Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Is current traditional schooling accepted cruelty?

I am expecting and hoping that this will get some interesting reactions...

Wolf has been doing Independent Study for three years now. He's been in Cub Scouts the same amount of time. I am a Den Leader and the Chairperson for his Cub Scout Pack. We know a bunch of kids both in homeschool/charter school situations and many more in traditional schools.

My observations of the children who go to traditional school vs alternative options have started to lead me to feel that traditional schooling has become a socially accepted form of cruelty to children.

The children in alternative education never seem overly stressed out. The children from traditional schools nearly always seem wound so tight they could snap. Alternative kids know how to play and are able to focus their attention when asked politely. Traditional school children, once they are out of school, always seem hard pressed to focus on anything other than physical movement of some kind.

Parents tell me horror stories of hours of homework in third grade, of fighting their children to get it done when they are already exhausted from school and a myriad of structured activities, of it taking three times as long because the children just can't handle anymore work or structure.

In addition I am now reading articles about how universities are having to deal with children spat out of the traditional school system who don't know the basic interpersonal concepts that are learned mainly through unguided group play.

All of this is really pushing me into the opinion that traditional school, as it stands now, is socially accepted cruelty. Someone looking in from the outside would be hard pressed to see it as anything else, but because that is how our world works, people just don't notice. The status quo is "normal" so it can't be wrong.

Comments?

Absolutely! I think it's like the frog in the pot, it happened so gradually no one questioned it (public school changing from a useful and reasonable institution to a horrible prison for children where they have no rights and are at the mercy of oftentimes incompetent and downright mean adults for most of their days).

It's unconscionable that this is the accepted norm and that we are legally obligated to subject our children to it and bled for tax dollars to pay for it. Then we accept camping out for the few spots in good schools as a fact of life. There is no accountability for the schools. After watching "Waiting for Superman" I understand a lot of the problem is due to the tenured status of school teachers, no matter how rotten they are they cant be fired? That seems like it would just attract despicable and or incompetent people to the profession. The good teachers become frustrated at not being recognized for their efforts because they are treated the same as the bad ones...

Okay, my vent over, my DD is in a better place now and all of that is behind us. My prayers go out to those that are still trapped in the system.

As a public school teacher, I don't get up in the morning to torture children. I've never assigned homework that takes hours. My students aren't doing structured activities for 7 hours a day and we go outside to play as a class.

Here is what I see from my angle. Charter Schools like the ones in Waiting for Superman are a joke and a half. A public school is designed to educate everyone, a charter school gets to pick and choose. Usually a charter school will flat out deny a child because of a disability, which is highly unfair to special needs students or 2E students. They can also deny a child if the parents aren't going to offer support. The teachers in charter schools are also not the happiest people in the world because their working conditions are ridiculous. I'd sooner leave teaching than work in a charter school. However, no matter where I go I'm treated as the problem.

Well, the charter school situation varies GREATLY from state to state. In TX charter schools are required to meet all the same standards and rules/laws as regular public schools. They have to honor IEPs, they cannot be selective regarding entry (unless given a specific waiver from the state - ie, there is one charter school that is boys-only) but they certainly wouldn't be granted one to not accept a child with a disability.

Wow, this is totally not my experience! I'm quite shocked by your characterization. My kids love school and their friends there, have plenty of time to play, etc. Of course, it isn't absolutely perfect, some of the academics are off kilter for their abilities, but there are many benefits that make up for it. And they certainly are filled with joy when they think about school, their teachers, and friends.

I suppose there must be kids for whom any particular type of schooling would be a terrible fit (whether that be public, private, home, charter, other), and might seem cruel or torturous for that particular child, but to consider traditional public school as cruel seems bizarre to me. But a fun & thought provoking topic, perhaps?

Well I don't think it's "meant" to be cruel. I wouldn't say you could point a finger at the traditional schools for all the kids' woes.

There has been public school for awhile now, I think it's roots have always been to sort of churn out citizens who will be productive in society based on their class.

The whole assessment thing seems to have gotten out of control as far as how much time is spent "teaching to the test". And using schools as curriculum and social experiments doesn’t always have a good outcome and the people who suffer the most are the kids.

But, as far as all the organized activities and the kids being frazzled or whatever...that's not the school's fault. Kids have been going to school for many, many years, but they would have free-form play in the hours not in school. Now when they’re not in school they’re in a steady stream of school-like organized activities for sports, music, dance, art...whatever, from a very young age. Some of it is due to duel-income or single-parent household situations where the kids need to be in a supervised situation since nobody’s home to let them come home and play (though single-family households weren't uncommon in previous times, but people lived in different multi-generation family structures, or neighborhoods that were more supportive).

