There’s a saying (wish I could remember the originator) that our schools are doing a wonderful job of preparing the farm kids of 1890 for the factory jobs of 1910.
Just as the medium is the message, the process is the product. Schools teach obedience, loyalty, and productivity, not English, math, and science.
Grade levels and grades with a ~185 day school year make an employee molder and filter, not an education. Every child learns at a different pace, changing pace depending upon circumstances, but that’s not how we do it.
How we change from a productivity/obedience based system to a mastery based system is beyond me.
This really resonated. What stands out is that age-based grade levels didn’t just fail over time - they failed almost immediately, because children’s development was never uniform enough to support them. The way I see it, wide variation by age is a natural feature of human development, yet when learning is organised around narrow age expectations, difference becomes a problem of the child rather than the structure. Through my experience with child development as a therapist, and now being part of home education communities, I keep seeing this same mismatch.
Interesting. I had not known that the failure was so universal. It is my observation that the more capable children are far more likely to be partial to full autodidacts and capable of moving significantly faster than the traditional class schedule. When my youngest daughter went to Middle School they started repeating the math that she had already mastered - so I had her jumped to the advanced/honors 7th grade math class. I am a Physcist / Ph.D. Engineer - so I supplemented my kids math instruction when I thought it wrongheaded. In 7th grade she had to go the the High School for math in the first period - along with a number of 8th graders. She was bored by her classes in 7th grade so we switched a number of them to on-line - andshe went lickety split through them. I had her do Geometry by correspondence over the summer after 7th grade. She skipped 8th grade and did pre-calculus by correspondence over the summer after 9th grade. She did calculus in 10th grade and dropped out after 10th grade to do early admission to the university and do her engineering degree.
We seriously limited screens - all of my kids were reading at high school level or above by the time they left elementary school. If you can't watch screens and you get an additional half hour before lights out if you are reading in bed, there is a higher liklihood of reading.
I read with a flashlight when I supposed to be going to sleep 60+ years ago. So did my father. I have no doubt that my grandfather would have done so as well - but they didn't have flashlights at the time. My son had a kindle which would glow gently, allowing him to read. Once kids start reading for pleasure, their reading levels climb rapidly. And once they start reading they start learning all types of miscellaneous information.
There’s a saying (wish I could remember the originator) that our schools are doing a wonderful job of preparing the farm kids of 1890 for the factory jobs of 1910.
Just as the medium is the message, the process is the product. Schools teach obedience, loyalty, and productivity, not English, math, and science.
Grade levels and grades with a ~185 day school year make an employee molder and filter, not an education. Every child learns at a different pace, changing pace depending upon circumstances, but that’s not how we do it.
How we change from a productivity/obedience based system to a mastery based system is beyond me.
This really resonated. What stands out is that age-based grade levels didn’t just fail over time - they failed almost immediately, because children’s development was never uniform enough to support them. The way I see it, wide variation by age is a natural feature of human development, yet when learning is organised around narrow age expectations, difference becomes a problem of the child rather than the structure. Through my experience with child development as a therapist, and now being part of home education communities, I keep seeing this same mismatch.
Interesting. I had not known that the failure was so universal. It is my observation that the more capable children are far more likely to be partial to full autodidacts and capable of moving significantly faster than the traditional class schedule. When my youngest daughter went to Middle School they started repeating the math that she had already mastered - so I had her jumped to the advanced/honors 7th grade math class. I am a Physcist / Ph.D. Engineer - so I supplemented my kids math instruction when I thought it wrongheaded. In 7th grade she had to go the the High School for math in the first period - along with a number of 8th graders. She was bored by her classes in 7th grade so we switched a number of them to on-line - andshe went lickety split through them. I had her do Geometry by correspondence over the summer after 7th grade. She skipped 8th grade and did pre-calculus by correspondence over the summer after 9th grade. She did calculus in 10th grade and dropped out after 10th grade to do early admission to the university and do her engineering degree.
We seriously limited screens - all of my kids were reading at high school level or above by the time they left elementary school. If you can't watch screens and you get an additional half hour before lights out if you are reading in bed, there is a higher liklihood of reading.
I read with a flashlight when I supposed to be going to sleep 60+ years ago. So did my father. I have no doubt that my grandfather would have done so as well - but they didn't have flashlights at the time. My son had a kindle which would glow gently, allowing him to read. Once kids start reading for pleasure, their reading levels climb rapidly. And once they start reading they start learning all types of miscellaneous information.