Today's Education

[Anguirus]

I'm a liberal-arts-college freshman, and so far I've actually had some great class discussions. (Especially fun was the "book of Job" discussion wth me, the atheist, and a mostly-Christian class.) However, many of my classmates are relatively unenthusiastic nd unmotivated, and they don't tend to score as well. But my professors are invariably energetic and interesting, always making an effort (successful or not) to engage the class.

I can't really draw any conclusions until I've taken some more advanced classes. For instance, I'm a bio major, and the only class I've taken so far is the First-Year Seminar Principles of Biology. For the most part, passing the quizzes and doing the research projects is rote learning so far, but as I advance in the field that's sure to change. What the professor does is every week we have a class discussion on something related to science. He's very good at drawing connections between, say, Darwin and Mendel, and looking at the history of science.

[Arrow]

I've noticed this in my own school. Actually knowing information isn't as important on most tests, essays, or busyworks as regurgitating information. Actually, trying to understand information is often seen by the typical student as a waste of time. If they can get an A by using some pointless formulaic approach, then that's what they're going to do.

My Trig professor figured that since the students don't care to understand the information, he shouldn't bother with anything more than making use memorize formulas. That came back in bit in my ass in my calc classes, because I didn't quite get the concepts. Two of my coworkers were in the same boat, too.

Then our Chief Scientist comes down one day an explains several mathematically (trig related) concepts that we all struggled on in school, and with in ten minutes, everything was crystal clear. If I'd had the ten minutes of instruction eight years ago, I would've had a lot less headaches.

[RedImperator]

Wau, Red. You just totally pwned me there. Convinced and Conceded. Thank you.

Sorry, I'm a little touchy about all this. I used to believe pretty much the same thing as you did, but actually being out there in the trenches changed a lot of what I thought. Lazy and inept teachers are part of the problem, but it's a much more complicated problem than that. I wish it was just a problem of bad teaching, because that would be comparatively easy to fix.

[Coyote]

The problem is lazy teachers. Teaching of critical thinking skills requires considerable effort and individualized teacher-student interaction. Rote memorization, on the other hand, is easy to teach. You simply give students the material and then give them a test to see if they memorized it.

I don't know about that, either. My friend Jim teaches high school and he complains about having to spend so much time teaching the kids to get ready for the next test that he doesn't have time to get into anything really useful.

He described it thus-- "Johnny performs at 20%, and Tommy performs at 60%. I have to get everyone to 70%, and if too many of my students don't make it, I am penalized. So I get Tommy to 70%, a ten percent improvement, and Johnny gets to 40% performance....doubling his ability.

"...but because Johny isn't at 70% performance, it's as if his work accounted for nothing, my teaching accounted to nothing, and this was all done to get the kids through the next standardized test hurdle. Now we have to get ready for the next test, and meanwhile, the kids don't truly get to learn, just record."

He says the resultant test scores are generally pretty damn good, but that's all the kids can do-- ready for a test, take test, pass test, no critical thinking skills. The result is what Litlith sees showing up in her classes: kids that are bright at taking tests, the scores say these kids are 'well educated', but they're just tape recorders and little more.

[Zero]

The problem, methinks, is the goal-based culture. Many of the kids I work with are already thinking about some future career while in high school. Everything between now and then is just a means to getting there. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge seems stupid to many of them. I find my own reasons for understanding things instead of memorizing them, but most people simply don't give a fuck.

It isn't just lazy teachers or anything like that. There are two people involved in the student-teacher relationship, and many more people who affect it, so I don't think you can completely pin it down to any one thing.

[Ubiquitous]

As a history student in my final year at university, it always depresses me how a student who just fires off various historians opinions in their essays repeat with masses of footnotes will always get a better grade than me: a person who performs to form his own unique opinions rather than take a professors view and agree with it.

It's the way our system works, and I think it stifles creative thought in the historical field.

[thejester]

I've got the same problem in my history class. Critical thinking and forming your own opinions is largely the goal of the subject, but most just don't get it - and I even though I understand, I'm scared shitless to take the step in an exam and risk falling flat on my face. The concept of histiography baffles most of them - and fair enough, they've never encountered it before. I think that's the problem - a lack of depth in the education system. I can't speak for the US system, but here in Australia the first and only time we're really competitivly marked against a large group is in Year 12, when it becomes do or die.

