Jupiter
I haven't heard of Critical Thinking Education, sounds like a good thing to teach kids though. Is it critical theory?
What Critical Thinking is supposed to be: how to gather and use reliable information (including checking sources and all that jazz), and how to problem solve.
What Critical Thinking has become in classrooms: any open-ended question that can be addressed in more than one way, but only a few answers will be acceptable.
(be noted: some teachers actually do it right, but that's because of the teacher, not the system. They actually have to find outside materials, and many will use materials from when they were a student, instead of relying on current textbooks and workbooks.)
GemmaMarie
Personally- I think these things should be address & discussed in the classroom AND at home. Education doesn't stop when you leave the classroom. Critical thinking, sex education, health education, etc these ALL need to be taught in the schools & at home. Quite honestly I think part of America's part is that is stresses so much on the SCHOOL portion of education & not enough on parents taking the time to reinforce everything their children are learning. You don't have to sit down in a classroom to be learning, but we've created this image of "education" happening in a classroom that I don't think parents are taking the time to do any educating themselves. So you see sort of a snowball effect, of schools having to cover topics they didn't used to, & it just gradually gets worse
That's just my opinion, I work with a lot of younger children & parents and I see it SO much.
I agree with this, completely. I attempted to become a high school math teacher, and one of the things all the professors who had been teachers before said was that it couldn't stop at home, and that as teachers we would have to encourage not only our students to learn, but the parents to be our partners in learning and teaching.
SweeptheLeg
It feels like for the most part the parents that want these classes banned in school are the same parents that are too embarrassed or repressed themselves to be around any type of discussion with their children.
This is usually the case. unfortunately, they're also backed by the parents who do teach it, but want it taught their way due to religious or ideological reasons. The trouble is to get the good parents to realize that the parents who don't want it talked about at all actually exist, so that they'll support the optional method.
JickyJuly
If kids can't come out of 13 years of schooling with the skills necessary to run a cash register in a retail situation
One more thing for schools to teach? This one is supposed to be tackled by summer jobs in junior and senior year of high school. Unfortunately, managers these days think that a person just entering the field is supposed to magically have 3-5 years of experience...
My fetus is getting home schooled unless some major changes happen over the next few years.
Honestly, I wish there were a middle ground option... but since there isn't, I feel that might be the best possible course you could take.
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Pause in reading to pontificate:
I wish school would go something like this.
-Morning classes would be reading, writing, math, and science. (rotating schedule would probably be best for these)
-Afternoon classes would be languages, followed by the optional classes. If the parents opt their children out of the classes, they still have to take the text-book home, and the kids have to pass a basic knowledge test at the end of the year (basic knowledge being "how do you get an std?" "how does pregnancy happen?" "when a girl says 'no' or 'stop', what should you do?" "what is the penalty for rape?" "what is sexual harassment?" "what is non-sexual harassment?")
-in high school, one quarter or semester of classes is replaced by a job at half-pay. The job should be rotated, so that each student experiences waitressing, fast food, retail, and delivery driving.
(well, maybe change the order, so retail would be first, since I consider that the easiest, then fast food, then waitressing, then delivery driving.)
okay, back to reading the responses
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LeenaLiberty
I'm glad you're here to give your feedback as well!
Hey Luna, I am glad you took an act of interest regarding the text posted. It is quite dense but worth the read, right?.
Anything on education is worth a read. Still haven't finished it, that will take me a month or two... x.x Last night I got to the point I quoted, posted this, then read far enough into the introduction to realize I'd made a terrible mistake in what I thought the "Death Education" was all about.
I for one, will be homeschooling my children.
I was homeschooled for a year... it was 10th grade and despite the warning my parents received that it would likely take me two years to finish 10th grade under homeschooling, they decided that if I didn't finish it in one year they'd send me to boarding school...
I highly suggest the Seton Method if you don't have a problem with a slightly Catholic bias. I'm not sure, but you might be able to opt out of the classes that are strictly about the catholic tradition. They teach evolution mixed with intelligent design- basically saying that God guided the evolutionary process. Catholics are all about "treat everyone with love and respect," as well as "these things are wrong, these things are wrong but not as wrong as those things, and don't judge someone to be a bad person just because they do some wrong things"
I will assume the responsibility of teaching my child-especially when it comes to value based curriculum. I have absolutely no faith in the public education system whether it is primary, secondary or post-secondary education-and I don’t want my child indoctrinated by a system in which I do not trust to teach the values or knowledge I desire my children to have.
