Newsgroups: comp.edu Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!ai.toronto.edu!tjhorton From: tjhorton@ai.toronto.edu ("Timothy J. Horton") Subject: Education (was: Becoming CAI literate) Message-ID: <1988Feb23.045155.16293@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> Reply-To: tjhorton@ai.toronto.edu (Timothy J. Horton) Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto Distribution: na Date: Tue, 23-Feb-88 04:51:54 EST A comprehensive answer to educational rednecks: "Teens need less school -- not more" by Frank Jones Toronto Star, Feb 22, page C1 "I've just got the scoop on a new government report of secondary education. This report recommends dropping the school-leaving age to 14, closing down half the high schools in Metro (Toronto), and allowing kids to choose which teachers to fire. Classes will be scheduled in the evenings, so as not to interfere with stu- dents' working hours, and kids will be paid $300 a week to attend school. "There I go, dreaming again. There is no such report -- worse luck. The only kind of reports you'll get out of (the govern- ment) are ones crying out for return to basics, for stricter ex- ams, for keeping kids in school longer. And do you know why? Because all these reports are written by people who loved high school, who got top marks and sailed through to university. And their solution is always: everyone would be fine if everyone was like me. "The latest report of this kind was produced last week by George Radwanski, a former editor of this paper who tells me he got good marks and enjoyed his school days. True to form, his report agonizes over the "plight" or working-class children, urging stiffer and sterner doses of schooling. And what Radwanski and all these other report writers can't seem to come to grips with is that, for most teenagers, high school is a perverse and alien experience involving years of boredom and frustration. "Just think about it: At the very time when your glands are pump- ing furiously and your energy and emotions are at a lifetime peak, society plucks you down at an uncomfortable desk and force-feeds you dreary lectures on subjects in which you have not the least interest. "The teenage years, in fact, are a state of purgatory invented in this century. In the past people went with relatively little discomfort from childhood into adulthood. Now we have this stage of frozen animation when, in the interests of adult peace and quiet, young people are deprived of all responsibilities and rights and confined to institutions of mainly useless learning. "Then, to keep the escapers in line -- the ones either too dumb to absorb anything or smart enough to see through it -- adults in- vented the pejorative term "drop-out". "If I quite my job, no one calls me a drop-out. If I leave a church I am not called a drop-out. Only if I chose to leave school according to my own timetable rather than the institution's am I a drop-out. "It is quite safe, apparently, to make any kind of derogatory re- mark about these "failures". Radwanski quotes a Goldfarb survey thus; "The drop-out in general does not think in abstract terms but in terms that are visible and measurable. He is confused and alienated by concepts that are overly intellectualized." Sounds to me like a good definition of someone with down-to-earth common sense. "Radwanski's suggestions include starting children in school at 3 (in other words, lengthening the sentence) and doing away with streaming because it penalizes working-class kids. "Now I know very well there are thousands of gifted high school teachers out there who are doing everything in the power to fan that spark of interest in their students. And often it's enough to encounter just one of those excellent teachers during your school years to open a student's eyes to life's possibilities. "But isn't it time we recognized that for lots of kids the spark is never lit, that there are limits to what we can expect our high schools to achieve? "To start with social engineering is a very dubious proposition. For most kids coming from homes where learning is not valued, it's game over by the time they start kindergarten For the few who want to break that mold, we should give every sort of indivi- dual attention. "Abolishing streaming would be nothing but a disaster because it would turn off the minority of students who really like school, the super-achievers Pretty soon, they'd all be in private schools. "For the rest, the real need is to get them reading and writing and then get them through high school as quickly and painlessly as possible and out into the world of jobs; ... for most of us the real interest in ideas and knowledge comes later, when the hectic teen years are behind us. And that's why we should cut back on teenage schooling and put even more effort into selling continuing education -- getting people back into school when they're good and ready.