Category: Education

How To Breathe

Education, Seen On Campus

I can only regard with incredulity this new adventure in education:

A renowned Canadian university has launched a bizarre ‘Adulting 101’ crash course for pampered students who can’t perform the most basic life tasks like changing a tire, buying groceries or doing laundry.

In an era dominated by digital innovation, Generation Z – or those born between 1997 and 2012 – are in desperate need of practical knowledge that older generations might otherwise consider ‘common sense’.

Adulting 101 is designed to teach basic life skills that Gen Z often struggles with, including cooking, budgeting, basic nutrition, laundry and even navigating a grocery store.  The course covers everything from maintaining healthy relationships, practicing fire safety in the kitchen and changing a tire.

For many, the course has been a saving grace – not only helping them personally, but also boosting their daily confidence in navigating the ins and outs of adulthood.

Well, I guess that once a university stoops to deliver courses in Remedial English because such basics somehow escaped the grade-, middle- and high school curriculum, why not the equivalent of 8th-grade Home Economics?

The difference is that “life skills” belong not in secondary school education, but squarely in the “parenting” remit, as the article suggests:

Jean Twenge, a researcher and psychology professor at San Diego State University, suggests that prolonged adolescence and ‘helicopter’ parenting have delayed development among Gen Z.

You don’t say.

For all the mud slung by “educators” at homeschoolers, I defy anyone to come up with examples of such helplessness among the homeschooled.  We started giving our kids an allowance as soon as they reached an age we deemed appropriate, said budget to cover their clothing, toiletries and entertainment.  We took them shopping all the time, whether for toiletries, groceries or clothing, but let them make their own decisions, staying well back as they navigated their way through the stores — although we did show them basic stuff like comparative pricing and value judgements.  Hell, I think the Son&Heir learned how to shop for produce from the age of five, because he always accompanied me on the weekly supermarket trip;  and when he bought his first car (at age 19, cash, from his own savings), I showed both him and Daughter the basics of car maintenance — checking the oil, the radiator, how to use a gas pump, and so on.  Their allowance, by the way, ended at age 17 and they all went out to work, at restaurants, movie houses, drugstores and so on, and they were solely responsible for managing their savings and expenditure.

I’m not holding us up as ideal parents, but FFS, any parent who doesn’t do this kind of thing is setting their kids up for failure.

But thank goodness for the universities, who will make up for parental neglect with a course that probably costs $2,500 per quarter.  That cost, by the way, should not be covered by public subsidy or student loans, but by the fucking parents.

Fat chance.

Handing Over The Future

Education

Last week I talked about a serious young teacher quitting her job because of A.I. and how said excrescence was affecting her students.

Here’s another take on the same topic, courtesy of Insty (thankee, Squire):

“We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

Perhaps? 

From a student:

“I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

As for the teachers:

“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate, both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

“How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?”

Well, yeah.  Perhaps [gasp!]  not all kids are college material.  And I think this A.I. cheating thing is proving the point.

And then, from the teechurs:

“Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis.

Of course, this whole situation is fixable — there’s always a solution to a problem of this nature — but don’t expect the current crop of teachers to figure it out.  Especially if it takes actual hard work and thought.

Small wonder their students are screwed up and hopeless.

Read the whole article.  It’s worth it.

Amen, Kid

Education

I can understand  an Olde Phartte  someone from my generation banging on about how the Yoof Of Today are hopeless wankers when it comes to education and being taught in the classroom.  (And yes, I use the word “wanker” in its most appropriate sense, as you will see later.)

But when a 26-year-old teacher gets all ranty on the above topic… well.

“These kids don’t know how to read,” she says flatly. “Because they’ve had things read to them, or they can just click a button and have something read out loud. Their attention spans are waning. Everything is high stimulation. They can scroll in less than a minute.”

And:

Teenagers who refuse to write even a paragraph, who throw tantrums when asked to handwrite an assignment, who beg to ‘just type it’ – not to save time or effort but to copy and paste answers from the internet or use AI to do the thinking for them.

She believes the behavior of her high schoolers is only part of the problem. What worries her is the sense that this generation, raised on screens, simply doesn’t care about anything whether it be learning, literacy or even the basics of society.