But it can also be the case that the parents choose to place their children in all these activities, for whatever reason, to get their children all the exposure to whatever it is they want them to be exposed to as far as becoming "well-rounded".

I’m VERY far from thrilled at the public school experiences we’ve had. Part of that is that my child is “an outlier”, not her fault, but the system is not design to handle outliers, and since the law does not force them to accommodate her I'm left to figuring out how to advocate in my own time and on my own $$. But, the private school choices have their own issues and cost alot of $$ on top of the taxes you have to pay to support the public education, and it’s a gamble to have your child change schools and see if it will or won’t work. Charters may or may not be any good, and unless you can get a spot in one that has already established a good reputation, (and charter schools might not be supported by the local bussing) competing against hundreds of others...well that option doesn't work. Magnet schools also have competing spots and you might not live in the right location to try and win the lottery. Homeschooling is really a cool idea but can be very isolating if you don’t live in place where it’s common, at least when the child is young.

I don’t care for the whole system, perhaps because it is “a system” and any organized system can get big, bad and corrupt. It's hit and miss like most of life in general. There are certainly many wonderful teachers, social workers and counselors trying to work within the constraints of “the system” to really help their students, just like there are many wonderful healthcare professionals trying to work within our nightmare healthcare insurance system to try and provide the best care for their patients.

I'm not saying this statement applies to you, but I've found through experience and talking with teachers that it's common to underestimate how long it will take to do an assignment.


Wow. Sweeping Statement Alert.

AFAIK, charter schools have exactly one way to pick students: lotteries. They're publicly funded and have to take all comers. If they don't have enough spots, they have to use lotteries to choose students.

Where are you getting your data about the horror of working at charter schools? Citations please (peer-reviewed, ideally).

Around here, we have "parent participation" PUBLIC (not charter) schools. In those schools, the parents are required to commit a lot of time to the school or pay the school if they don't.

Reasonable people can disagree about this subject, and I like to see new perspectives that present reasoned arguments and force me to think in a new way. I've learned a lot here in that regard.

IMO, however, sweeping statements that segue a discussion into pitting charter schools against public schools don't help. Neither does wallowing in feelings of offense.

This is just my opinionated opinion.

Back to the OP: I've observed a misconception in the education world that more homework = rigor (more likely in private schools? Not sure) and that academics are important enough to squeeze out other subjects like art, music, PE and even, in some schools, recess (more likely in public schools? Not sure). We've had numerous discussions on this forum around the idea that compliance is a big theme in many schools.

Personally, I feel that the high-stakes-test driven atmosphere that pervades the United States is forcing schooling to resemble training for multiple choice tests more than education in the classical sense of the term. I can see that kids would be dissatisfied with this (possibly without even knowing what was bugging them and why), and that it could stress them out and make them antsy after school.

There's no denying that the vast majority of public schools focus primarily on the non-gifted, so we could be biased with respect to how we see the answers to the OP's question. NCLB forces this (as well as the testing mania) but it was already a problem before NCLB came along. NCLB formalized things, I suppose.

Charter schools typically have an "at will" contract. This means you can be fired for any reason at any time. While this sounds reasonable to most people, things work slightly different in a school system. The union was the only thing that protected my job. I had a parent rage and complain about me and the supposedly awful thing I said to her darling daughter. The union stood in my corner and brought evidence forward that the mother made her false accusations when I was out for a week with the flu. The mother still thinks I drove in that week to torment her daughter.

If you are let go from a teaching job during the middle of the year, you are dead. There is no coming back from that. No one will ever hire you. You never know when an administrator or parent may have it in for you.

Here's an NPR article on how charter schools rarely serve special needs students: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/14/143659449/florida-charter-schools-failing-disabled-students

I obviously can't speak for other school districts in other cities and other states, but my son's school is nothing like this. The only homework they get is spelling. Plus - the "myriad of structured activities" are nothing to do with the school, surely ? My son attends Cub Scouts, swimming lessons, and soccer - but none of them are through the school. Surely if the child doesn't have time to do his homework, it's the fault of the parents, not the school.
I have to admit I'm a bit ignorant as to what the exact definition of a charter school is - but on the subject of discrimination, I know a child who is deaf, and was not accepted into our state school for the deaf (which his dad had attended when he was in school)- because he also has cerebral palsy.

Ditto. My son in third grade has like 30 seconds of homework a night. Our traditional public school offers so many wonderful clubs that many charter schools, I think, can't offer- Chess Club, Choir, Nature Bowl, a student orchestra open to everyone that starts in 4th grade.
I've read that only 20% of charter schools surpass traditional school and maybe 30% equal traditional schools, leaving at least 50% below.
We left a private school b/c my son had 30 minutes of (stupid, mindless) homework a night in kindergarten!