[Stark]

This doesn't surprise me. Almost all the student who ranked high in my senior year were just rote learning people: you could ask them about things right after exams, and they couldn't explain shit - even in subjects like physics and chem, where the concepts are so interrelated I got 74% on my first chem exam, without studying (I didn't know what elements had what valance). I just inferred everything I needed from the equations and reactions given.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

As a history student in my final year at university, it always depresses me how a student who just fires off various historians opinions in their essays repeat with masses of footnotes will always get a better grade than me: a person who performs to form his own unique opinions rather than take a professors view and agree with it.

It's the way our system works, and I think it stifles creative thought in the historical field.

This is a problem I have. I don't really have any room for critical thinking in my History and English courses. Every essay I write is so trite and pathetic because we are told that we cannot write on something that doesn't have some critic in agreement with it. For example, if I am critiquing a poe gothic story, I cannot make my own analysis, because the chances of someone else agreeing with a unique perspective are pretty slim. Anything I say that has "research" on it will be taken. I am just regurgitating what other authors have said. Same thing happens in history. They say they want you to be "creative", yet they only want the opinions of other historians to back you up, or you cannot use that critique as a point in your thesis.

[Ubiquitous]

Same thing happens in history. They say they want you to be "creative", yet they only want the opinions of other historians to back you up, or you cannot use that critique as a point in your thesis.

Yes! That's exactly what I feel. I couldn't care less what other historians think when I am forming my own opinions. But for this independence I am penalised. Wtf?!

[Superboy]

The problem was very evident in my senior year high school math class.

The vast majority of students would learn all the equations the teacher showed us and use them when needed to get the right answers, but they had no idea why the equations gave them they answers they did. They would just take the numbers given and plug them into the equations they memorised and write down the answers. Most of the students got great grades on all the tests by doing this because the teacher would give questions that were perfectly tailored to the equations. He made it incredibly obvious which numbers you needed and where to put them in each equation to get the right answer.

At the end of the year we were given a provincial exam, an exam that the teacher did not write and had no control over. All year the teacher would constantly warn us that the exam was impossibly hard and only 5% of students pass it, so we need to get good marks now so we can pass the course regardless of how badly we did on the provincial.

Along came the exam, and no suprise, only 5% of the class passed. All the questions on the exam were worded and written differently than what the students were used to, and since they didn't understand why any of the equations worked they had no idea how to work out the problems.

[J]

For my university program, all applicants were required to submit a lengthy written essay in addition to the usual SAT scores and class grades. We were given a small choice of topics and had to write an essay to express & support our viewpoints on the subject. I later learned the admissions personnel weighted the essay quite heavily when evaluating prospective students.

Even then, we still had people who had trouble thinking on their own, and though the proportion did decline with each passing semester they never quite disappeared even in my final term.

As some of you know, I was born in Canada and most of my education up to grade 12 was also in my native country, but a US Ivy League university made me an offer I couldn't refuse so that's where I went for my post-secondary education. It was a huge change, though for me it was pretty easy to adjust to since I'd already been rebelling for years against our usual rote-learning system.

In high school we were supposed to "research" and "analyze" certain subjects in history, law, and English, but as you can guess it almost always has to come down to one or two set opinions at the end if you wanted a decent mark on your paper. I hated that and it really pissed me off, but I could actually do something about it since my writing skills at the time were well advanced of everyone else, and I could often put my own opinions (which the school frowned on) down on black & white and still end up with an A. Led to a few interesting teacher-parent interviews too.

So university for me was just more of the same, except we were expected to do critical thinking and the writing abilities of others started catching up to my own. It was wonderful, hard & challenging, but I was never bored or upset with the teachers.

[BloodAngel]

So far in my tenure as a college student, I've only encountered two professors who completely discouraged out-of-the-box thinking: my intro to C++ professor and my first writing course professor.

The CS prof was the most hardline of the two; he would say that there is only one way to write a correct bit of code, and that was the only correct way of doing things. Every other way would be WRONG WRONG WRONG. For example, a menu; you have the choice of a while or do while loop. The professor suggests a do while loop. I use a while loop. WRONG! The while loop did work, but YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO USE THE DAMN DO WHILE LOOP! Yeah...that was annoying. Very. Glad I'm a ME, not a CS major.

[Arrow]

The CS prof was the most hardline of the two; he would say that there is only one way to write a correct bit of code, and that was the only correct way of doing things. Every other way would be WRONG WRONG WRONG. For example, a menu; you have the choice of a while or do while loop. The professor suggests a do while loop. I use a while loop. WRONG! The while loop did work, but YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO USE THE DAMN DO WHILE LOOP! Yeah...that was annoying. Very. Glad I'm a ME, not a CS major.