“They don’t care about making a difference in the world. They don’t care how to write a resume or a cover letter. They just have these devices in their hands that they think will get them through the rest of their life.

“They want to use [technology] for entertainment. They don’t want to use it for education.”

Hence my use of the term “wankers”:  self-pleasuring little wastrels.

Her solution?

“I think we need to cut off technology from these kids probably until they go to college,” she says. “Call me old-fashioned, but I just want you to look at the test scores. Look at the literacy rates. Look at the statistics. From when students didn’t use technology… to now.

“If you can’t read and you don’t care to read… you’re never going to have real opinions. You’ll never understand why laws and government matter. You’ll never know why you have the right to vote.”

By George… I think she’s got it.  And I repeat:  this isn’t some Olde Phartte like me;  she’s Gen Z, FFS.  And if someone in that group is starting to despair about the future generation…

She’s quitting teaching.  At age 26.

Somebody somewhere needs to give her a job — in a proper school, run as she describes it — because this is a lovely seed just waiting to grow.  She shouldn’t be wasted, because gawd knows there aren’t that many like her.

At Long Last, Choice

Education

Some excellent news for Texas parents:

On Wednesday, Texas finally passed a comprehensive school choice bill after years of trying and failing. The legislation could reshape the way the Lone Star State does education.

The state House vote followed a long day of deliberations that lasted well after midnight before passing.

The bill now goes to Gov. Jim Abbott’s desk for signing, and in case anyone has any reservations about his feelings on the topic:

“This is an extraordinary victory for the thousands of parents who have advocated for more choices when it comes to the education of their children,” Abbott said.

The Usual Suspects (i.e. Democrats) were against this bill, along with a couple of malcontent Republicans who (surprise surprise) were formerly public-school superintendents.

So instead of getting “free” education from state schools tied to their home address, Texans will be getting the chance to set up an education savings account (ESA) which can fund their kids’ education — and if their choice of school happens to be the home, that’s just fine.  Instead of funds going to schools, in other words, the money will be going to parents to spend on their kids’ education, at schools of their choice.  Some details:

The ESA proposal would establish dedicated accounts fueled by public funds that families could tap into to pay for education expenses. An ESA could fund private school tuition, support homeschooling costs or be used for other education-related expenses.

Families in private schools would receive roughly $10,000 per year per child. Children with disabilities would receive $11,500. Homeschooled students could receive $2,000, and homeschooled students with disabilities would be eligible for $2,500.

All in all, excellent news.  I just wish we’d had that option when our kids were of that age.  Instead, we paid taxes into a system that we never used, and had to fund our kids’ education out of our post-tax dollars.

This will go a long way to alleviate that problem.

Reform

Education

God-Emperor Trump’s Administration will, one hopes, cast a baleful eye upon that nest of Commie indoctrination known as the Department of Education, prior to shutting it down.

One hopes.

However, as these festering cockroach nests are almost impossible to eradicate completely (without the introduction of machine guns, anyway), there might be a way to cause wholesale resignations among the cockroaches themselves, by making their jobs impossible (for them).

Such as by implementing the following (drawn from any decent homeschooling curriculum):

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to fill in the last two blanks.

A Ban To Get Behind

Education, Good Stuff

Generally speaking, I tend to be somewhat of a libertarian when it comes to banning stuff, because it either doesn’t work or else has the opposite effect to the stated goal by creating a “forbidden fruit” cachet around the thing.

However, when it comes to banning the chilluns from using their cell phones at school, I’m all over the idea, and here’s one reason why:

One of the first UK schools to ban mobile phones has revealed their pupils are now more sociable and involved in activities than ever before.  12 years ago Burnage Academy for Boys, in Greater Manchester, banned phones — with associate assistant head teacher Greg Morrison now saying that ban’s made a “big impact” in the school.

Phones are not allowed among pupils at any point — including break times — until the end of the school day.

Last year it was named UK Secondary School of the Year at the 2024 TES Schools Awards in London, with judges praising it as an “inspiring and inclusive school where students thrive, love learning and achieve exceptionally well.”

Well well well, who could have predicted this outcome?

“Only anyone with a brain and common sense, Kim.”