next test!
My daughter was bored to death and then kept skipping school which NOT one teacher told me, until she did herself.
Yep: it's mainly policing and a factory model.
Oh my god the hours the days I was bored and deprived of!!!
Hi Jenny
I’m not sure if this is relevant today, but parochial schools back in my time provided a far superior education than did public schools. Whether nuns or lay teachers, they made us WORK. Oh, and that terror of the nuns’ disapproval, lol.
When I’d completed tenth grade, the local Catholic high schools closed and consolidated into one large one, which happened to be on the opposite side of town where we lived, so I attended the local public high school for 11/12 grades. I saw the difference immediately when I signed up for third-year Spanish; it was exactly the same as second- year Spanish at St. Matt’s. I dropped the class.
And I actually wasn’t allowed to take a course called “Harlem Renaissance”. I wanted to read the Black writers and would have been the only non-Black in the class. But the school principal told me, The boys are gonna hit on you, and the girls are gonna want to beat you up.
Sigh…1970! 🙄
Yes. Catholic Schools had a good reputation for actually teaching.
Sorry you went to such a hopeless High School.
My daughter had a wonderful Education at Primary School in our Canyon but then Junior High happened. One of the largest schools in LA School District with police on the campus.
Hi Jenny
I did have a wonderful art teacher there. Thing is, I didn’t NEED an art teacher!
Laughing.
Arrgh, penguins. They were usually better teachers, I admit. But they shoulda seasoned the younger ones before sending them out into the older grades, 6, 7, 8. Oh the stories I could tell. Sweet-faced Sister Christine, maybe 21, who thought she could single-handedly stop the 6th grade boys from smoking cigs behind the church. NOT!
Vin, we were Catholics, not angels 😉
Our public school system is labor intensive because it's 100% adultist; also known as 13 years of obedience training. Students must get permission from adult authority for literally everything they do. Teachers' unions like this because it generates maximum jobs but, ironically, it's a recipe for burnout. The cure is self-directed education, wherein children and teens design their own "curriculum." Because they have control over their own education in this model, they're happy and they learn infinitely better and most of the discipline problems disappear; teachers are facilitators, not cops or firefighters. There's no cure for our failed system as long as liberals and the left continue to believe the system is noble and necessary. It's not. It's thoroughly retrograde and critical to keeping us on the imperial path. It alienates so many of its captives to the point that they throw their support behind terribly regressive political movements. Those who don't merely believe, many for life, that math and reading and history are horrible. That is to say, these things suffer from their association with school. Sadly, the vast majority of critics of the system call it out for its miserable politics and service to empire, correctly, but not for the shitty way it treats young people. Talk about denial...
"as long as liberals and the left continue to believe the system is noble and necessary..."
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Of course a good public school system is "noble and necessary" but over the past 60 years the right has continually chipped away at the institution both from without and within. And if you think school vouchers and charter schools are going to fix the US education system, you're either a cult member of the rich/right or you've been lied to. At BEST vouchers are a coupon for already rich people who already send their kids to private schools. At worst, wait until thousands of poor people suddenly find out that their voucher isn't sufficient to cover their kids' tuition at the for-profit private school which replaced the public one that had to shut down, and they have to turn to Wall Street for a loan to get them through high school.
Well said Tom!
What's nonsense is jumping to the conclusion that I'm pro-voucher and that I was condemning the ideal of public education and not the system we have. You could have asked, "Do you mean to say public education is an ignoble idea?", but instead you saw an opportunity to rant against vouchers, about which I said NOTHING. So, for the record, my beef is with the industrial school system we have, not the idea of public funding of education. The system we have is a choice (largely molded by the education industry), not the inevitable way schooling has to be designed or managed. It is, in fact, anti-child, ineffective, and expensive, not to mention something of an international joke. The one thing you got right is that the system used to be more effective 60 years ago and prior (though it was never very child-friendly), but you don't appear to understand what happened. To remedy that, I recommend you read "Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms," by Frank Smith. It's old and out of print but he lays out what happened well. The only other critic I know of who understood what Smith did was John Taylor Gatto, whose work would also bring you up to speed and which is easy to find. In his case, I suggest starting with "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling."
Goodbye Megan. I think you are probably done here unless you can muster a real, genuine, legitimate response to me.
"international joke" - I'm NOT disagreeing with you Megan! But what I do want is detailed, specific, articulated examples of HOW we have become an international joke and on the basis of what exact expectations!!!
Can you articulate any of this stuff in your own words in the span of a single comment??????