You're CS prof is a fucking idiot and needs to be shot. He and people like him are responsible for every piece of shit programmer (and their shitty programs) in existance. What an asshole. Actually its just more proof for the saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." (no offense to the teachers in this board).

[Darth Wong]

But of course, it all those damn lazy teachers' fault. It's not the disintegration of the family structure, it's not growing intellectual laziness and anti-intellectualism throughout the culture, it's not the replacement of reading and unstructured play with television and video games, it's not an outdated pedagogy, it's not the cult of standardized testing, it's not misspent or nonexistant resources, it's not politicians or administrators or parents or the students themselves. Just those damn teachers.

Hyper-defensive behaviour is not going to change anything. The same fucking problem occurs in even the most cushy, comfortable, high-income neighbourhoods with activist parents who work their asses off to help out at the goddamned schools.

I understand that all of the problems you cite are real, and crippling. But you can't apply the particular problems of a ghetto school as explanations across the board, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing some of the same problems in rich neighbourhoods. They'd all be the fault of these damned apathetic parents who don't give a shit or are on drugs, so things would be hunky-dory in neighbourhoods where teachers can regularly rely on parent volunteers in the goddamned classroom every day. Hell, my son's school is one of those schools, and guess what: it's only the older teachers who really put in the effort; the younger ones just load the kids down with drills and homework; in some cases they don't even instruct the kids themselves; they let parent volunteers do it.

I'd agree that there are other problems with the education system, but you can't absolve teachers of blame for preferring rote memorization techniques when they're so goddamned easy to teach and even in situations where they aren't required to use them, they still do. I've seen the contrast between the methods of older teachers and younger teachers myself.

I am actually growing more and more convinced all the time that education systems fail most primarily at the earliest levels. If someone makes it all the way to high school without developing any critical thinking skills, it's too late.

[Uraniun235]

I am actually growing more and more convinced all the time that education systems fail most primarily at the earliest levels. If someone makes it all the way to high school without developing any critical thinking skills, it's too late.

I concur completely with you. If I remember right, over a third of last year's freshman class at Forest Grove High School (Oregon) tested at a third to fourth grade reading level. That's pathetic. Not only is it pathetic, it's indicative of some pretty fucking severe failures in the elementary and middle school areas.

What's worse is that when these schools pass on their failures to the higher grades, they're robbing the middle and high schools of resources that, instead of going to provide a challenging and diverse high school curricuulum, are going to teachers reading "The True Story of the Big Bad Wolf" out loud to students. There are no technology courses at the high school because whenever an elective teacher leaves or retires, they're replaced by a math/english teacher because the high school is desperate to raise test scores.

[Surlethe]

If I remember right, over a third of last year's freshman class at Forest Grove High School (Oregon) tested at a third to fourth grade reading level. That's pathetic. Not only is it pathetic, it's indicative of some pretty fucking severe failures in the elementary and middle school areas.

Why the fuck did those kids fucking pass?! Third to fourth grade reading level in high school? That's beyond pathetic; that's fucking well contemptibly deplorable!

[Falkenhayn]

My best teachers in high school were three, three, five, and two years away from retiring respectively. My mother fucking flat out refused to have my little brother take any teacher who had not passed muster between me and her as being of quality. She was the terror of every guidance councilor and could make administrators wear the ball gag whenever she came knocking. She's also taught kindergarten in a dead end school district for 27 years.

The only exception to the old teachers rule was a thirty five year old english teacher who had been an advertising executive in Poland making huge amounts of money pushing cigarettes. He woke up one day and decided he'd had enough of convincing people to kill themselves and went into public school.

[Gil Hamilton]

The upper class come with their own problems with education than the poor, but they are there. I've seen it to great degree with the Fox Chapel Brats (Fox Chapel being an amazingly affluent suburb of Pittsburgh).

-For one thing, they are highly used to getting their own way, even from teachers, who they know won't dare fail them due to the fact that the school administration doesn't let anyone fail when their parents could make a stink and stop making donations. Worse, their parents basically given them everything they want; "no" isn't something they hear very often. The effect is they coast through life till they are adults and they never learn to really think, except the best way to exploit the system and to cheat. I see it constantly, they are practically brainless critically and intellectually, but have great experience in manipulation. However, they end up easily getting into the college their fathers are alumni to.

-Drug use is no less common with them, in fact, it's probably worse cause they tend to get access to more stuff than poor kids. However, it highlights this subset of teenagers brainlessness; back when I was sixteen one asked me if I knew anyone who could sell him cocaine (assuming because I was going to a public school, it was easy to procure good cocaine, appearantly - don't ask me). I made 30 bucks selling him a baggy of confectioners sugar, which I dearly hope he snorted...

