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Post by anodyne on Jan 15, 2006 20:38:53 GMT -5
Alaina, I've heard some interesting things about home schooling. Is it true that you only are required to study for 2-3 hours a day? I would think it depends on the person. Generally children that are home schooled score better on achievement tests but you have some real whackos, too. ------- In another thread I spelled "wiped" as whiped.. so we all make mistakes... nymos, you're making me neurotic, lol
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Post by nymos on Jan 15, 2006 20:42:53 GMT -5
You should've been whipped for that, you ignoramus!
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Post by stella22 on Jan 15, 2006 20:51:59 GMT -5
You all sound like real education buffs. I guess I'm in the minority here. I hated school and still have nightmares about taking tests.
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Post by anodyne on Jan 16, 2006 0:00:43 GMT -5
No, I hated school with a passion. In elementary I was an average student except in science and history.
In high school I was a terrible student except when finals came around. I had an incentive since I wasn't keen on going to summer school. Needless to say my parents weren't very happy with me considering all my cousins except one tended to be honor students.
Although, I did very well at the university but I think its because of the environment.
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Post by Ilmatar on Jan 16, 2006 6:53:35 GMT -5
America also has a quarter-of-a-billion population--compared to Belgium and Finland (that both have populations that are less than one US city: New York.) There are literally more people in New York City than in all of Belgium and Finland--combined. Is this some sort of an excuse for leaving large portions of population basicly analphabet ? Sinceirly, this is the "vibe" I'm getting from your answer. I agree that with most commentators on that one of the reasons Finnish education system excels is the fact that the system is very well equipped to answer any problem arising in the learning process early on. Ours may be a homogenously "white" (really, you can't compare the position of the Sámi or the Swedish speakers, who make 6 % of the population, to any US minority) society, but it doesn't mean the children don't experience learning difficulties.
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Post by asdf on Jan 16, 2006 10:45:44 GMT -5
There is no such thing as "average American IQ" because there is no such thing as a genetic American. There are negroes with 85 IQs for an average, whites with 110, Um, no, sorry. The American "white" IQ is not 110. It's 100-103 at best. Europe has no one country with a 110 average, and you think Americans whites are at that level? WTF. "Mexican-Indians"? Consult any genetic study on Mexican-Americans. Approximately300 million including illegals. Un, no, there aren't 'literally' more. Finland has a population of 5.22 million (CIA 2005 estimate) and Belgium is 10.36 million (CIA 2005 estimate). Hey, you're only 50% off. Although that's your average. Where's the part where you actually explain why a small population is an advantage? Try 350-360,000 non-Europeans. Didn't you claim the Finnish were 10% Mongoloid? Boy, do you love to exaggerrate. Yeah, "mostly Mexican Indians". Every time you see a mestizo, you call him an "Aztec", or a "short brown Indian" (as if Iberians aren't short and brown). Take a look at some or at all the studies Vgambler posted. Mestizos aren't Aztecs with minor European admixture--nor are Mexicans in America. Look at the chart at the bottom with Lynn and Vanhanen's stuff: www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htmThe sub-Saharan average is around 70, and it's range goes no further than 78. Southeast Asians on the other hand are all in the 80s and many in the 90s. Why do you have to exagerrate every similarity and every difference? The two averages are 15-20 points different, and their ranges do not overlap. From the 2003 Britannica Book of the YearPopulation in 2002 - 82,506,000 - German 75,060,000 - Turkish 2,110,000 - Kurdish 400,000 - Greek 360,000 - Italian 610,000 - Polish 280,000 - South Slavic languages 1,190,000 - Other 2,590,000 Ethnic composition of Germany in year 2000: - German 88.2% - Turkish 3.4% (of which Kurdish 0.7%)- Italian 1.0% - Greek 0.7% - Serb 0.6% - Russian 0.6% - Polish 0.4% - other 5.1% This one's not a complaint... Just giving the precise number.
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Post by Drooperdoo on Jan 16, 2006 14:31:11 GMT -5
Forrester, God! Why do you follow me around and heckle? --You need a woman. As to my saying that New York City was larger than both Finland and Belgium, it's true: You yourself said that Finland had a population of 5 million. Likewise, you said that Belgium had 10 million. Here's a Wikipedia quote: "Located in the state of New York, New York City has a population of 8.2 million[1] within an area of 321 square miles (approximately 830 km²)[2]. It is at the heart of the New York Metropolitan Area, which at a population of over 22 million is one of the largest urban conglomerations in the world." 22 million--in the greater New York Metropolitan AreaSo you're right: Rather than saying that New York was bigger than both countries, I should have written "The New York Metropolitan Area" is bigger than both countries combined. Why did I bring up the fact that the United States, with its quarter-of-a-billion population, is at a loss when compared to tiny European nations? Nietzsche holds the answer. He wrote that "In large states, public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad." P.S.--Here's Wikiedpia's IQ-Averages by Nation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IQ#National_IQ_estimatesAmerica's "national IQ" is 98. The Caucasian IQ would have to be high to counteract, the sub-Saharan IQ average, which is 85. And Mexico's IQ average of 87. 12% of the United States is black, and 12% [and growing] is Hispanic (mostly Mexican). That's 24% of the nation bringing the average down. So for the US to maintain a 98-IQ average in the face of this, the Caucasians would have to statistically be pulling in greater scores than 100. Do the math. Factor out the Mexicans and blacks, and you'll find that average white American IQ rivals the highest rates found in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia. * To make it really fair, one would also have to factor out the Northern-Asians and Jews, who bring the averages up. But since both of these groups are so tiny--far tinier than black and Mexican populations--it's almost irrelevant. But if one really WANTS to do the math: Factor out 1% for Northern Asians and 2% for Jews.
