I think the hyperbole is unhelpful. School can be a place of learning and discovery and joy (most of the time: nowhere is joyful 100% of the time). I admit most of our schools don't attain this.
Your answer doesn't leave any room for the improvement of school, merely to castigate the very idea of putting children together in classes.
At my school, kids are excited to show up Monday morning-- interesting things are happening in our classes. They come see me and play with robots and do real engineering. They get to see their friends and do sports and coursework that "feels real".
Sure, by the time Friday afternoon comes around, we're all done... but we'll be pretty excited to start it all again next week.
I think we just ran into each other just recently when I posted "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher", but some other guy started talking your ear off and I didn't feel like stepping in to offer my own opinions.
If you look at my response to another sub-commenter, you'll see a few of the things I'd like to add to school, some of which may appear more palatable to you than the abolition of the entire model.
Ultimately, I'm gratified that you're a good teacher, but regrettably not only are you one of the few, you also are kept far back from the actual effect you could be having on kids by confining your expertise to the schooling model. You sound more like a mentor that could clearly steer a high number of kids through life from early to late ages, and you could run events and study plans that go late into the night and through the summer. If you were unconstrained by the rules of the school and unbound by the need for a retirement savings account and health insurance, you could run your own always-open institute where you teach whatever you want to whoever is willing to come and listen. The results you'd see under such a model would wildly outstrip the ones you see in school.
My goal is to create a society filled with people like you--but that takes individuals who are parented well, and it can't be done under the factory schooling model, where the primary lesson learned is obedience to the institution.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that none of the activities you mentioned require school to exist for them to be performed. People visited, played sports and music, and investigated science well before every single child went to school. The difference then was that it didn't "feel real", it "was real". School only provides an age-segregated simulation of greater society, and the more time you spend in greater society the more inaccurate that simulation seems.
Regarding the hyperbole, I don't consider it to be hyperbole. Schools are constructed using the same techniques that prisons are constructed, the social cliques run similar to prisons, and in neither place are you allowed to leave or meaningfully challenge or change the rules of the institution. When you are in a school, you are not part of a thriving society, you are a subject that is managed according to the needs of the administration.
> Ultimately, I'm gratified that you're a good teacher, but regrettably not only are you one of the few, you also are kept far back from the actual effect you could be having on kids by confining your expertise to the schooling model.
I actually like the school I'm at quite a bit and would say that my peer faculty are doing much the same thing.
> Ultimately, I'm gratified that you're a good teacher, but regrettably not only are you one of the few, you also are kept far back from the actual effect you could be having on kids by confining your expertise to the schooling model. You sound more like a mentor that could clearly steer a high number of kids through life from early to late ages, and you could run events and study plans that go late into the night and through the summer.
Yup, I do those things too. Did them before taking a teaching job, actually.
> If you were unconstrained by the rules of the school and unbound by the need for a retirement savings account and health insurance, you could run your own always-open institute where you teach whatever you want to whoever is willing to come and listen.
I got rich in industry. This is not a concern.
I impact a few hundred kids a year by being a teacher in a structured school. The other programs, etc, are a much smaller number.
> When you are in a school, you are not part of a thriving society, you are a subject that is managed according to the needs of the administration.
You know, we need to know where students are and to keep them safe, and different subjects/teachers need to "share". So there is a certain amount of structure.
BTW, we changed some things this past year with schedule, academic load, and structure. Students had a lot of say.
I'm just also making a broader but somewhat smaller impact across many more. And the pool for the students who will best benefit from my time making a deeper connection and ending up in a more intensive program with me is much larger, improving the odds of "good matches".
There are some economies of scale and ancillary benefits, too. I can teach 15 competitive math kids about 40-50% of what I can teach two in the room in the same block of time.
(And some students benefit even more being 1-of-15, because e.g.
* think-pair-share is really, really powerful for recall and internalizing knowledge
* because an excited classroom of 15 often draws more effort out of students than one-on-one engagement
* because there are more "kinds of solutions" in the room and we can celebrate the remarkably varied approaches
Your answer doesn't leave any room for the improvement of school, merely to castigate the very idea of putting children together in classes.
At my school, kids are excited to show up Monday morning-- interesting things are happening in our classes. They come see me and play with robots and do real engineering. They get to see their friends and do sports and coursework that "feels real".
Sure, by the time Friday afternoon comes around, we're all done... but we'll be pretty excited to start it all again next week.