Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: blaming teachers Message-ID: <235@quintus.UUCP> Date: 4 Aug 88 04:46:33 GMT References: <12230@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <12260@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <233@quintus.UUCP> <1412@devsys.oakhill.UUCP> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 88 In article <1412@devsys.oakhill.UUCP> steve@oakhill.UUCP (steve) writes: >> Teachers have children for ~5 hours per week-day. >> A couple of days ago I read a book called "Miseducation" ( [ "Miseducation", by David Elkind ]) which >> quoted a study which reported in their sample that parents spent >> ~15 minutes per week-day talking to their children, ~30 minutes a day >> on week-ends. That gives the teachers about a ... 6-to-1 advantage. >First if this fact is true - it is sad (not that I'm really surprised). >But to claim that the teachers must take up where the parents fail is >renoucing the responsibilities of parenthood, is just plain shortsightness. *** I DID NOT CLAIM THAT! My claim was that if this figure is correct, then teachers _do_ have more influence on children's learning than parents. Nowhere in my posting will you find a claim that this is desirable! >By the way there is still a flaw in your statisics. >The 11-1 advantage disappears when divided over 20 (conservative) children >to 1-2 (with 30 children at 6-1 it goes to 1-5!!). Wrong. Or can children only listen one at a time in this country? I was concerned with the ratio (time the child is exposed to informative speech in home) --------------------------------------------------------- (time the child is exposed to informative speech in school) under the impression that this might be a (_very_ crude) measure of the importance of the two environments for acquiring formal knowledge. [To other potential misreaders: I do not claim that formal knowledge is the most important kind. Nor do I claim that this ratio is much more than suggestive.] >But to continue - No teacher (or school administrator) will ever tell you >that they can educated a child in a vacuum. The sad truth is that the ^^^^^^^ >ideals the child carries are largely based on the values the student gets >from his whole environment. A school system has a child only about >10,000* hours before graduation. The child is out of school much more (about >150,000** hours). (steve) includes the time the children are asleep and before they can talk in this. He also ignores kindergarten's and nursery schools. The thing to be compared is *actual* *information transfer time*. I would be much surprised if this amounted to as much as 1:1 (since we're talking about information transfer rather than acquisition of social skills, most of a child's conversation with age-mates can be discounted too). The topic I was considering was not ideals, but facts, such as arithmetic, reading, and geography, and while teachers don't claim to be able to teach those or any other subjects in a vacuum, they _do_ claim to be able to teach them in school. >Thus the only way to break this vicious cycle is to convince >the outside world to tell the student that education is important. Tell >the parents that even if you don't have an education it is important that >your child gets one. Also the community needs to support education better. >This means more support and better pay for teachers, less tolerence with >just passing, more resources and better equiptment. Having school boards >and administrators that work to improve education, and not just play politics. >Its also means more than 20% voter turnout for school referendums. This >stuff takes time and money, but I can't imagine that it won't pay off >in the end. And that whole paragraph assumes that education is something that happens in SCHOOLS and that the way to improve it is to improve the conditions in the SCHOOLS. If the home environment is so important and so bad, why not improve THAT? Let me offer an analogy. Old McDonald's Pie Factory are worried about the quality of their meat pies. Someone points out that the farmers are neglecting their cattle. So the answer is to build a bigger and shinier Pie Factory? That doesn't make sense. I agree that the community needs to support education better. But if, as someone recently claimed in this newsgroup, the problem is that children go home to homes with no books, and pick up the apathy about reading, and if that means that the methods schools are presently using to teach reading would work if only it weren't for those terrible terrible homes, why then, we don't _need_ to improve the schools, but we do need to have a library on every block, cheap high-quality comics, prestigious prizes for authors who write books children enjoy reading, children's drama groups, perhaps even a class of licenced baby-sitters who have been suitably indoctrinated in the importance of reading aloud to children, ... There are LOTS of things to try, that needn't involve schools at all. Why, we are constantly being told that there will be an increasing proportion of eldery and retired people in the community. Why not recruit "block librarians" from them? And so on. What, then, has been/can be/should be done to make "community involvement" more than a buzz-phrase for "more spending on schools"?