Can't blame you there! I couldn't become a teacher, and part of it was my desire to fight the system I was supposed to be working for!
however, the majority of them complain frequently about the liberty they have in teaching these days
So true!
Education is primarily the responsibility of parents. Parental control of education is the best way to ensure that children will receive an education tailored to their unique skills and abilities -- after all, every child is different, thus one-size-fits-all federal programs must be resisted.
While I believe this whole-heartedly... I also believe that there are times when a parent has no clue what their child's abilities actually are! I worked at a school where there was a girl in honor's pre-calculus who barely passed Algebra II with a C! How did she get in? Because her mother was convinced her daughter was a genius. Oi!
College is also becoming one the biggest jokes these days.
I wouldn't know. I was lucky enough to have rich adoptive parents who were willing to put me through a private college. Sure, I ended up with $16K in student loan debt (which has since grown to like, 20K) but I also graduated from a school I can be proud of! (or could be, I've heard that it's started going downhill like all the others, ever since the new president was brought in my senior year.)
The pressure to publish deters quality education for students since the professors are focused more on making money for the institution via research grants and so forth.
Which is the biggest reason why, when teaching high school didn't work out, I didn't even consider trying to teach college.
I found it rather shocking that a course on Banking at a major university doesn’t even cover topics like the Federal Reserve.
o.o
Gee, I would think that being a lawyer, you might need to know something about the Constitution, “well it is becoming archaic and unnecessary these days” he added. I was dumbfounded.
O.O
Children are taught to take tests. We lower the standards each year, to help children pass state mandated tests. Children are taught to be obedient little servants and workers. And if you have children who are “not so obedient” they get labeled with a disorder of some sort
yup... sad really. If you ever saw the foamy the squirrel videos on Newgrounds... there's one character in there who's constantly popping pills and you can't understand a word he says cause he's so hyper... except one point he forgets to take his pills and you could actually understand him and he wasn't all spacey or anything. That was the artist's way of commenting on our culture.
Behaviorist, theoretically view humans as simple machines and have a pretty scary disregard for the concept of free-will. Also, since grade school we are conditioned primarily by grades and achievement (remember getting a gold star, when you did something good or passed your spelling quiz?) Students then become motivated by grades, test scores, NOT by learning.
Interesting to note that this was actually touched on a LOT by my classes. In the one school, most of the classes were full of primary educators, and we were encouraged to use behavoiral theory. In the other school, all the classes were middle and secondary educators, and we were warned that most of the kids we'll be teaching will need to be re-taught how to love learning for it's own sake because of all that shit in the primary.
It does a fabulous job of breaking down our preconceived notions of what education is, what we have been taught about it, and what the purpose of it is as well
Sounds like a good read
Is this really the government’s job?
Read the other posts here. When it comes to how to protect a sexually active teenager, how many of the people here said that their parents taught them this as a kid? I counted one from the US. And five who said they had to learn it from the schools...
While I agree that what MORAL behavior is SHOULD be taught by parents, it *isn't* being taught by parents. This is the problem. You have kids being born to parents who don't take no for an answer- even in their sex life. You have kids being born to parents who don't believe that you shouldn't steal, shouldn't lie, and should respect the limits of other people. They have to be taught those things somewhere. While I don't like putting that in the hands of the school district, some of these kids aren't going to learn it anywhere else.
I personally think that ethics should be an optional course- that if the parents are willing to swear that they are teaching it to the kids, they should be allowed to teach it, but if the parent can't even answer a few questions properly (like, "if a woman says no to her husband, can he still have sex with her, or is that rape?"- it's rape btw) then the child MUST be taught to respect the boundaries of others.
Most schools don’t teach courses in Critical Thinking, because the system is designed to have a class of very uninformed individuals, incapable of thinking for themselves-thus perpetuation the machine – work and consume, work and consume, don’t question “authority”, don't question the system and accept the status quo
I do not remember who the original quote came from, but it goes: 'School is 12 years because that's how long it takes to break someone's spirit'
Also “requiring certain classes” falls into the category of compulsory education.
The only required courses I think should be there are reading, writing, figuring, language and manners.
