Category: Education

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.”

Maybe A Good Reason

Education

This piece from the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs makes a few interesting points:

Teens’ homework time fell significantly in the pandemic era, writes Jean M. Twenge on Generation Tech. new data from 2022 and 2023 shows the average time spent on homework fell 24 percent for 10th-graders — from an hour to about 45 minutes — and 17 percent for eighth-graders.

Furthermore, the percentage of students saying they do no homework “spiked,” she writes. In 2021, 6 percent of high school sophomores did no homework. That’s up to 10.3 percent. Eleven percent of eighth-graders said they did no work at home in 2021. Now it’s 15.2 percent.

As a longtime homeschooler, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of homework in the educational process anyway, unless it’s reading prep for the next day’s class, or revision for a test.  But here’s an interesting observation:

Twenge thinks “students have given up on doing hours of homework, and teachers have given up on holding students to high standards.”  Everybody’s “phoning it in.”

But here’s the really salient point:

The 15 percenters who are working for their A’s have a right to complain about stress. They’re doing homework and extracurriculars and community service to impress some jaded college admissions officer. But they’re not the norm.

Perhaps “the norm” as a group has decided that all that prep for college admission is a waste of time because they have no desire to attend college, get into serious debt and have no guarantee of a job once they graduate?  Just a thought.

Then:

The homework research aligns with a slide in 18-year-olds’ work ethic: As they leave high school, they are less likely to say they plan to work overtime or make their jobs a priority. In a sense, they’re “quiet quitting” before they even enter the workforce. Teens are less likely to work after school and in the summer, missing out on lessons about how to meet workplace expectations and manage their time and money.

Hmm.  Of course, at some point reality is going to kick in and they’ll either acquire that work ethic or, more likely, become life dropouts.

Or they’ll get a clue and start doing “muscular work”, as Mike Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson put it, and start trade apprenticeships — for which, it needs hardly be said, most of that shit they learned at school, never mind college, is unnecessary and there’s the added benefit of being paid to work instead of paying for a dubious benefit (e.g. college).

The motivated ones, as always, won’t have a problem:  engineering, medicine and the like will always be attractive to a core group.

My guess is that Gen Z is looking at what we now call “education” and realizing that it’s all a waste of time.  (I’m not even going to analyze the real bullshit like Gender Studies and similar fluff courses.)

Here’s the thing.  As we all know, education occurs only under two conditions:  fear and love.

  • Fear:  if I don’t learn this, bad things will happen to me, and
  • Love:  this topic really appeals to me and I want to pursue it.

We don’t have to worry about the “love” part:  as I said above, there’ll always be a market for that — whether academic or practical.

What’s going to be really interesting is how Gen Z responds to fear.

Out Of Control

Education, Entertainment

Why did I never have school trips like this one?

Head teacher struck off for school ski trip to Switzerland where one girl pupil slept with three boys, another had sex with a boy for £30

…and unbelievably, it gets even better from there.

Sheeesh… and all the school trips I ever experienced were to museums and other such boring nonsense.

As to how all this happened, this sentence may provide a clue:

A Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) misconduct panel heard Mrs Drury was principal of the CP Riverside school in Nottingham, a school which provides alternative education for children aged 13-18 with behavior or social issues.

Wow… who could have predicted this outcome?  (“Only about 99% of all sentient adults, Kim.”)

Well, I guess that all falls under the umbrella of “alternative education” now, dunnit?