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Post by nymos on Jan 17, 2006 0:38:20 GMT -5
The math agrees with Seizure. His range of 100-103 is dead on. The actual number comes out to about 101.8.
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Post by wendland on Jan 17, 2006 1:20:41 GMT -5
Away from IQ and back to Education. A big problem with US schooling is a cultural one: 1. In Europe people go to school to learn, but in the US much of the school experience is about acculturation: clubs, teams, sports, dances-- and all the extra stuff that leads to (gossip, cliques, etc...). So, not as much energy goes actually into learning. Besides, in many schools, learning is for geeks and nerds, the "lowest kids" in the VERY IMPORTANT social hierarchy, so there's even a social bias AGAINST being a good student. In Europe, these hierarchies are not as important as school is more about learning. 2. The US has a history of mistrust of centralization. So, all the school districts are atomized. Parents HAVE to send their child to the school in their district, if they want the child in a public school. This atomization means that the laudible Belgian system would be impossible in the US.
This is just part of what the US is about. It's the culture, the way. Schools will be unequal, not necessarily about learning. There will be periodic killings and suicides-- due to the various social pressures. Some people will say that high school was the best period of their lives (do people in Europe or other parts of world ever say that?!)-- thinking about the football team, or being the prom queen or whatever. It's American culture. Our schools will never change, unless our culture radically changes.
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Post by Josh on Jan 17, 2006 3:08:21 GMT -5
^^Largely true and very very sad in my opinion. Thankfully, I know that I have used my school time well and that I will not be saying that high school was the best time of my life. I wish that I could do something to change this rather f*cked up system.
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Post by murphee on Jan 17, 2006 3:34:27 GMT -5
"Besides, in many schools, learning is for geeks and nerds, the "lowest kids" in the VERY IMPORTANT social hierarchy, so there's even a social bias AGAINST being a good student."
I agree. Most of the good students were geeks and nerds at my school. Funny how most of the popular kids were good-looking idiots and the smart kids were...well... nerds.
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Post by asdf on Jan 17, 2006 4:00:20 GMT -5
Forrester, God! Why do you follow me around and heckle? --You need a woman. So do you admit most of your figures were offbase? We don't really need more wrong statistics here. My bad. bit you said US cities. NYC is the city. Okay, so did Nietzsche have support for his argument (I'm not saying it's wrong--I'd just like to see it justified)--or are we just going to keep dancing around in circles? It's right because you're saying Nietzsche says it is. That's great, but really doesn't show us anything. Not even that you've read any of Nietzsche. OR... you could just look it up like Nymos said. It's not illegal yet to make statistics by ethnic group in this country.
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Post by Ilmatar on Jan 17, 2006 8:24:21 GMT -5
Wendland put it nicely. I personally don't think that the IQ test results and the general scholastic success - or any other kind of success - necessarely correlate. IQ tests usually lean largely to mathematic-logic skills. However, in my experience the general scholastic success correlates to linguistic skills more than anything else. I guess that this is the experience of the Finnish (at least) educators as well, since children's IQ never gets tested here in the course of the Academic career.
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Post by Drooperdoo on Jan 17, 2006 9:16:39 GMT -5
Forrester, You're attacking even my quotations of people I like? --My God! I often quote people just to show that my thinking isn't original on any number of subjects. The reason that Nietzsche's opinion on education was germane was that he was a university professor. He knew all about the educational system of Germany. What most Americans don't know is that the American educational system is based on the Prussian one. (And that one was specifically designed to turn out factory workers, not to educate anyone.) So his comments on education seemed appropriate--both from his standpoint as a professor and his dealings with an educational system that was the basis for the later American one.
Look at this excerpt from an article on American education. It's from John Taylor Gatto (a former New York City school teacher and author of The Underground History of American Education):
"... the great H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern. The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable." It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary." Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole. Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modern schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier: 1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. 2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. 3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one. 4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best. 5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain. 6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor. That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed. There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing. Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down." It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it. Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can. First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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Post by anodyne on Jan 17, 2006 10:36:59 GMT -5
I don't think kids in Europe and America are that much different. What is different is the standards. In Spain for example, they don't just pass people just to get them out of school. They expect you to meet the standards. If you can't then too bad. You get another shot the following year but nothing is handed to you. It's a great incentive to put in effort. Wouldn't that be an example of centralization since the parents have no choice in what school their child will be placed? I don't understand why that's a given. Suicides and killings among teens is not unique to the US. In fact, violence among teens in the US has been dropping since the early 90s. What we can do is compare our current US culture to that of the past US culture (say 50s and early 60s) and see where things went wrong considering many of the problems we have today were a small factor during that period rather than comapre it to some other current European culture that has different variables at play. But I tend to go much further back than the 50s for the roots of the problem and look at the underlining philosophical problems. Here's a website of an interesting and respected author who was a good enough guy to allow his most important book to be free online. John Taylor Gatto www.johntaylorgatto.com/
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