Again, you keep naming books, but you have your own Substack and you have unlimited space to explain what you think here, and all you keep doing is making vague references to the work of others while seemingly intentionally avoiding the prospect of explaining exactly what you think is wrong and how to fix it.
You are being SOOOO vague!!
And one last question: You have a few kids, if I understand correctly. Are either or both successful STEM students going for degrees or masters/doctorates in science, technology or engineering/medicine? If so, I am so glad for you, but if not then why? Please explain - and don't misunderstand me: I am equally happy with degrees or just full courses of study in philosophy and the humanities. I just think you're holding people to a different standard and want you to defend it if you're willing.
Megan, if you don't mind, would you please try elaborating on your own understanding of the US public (pre-K12) education system's history from, say, mid WWII to the present? At the same time, could you also articulate what and where things went wrong, in as much detail as possible?
Look, as I mentioned prior, it would be great if it was an acceptable and effective form of debate to simply refer one's interlocutor to a list of books and essays and say "if you just read these things you'd know!" but that isn't how life or debate work. I'm guilty of the same thing as a younger person. I wish I could just say to any stupid American exceptionalist capitalist worshipping moron "GO READ WILLIAM BLUM'S "KILLING HOPE" and you'll know that the US is a FRAUD and HYPOCRITICAL LIAR in terms of who has killed how many people!" - But I know that I can't.
Have you read any or all of Marx? Michael Hudson? Have you read long defenses of the original intent of most US public education defenders? Most likely not. And I'm not faulting you for it.
So please just try to defend or advance your own opinions in your own words here without the cop-out of making it seem like none of us will understand what you're trying to say without reading multiple 300 page book-length treatises on the topic!
Articulate it yourself, and with brevity! Brevity is the soul of effectiveness!!! (Hope you're teaching your kids that in a meaningful way)
Define the "education industry" - Please, I think that will be very telling.
Providing a list of "recommended" reading in the way of long-form books in a comments section is a rather disingenuous or at least sort of unrealistic way to address points. Trust me, I also have a long list of reading material that I wish you and anyone else with whom I exchange comments here or any other online forum would have read in advance.
You make a fair point that YOU didn't raise the topic of vouchers or charter schools; it's just that there is literally no separating those topics from the current state of the education debate in the US right now.
But please try to articulate in your own words, in the here-and-now, why the US public education system, or any government mandated or funded PES, is by its very nature so flawed as to require complete abandonment.
Lastly, so that this may be a more productive exchange - could you please also explain your own political/social philosophy? Are you a libertarian, social democrat, conservative, left-anarcho-libertarian, right-anarcho-libertarian, arch-capitalist, etc? I'm just curious and I think we need to set the terms and understand one another.
“Liberals” and “left” weren’t necessary as both sides have contributed to a poor offering. ✌🏻
Great model, one guaranteeing maximal resistance from the established "order". There are compromises. A colleague and I used the TAPPS (thinking aloud pair problem solving) method in our large classes (supposedly "lecture halls") of 150-175 college freshman bio/chem integrated curriculum students, with both he and I (the chem and bio professors) and four or five grad students circulating through the hall to listen to the students converse. While it was hardly ideal, it was a wonderful dent in the status quo of passive "learning", and a great way of identifying misconceptions.
https://www.uwlax.edu/globalassets/offices-services/catl/teaching-guides/group-learning-materials/think-aloud-pair-problem-solving.pdf
For physical science teachers, I also recommend Arnold Arons' book, A Guide to Introductory Physics Teaching, also a nice source of student misconceptions in physics.
Thanks for the link. I'll take a look....Self-directed education is definitely hostile to the status quo, which is why I advocate abandoning the school system instead of sinking another century into "reform." If the elites were smart, they'd ban homeschooling and flood the system with cash, since the more money it has the dumber it gets.
Nothing like doing what you are learning is there : )
First thing we should do is stop exporting our school system to the rest of the world. https://carolblack.org/schooling-the-world
We certainly don't have your school system here in France.
My guess is they have much more in common than you'd like to believe, at least from the perspective of young people, whose feelings don't tend to enter into adult considerations of whether a system is "good" or not. Certainly French schools are much more rigorous than those of the U.S., but there's still plenty of pressure and fear of failure put on students, and little decision-making power given them. At the end of the day, it's a conventional, western system with all the hierarchy, authoritarianism, and punitiveness of any other western school system.
Every school in France students have to do Philosophy. This means 'critical thinking.'
