Maybe A Good Reason

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

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?

Fine By Us

This is interesting:

A radical activist who believes black students should only be taught by same-race teachers has received $20million from billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Sharif El-Mekki has lobbied for a focus on anti-racism education in public schools through his prominent nonprofit and time as an adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, as reported by The Free Press.

A former middle and high school teacher, El-Mekki lobbies through his nonprofit, the Center for Black Educator Development, CBED, which describes its mission as a ‘world where… all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers’ and where ‘all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets.’

CBED has over $19.5 million in assets thanks to donations from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And Brother Sharif looks like about what you suspect he would:

Yeah, by all means pull Black kids out of these “White” public schools and put them into all-Black institutions.

Then watch as public schools’ test scores improve and crime goes down.  What will happen in the Black schools is as predictable as the sunrise, just a lot more depressing, and will need still more support from White liberal assholes (without any improvement to show for it, of course).

Somewhere out there, Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave at 12,000rpm, while all those old Afrikaner apartheid supporters are howling with laughter.

Separate but equal, indeed. It’ll work about as well as all other initiatives that have come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose sponsorship of OBED allows ol’ Sharif to pull an annual salary of nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

Race hustling has always been a way for Black “leaders” like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to earn the big bucks, but it’s almost as good for the lesser lights, like the above.  For their followers… not so much.

Let African-Americans sink.

Excuses, Excuses

A teacher talks about bizarre excuses for tardiness. Some classics include:

“The ceiling in the boys toilets collapsed due to the weight of the vapes hidden inside the ceiling tiles so they had to go to a different toilet”, and “their grandmother was meant to drop them off but went to the wrong school”, not to mention “the wait for Greggs sausage rolls made them late for school.”

Back when I were a whining schoolboy, I think in about 1970, I once made up an excuse for not having done my Math homework.  If I say so myself, it was a brilliant excuse (sadly, I cannot recall it, only that it was excellent and could have brought many to tears).

Unfortunately, the teacher was not some rookie, but an elderly man who had been teaching at St. John’s College since 1932, and was not to be fooled.  He smiled, and remarked:

“Do you know, I haven’t heard that excuse since the early 1950s.”

Howls of laughter from all the other guys in the class, and Red-Faced Kim had to acknowledge his defeat.  However, Mr. Jefferies (“Judge” was his nickname) showed some empathy by not punishing me, because of my creativity.

I always did my Math homework after that.

Yeah Well, Duh

No prizes for guessing my vote on this one:

Lessons are tightly scripted to the clock to squeeze in as much learning as possible. Teachers, rather than students, move through the shiny, clean hallways from classroom to classroom during the day because it takes less time and creates less commotion. Kids change rooms for classes like physical education.

Culture-building begins immediately at the start of each year. In the first three days of school, called “culture camp,” students learn the rules of behavior, such as keeping their eyes on the teacher and a pencil at the ready, and why those rules are key to meeting the high academic standards. Then they practice these skills, like how to show respect to teachers and peers, before they open a textbook.

Of course, the Left (i.e. the Education Establishment) are going to indulge in a frenzy of pearl-clutching and fiery hair at this kind of approach, but it’s clear that their little (?) experiment on turning public schools into a Lord Of The Flies environment has failed utterly.

And of course, the very idea of returning to basic principles is contrary to “progressive” dogma, so “Doubleplusungoodness!” will be the response.

Yeah, well fuck you.  You tried, it failed (like so much of Socialism), and kids deserve better, much better than the drivel you’ve been pushing on them.

The alternative is homeschooling — a total withdrawal from the public education system.

Once again, having homeschooled all three of my own kids into respectable and responsible adulthood, there will be no prizes for guessing my preference.

Oh, The Hardship

Must our children suffer any more?  Yes, according to the headmaster of this school in Britishland:

A [school principal] has insisted that a 12-hour school day will give pupils ‘buckets full of endorphins’ – as the 7am to 7pm scheme comes into effect today.

Children at All Saints Catholic College in the affluent neighbourhood of Notting Hill, west London, will partake in a whole host of activities instead of spending the time at home on their devices when classes finish at 3.15pm.

This includes homework time and activity clubs from dodgeball, basketball, art, drama and cookery classes in a bid to break the cycle of smartphone ‘addiction’.

The controversial decision to introduce a 12-hour school day comes after the principal found ‘shocking’ things on confiscated mobile phones, including pupils blackmailing strangers and catfishing one another.

[He said:] ‘It’s pretty clear across the sector this is a real issue in terms of the vacuum that phones fill for children when they go home. There’s a crisis in attendance and if we look at the last 10 years or so there’s a depletion in services that are available to children after school. He said the school will ensure homework is done within that time, while also making sure that children take part in activities so they go home ‘with a bucket full of endorphins’.

Not to mention that the little shits should be too exhausted to get up to mischief.

Not that this is anything new, of course.  Allow me to present a typical day in the life of a schoolboy at my old school, St. John’s College, back in the day:

6.40am:  Rising bell
7.02am:  Roll call
7.10am:  Breakfast
7.35am:  School prep (make beds, get books together for class, etc.)
8.00am:  Morning Chapel
8.25am:  Classes begin
1.25pm:  Lunch
2.10pm:  Reading and study (classrooms or dorm rooms)
2.50pm:  Sports (compulsory; cricket, swimming, athletics, tennis, squash in summer;  rugby or field hockey in winter)
4.15pm:  Roll call
4.20pm:  Free time, unless taken up by extra duties: sports, choir practice, punishment (detention, hard labor etc.)
Day scholars could leave for home after roll call or after extra duties.  For boarders:
6.30pm:  Dinner
7.10pm:  First Prep (homework), in classrooms, with a 10-minute break at 8pm
8.10pm:  Second Prep, until 9.15pm
Lights out:  9.45pm

If the daytime classroom hours seem to be less than in U.S. schools, remember the two hours’ prep each night, and allow me also to point out that Saturday mornings were the same as weekday mornings, and pupils were only free after lunch — “free”, that is, unless the school sports teams were engaged in matches against other area schools, and attendance was compulsory (roll call again!) at First Team matches.

Boarders stayed in school on Saturday nights, which were taken up with “club” activities such as Bridge, Drama, Chess, Debate, History, Photography, Geography, Literature, Film, Pioneer (nature/history studies) and so on.  Membership of at least three clubs was compulsory. Then Sundays:

8.30am:  Rising bell
8.55am:  Roll call
9.00am:  Sunday Chapel & Communion
10.00am:  Boarders were excused to leave, with parents only
6.30pm:  Roll call
6.35pm:  Dinner
7.00pm:  Evensong & Sermon, until 7.45pm
8.30pm:  Lights out
…and the whole thing would start again the next day.

So when I read about “12-hour days”, I just giggle.

We were so exhausted (endorphins? pah) that we seldom had time to get up to mischief.  Officially, that was the theory, anyway.  The reality, especially for thugs like the Four Muscadels, was a little different.

And we didn’t even have phones.  Wouldn’t have mattered if we did, because the school would have banned and confiscated them.

Just like our Brit headmaster has.  In that, at least, we have something in common.