-Girls, in particular, are practically expected to have their goal in life to marry a suitably rich husband. You'd be suprised about the emphasis on this. Education, however, it not necessary to this. They go from their father's house, to the sorority house, to their husband's house.

[Dark Hellion]

At the same time that High Schools fail at delivering Critical Thinking skills, this failure also can lead to freshman classes in college being very rudimentry in the skills needed, sometimes the skills actually being completely unneeded. After years of dealing with students with bad CT skills, the proffessors develop a mindset that only allows certain views of "the Truth" and anyone who doens't use those views recieves poor grades, even if the essay is well thought out. Many of the students, so used to getting A+s because they were the only student who used CT skills in high school, are discoraged by a C- on their first essay/exam and switch back to parroting the Prof. I have seen this happen in my first year English class, a class that was actually advertised as impoving CT skills, and half of my class probably backslid on the skill they had developed. The professor was so stuck in his ways, and so entrenched on what was the only correctly allowed interpretation of text that anything outside his viewpoint was wrong, but, since he couldn't fail you if you wrote an essay that was logically sound, he would simply give you C's. More than a few girls in the class admitted the next term, that throughout the whole class, they never once really thought and simply repeated his points back with pretty language.
And according to some I have heard, this is not unusual, instead of promoting CT skills, many first year profs are actually destroying them with lax and lazy class proceedure, and bullshit tenured "I don't have to listen to others" attitudes.

[Darth Wong]

That's the problem with liberal-arts in general; if you get a really good prof you're OK, but otherwise it's just "tell him what he wants to hear and learn nothing" for a whole semester.

[Civil War Man]

Sometimes it's not always the schools. Obviously it's not the only deciding factor by far, but there is a distinct trend that firstborn children are less likely to be critical thinkers than younger siblings. The rationale behind it was that parents are more likely to baby the older sibling for various reasons. Sometimes it's because they can focus their attention on the firstborn, but younger siblings have to compete for attention from the start. Sometimes it's because the parents are new with their firstborns, and so they focus on the firstborn because they want to "get it right."

For example, one study which involved parents and their children completing a puzzle found that parents were much more likely to interfere with their children's task (as in coach them on where to put the pieces) when the child was the oldest sibling.

Whatever the reasons behind the trend, I just thought I'd throw it out there as one of the many possible causes. I made a post about this a while back here.

As for me, I like to think I have critical thinking skills. They probably aren't as good as they could be, but it probably helps that I have a couple of screws loose. Being weird helps come up with, shall we say, creative solutions to many problems.

[Darth Wong]

Sometimes it's not always the schools. Obviously it's not the only deciding factor by far, but there is a distinct trend that firstborn children are less likely to be critical thinkers than younger siblings. The rationale behind it was that parents are more likely to baby the older sibling for various reasons. Sometimes it's because they can focus their attention on the firstborn, but younger siblings have to compete for attention from the start. Sometimes it's because the parents are new with their firstborns, and so they focus on the firstborn because they want to "get it right."

For example, one study which involved parents and their children completing a puzzle found that parents were much more likely to interfere with their children's task (as in coach them on where to put the pieces) when the child was the oldest sibling.

Whatever the reasons behind the trend, I just thought I'd throw it out there as one of the many possible causes. I made a post about this a while back here.

As for me, I like to think I have critical thinking skills. They probably aren't as good as they could be, but it probably helps that I have a couple of screws loose. Being weird helps come up with, shall we say, creative solutions to many problems.

That study only showed that firstborns tend to be skeptics who tend to oppose new ideas. I don't see what that has to do with inferior critical thinking skills; if anything, people with weak critical thinking skills are more likely to accept every new idea that comes along, not less.

[Uraniun235]

Why the fuck did those kids fucking pass?! Third to fourth grade reading level in high school? That's beyond pathetic; that's fucking well contemptibly deplorable!

My guess is one of two possibilities...

It's possible the teachers/administrators were afraid of failing a whole bunch of them and looking bad, as well as having to deal with them for another year.

Or, the courses may have been designed or implemented so badly that it would take a completely spastic kid with no attention span whatsoever, or a mentally handicapped person, to actually fail the course.

[Darth Wong]

I once asked a local teacher about the absurdly high marks being given out to students in recent years and he explained to me that they feel "the curriculum should be designed so that every student can graduate". In other words, they made it so fucking easy that it's almost impossible to fail.

We need to re-introduce the word "flunk" to our school system.