As I indicated, in terms of critical thinking, there's nowhere to go but up from American public schooling, but you skipped over my characterization of all western schooling, including France's, as hierarchical, authoritarian, and punitive. The movie linked above, "Schooling the World," is well worth its short viewing time, as is the director's essay, "A Thousand Rivers," for those who have a hard time imagining alternatives to coercive education, which seems to include nearly 100% of social activist types. Let me get you started: "rigorous" and "humane" are two completely different qualities in education. Both are important, and not mutually exclusive, but different.
Is there a synopsis or 'book report' version? I don't have time to watch an hour long film at the moment, and a summary would be appreciated.
oh the stupidity of American
schools sports teams hamburgers politicians,
it's endless
Hi Jenny
My daughter attended what was considered a pretty good public school.
Thing is: she NEVER had homework. When I inquired about it, she said, Oh they give us time in class to do it.
Huh. Guess that’s why it’s called “HOMEwork.” Nd the teachers clearly didn’t want to spend the entire period actually, er, teaching.
It left her totally unprepared for the workload of college.
Just saw this, gyp dear. This is why first class day, first semester freshman bio I saw so many duuh blank stares at the syllabus. And I thought: why are some of these folks here? But it was at least partly what you said -- many were shocked by what the workload expectations looked like.
At some point American public schools substituted "passages" for actual texts, and teachers became less and less capable of handling the latter. (It likely coincided with the entry of Big Education into the market in the 1960s. All you needed was a library before that--free; after, you were dependent upon the pablum coughed up the publishers--profitable.) I've seen a high school yearbook from a school in Texas which indicated that kids used to do work that would be considered advanced for college students today, and their extracurricular clubs couldn't be handled by grad students today. Palpable dumbing down that appears to have been no accident...
I never used a standard textbook in any course I taught, but rather gave students my "notes" and embedded in them questions for discussions via the TAPPS method I alluded to earlier. Standardized texts, in trying to be everything to everyone -- including performing to the satisfaction of the often prominent scientists on their advisory boards -- end up generally serving mostly publisher pockets. Never found a single one I l really liked. I'd put several on reserve in the library for students to reference, but no requirements to buy (some nervous ones did anyway). Re: what you describe, I'm not adequately familiar, so can't really comment, but I can see that many of my collegiate colleagues would have felt naked without a course textbook aligned with their syllabus.
Good for you, but then it sounds like you yourself got an actual education and so had the knowledge base to go outside the standardization model. I think that's key: that the more dumbed down the system gets, the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources. As for the scourge of "passages," I recall wanting to read my challenging library book in 5th grade in the 1970s (before the Department of Education was born) but being required to put it down to go do the SRA garbage from IBM. An unforgivable insult to my intelligence, it consisted of brain-dead passages (you'd have to TRY to make something so boring and meaningless) which I had to read and answer questions on. Utterly pointless, but...the district had signed a contract with IBM and so it had to put us all through this dumbed-down ordeal that stole many hours from actual learning from actual books. (If it's true that you value what you give attention to, kids are correct to take away from school that reading doesn't really matter: no time is given to it, no matter how much a kid just wants to curl up with a book.) It's one reason I caution against throwing more money at schools: they tend to waste it on admins and contracts for the corporations that fund the campaigns of our Congress critters. Kids? An afterthought on a good day. (The people who think the system was just GREAT before No Child's Behind Left are completely out to lunch, but then it does serve their political agenda, which appears to be the whole point.)
"the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources." -- Absolutely so. I once had an angry letter published in the journal Science contesting another letter-writer's opinion about teacher training -- by someone who thought grammar school teachers didn't need such rigorous understanding of scientific principles. You arrogant dimwit, I thought, although I was polite in my letter. That's where the misconceptions are frequently seeded that it's sometimes hell to unearth and undo. Educate those teachers well!
I confess that I'm older than you -- fifth grade, hmm that was late 1950s for me, so I guess I must've missed the specific scourge to which you refer, but your assessment of money thrown away on bogus corporate contracts is spot on.
UK education for me, so to add .... Religious studies (for me = Christian), Physics, French and / or Spanish and of course gym and outside sports.
Funny you mention "constant testing" ... my 2 educated in the EU, seem to have non-stop testing as well, but what gets me even more is the fact that there results are out of 9 or 90% ... err what?
I don't know how old you are: Times have changed since I was educated in the Great British Empire.
Close to 60.
Way below me in age.
I envy you and your age.
Oh Bob. Please don't envy me. It is so PAINFUL getting old....also I am pretty deaf so conversation with my beloved husband (who mumbles and has a few screws loose) is not fun.
Live your life......50 and 60 were magical for me.