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

Are these kids in public, private or charter schools? My experience around here is that private schools tend to pile on homework and public schools don't. Example: the private school two of my kids attend makes it a point to say, "We have a low homework load." My kids (3rd/4th grades) have 45-60 minutes of work a night, four nights a week, and it's banned on weekends and over vacations. I know parents who chose this school to escape homework burdens at other local private schools. One school advertises 90-120 minutes of homework a night, starting in 6th grade, with projects over vacations.

Then there's the high-prestige prep school that gives 2-4 hours every night in high school and is described as a competitive pressure cooker.

Public school parents I know complain about how little their kids get ("He's in 8th grade and gets it all done during lunch, and he gets good grades.")

I've met a lot of private and public school kids around here who go to school, then go to an academic after-school program, and then go to music (or whatever) lessons. These kids eat dinner in the car. They're the extremes, but I know many kids with scheduled activities every day, Monday-Friday. I know kids (early elementary!) who have three scheduled activities every weekend (in addition to something like church). We meet them at birthday parties. They arrive late in dance/gymnastics/soccer etc. clothes and leave early.

There are also kids who don't have these demands on their time, but I've met too many ultra-busy kids to call them outliers. I can definitely see that being overscheduled could make them behave in ways the OP described. I can also see that the focus on test prep in schools could have that effect too.

The kids at our public school where DS7 goes, and DD5 will start next year, are not tightly wound after school, but they do have a very hard time focusing on homework after spending 7 hours stuck inside an overly hot school with only 20 minutes of recess, and gym only twice a week for four weeks on a 12 week rotation. Our 1st grade teacher gives too much homework and underestimates the time it takes the kids to do it. We have about 45 minutes a night, which is too much for 1st grade - the standard is supposed to be 10 minutes per grade. She's gotten a lot of pushback from parents, and has backed off a bit in the past month.

I think back to my elementary school days, and we had at least two recesses plus gym daily, but the rest of the school day was pretty similar to DS's in terms of being inside classrooms at desks learning. I thought it was fine as a kid. The difference is that we got science, social studies, and foreign language daily, and spent only an hour on reading/writing and an hour on math. DS's school spends 3 hours every day on reading and writing, and they get very little science or social studies. They are definitely teaching to the test, as are all other public schools in our area. It's why they have no recess time anymore.

I think the children I know at our school and other public schools are happy. One little boy in DS's grade (the one other giftie I know about) told me after winter break that he was lying awake the previous night so excited about coming back to school, he just couldn't wait to be there. I think my kids would be happier in a less traditional school environment, or one that challenged their smarts better, but I could say the same thing about my generation as well. Those options just weren't available then and we didn't have those models to compare to. On the subject of over-scheduling kids, yes it creates problems as children need that unstructured play time. I can see that homeschooling allows for activities like piano lessons and physical activity during the regular day, while traditional school kids have to do those after school. But overscheduling kids is the parents' choice, not the schools'.

Wyldkat, based on going to observe in quite a few schools now, I agree with your comment, at least in regards to kindergarten. I might not use the word cruelty, but would be happy with something like "Orwellian personality modification experiment".

I've seen 4 public Ks now and simply by walking into a classroom and looking at the kids appearance I can tell without hearing a word uttered roughly how that school ranks nationally. It appears to be entirely due to socio-economic status. They could do away with testing and just average the parental tax returns.

At the lowest ranking one the kids enter with many not knowing colors, and none reading. There is an incredible task for the teacher and they do achieve an amazing amount of catch up. At the highest, all are reading by mid-year and there is all along a little bit of time for extra content and the occasional child directed moment.

At almost none of the public schools (and definitely not at 2 privates) have I seen examples of children rewarded or encouraged in independent thought, personal self expression, or creativity. On average, children's comments not directly in answer to a teacher question were just tolerated without response. At the worst they were squashed. At one single school, the highest socioeconomic status public, I saw one instance of a child expressing a personal experience relevant to the class activity which was given respect: a reply and exchange lasting a few moments.

Kindergarten at every one of the 6 I've viewed appears to be simply the first of many years of immersion therapy to shut up and listen to an authority figure who will tell you exactly what you are supposed to know.

At every school, a 10 or 15 minute break with access to toys or the outdoors seems to be a frantic rush to expel pent up tension. At no time did I see cooperative complex interactions between students such as complex imaginary scenarios or a child invented game (and this would be the main time they are allowed to speak to one another besides lunch).

In K a child can get through 6 hours straight without speaking other than reading specific words they are instructed to or answering primarily rote memorization type questions. If anyone noticed the child was silent it might be to think the child was well behaved and possibly reward them for that.

It seems really strange to me that the school system does this to 5 year olds.

The children at most of the schools (excepting the strictest private and 1 public) seemed happy and engaged, but I put that down to children being resilient and flexible and to their teachers being generally extremely friendly and energetic people. Happiness in a 5 year old does not necessarily mean it's a system that prepares them well for life after 17.

My husband recently helped interview high achieving high school grads that are looking for money to attend selective colleges. He commented to me that virtually none of them have anything interesting to say, they give no hint of the type of deep thinking or individuality that actually thrives at university. They can not come up with a real answer for what subject interests or excites them. They are consumed by an obsession over grades and promoting themselves via their glowingly long list of run of the mill extracurriculars. And they seem to have no sense of how vacuous they sound, they seem not like individuals but like a herd of hoop jumping monkeys.

I'm sure there are exceptions of course but I have to wonder if the exceptions survived the system rather than were benefited by it.

It is just hard not to jump to conclusions about causality, seeing the school system and then hearing about the product.

Polly

So much misinformation in one little thread!

Nearly all charter schools in the US are required to have a lottery for admission. Some schools are allowed "preference" categories for students that have a particular need/desire. For example, an arts academy may have an audition and 30% of the kids that are accepted in the lottery first, will have had to pass the audition with a high score. Or a school may focus on language immersion and declare that 50% of the lottery must be students who do not speak the primary language of the school (say Spanish.)

Charter schools that received public funding (which is the federal definition of a charter) are NOT allowed to discriminate against nearly all categories of IEP students. However, charter schools ARE allowed to exclude students who would not have an appropriate educational placement in the least restrictive environment. If an IEP team has decided that a student needs a severely emotionally disturbed, self-contained classroom and a charter school does not have one of those, the charter is allowed to say no.

Students who are on full-inclusion plans cannot be excluded from nearly any charter in the US. Whether they are appropriately served in that setting, is a different matter. As a former teacher and vice-principal at a charter, I can tell you that many parents chose to not disclose a child's true needs before applying. It's not good for anyone to find out that a child is severely autistic and needs assistance in a regular classroom on day 5 of 7th grade. But I've had this happen because of the misinformation that charters don't accept students with IEPs. So parents feel compelled to lie, which is completely unnecessary and does harm to the child.

As for accepted cruelty, it has been my observation that as schools move towards more heavily scripted curriculum, more testing and more test driven curriculum, students' spirits are being crushed. It is heart-wrenching for anyone, including the teacher in the classroom, to watch 1st graders go through a scripted program like Open Court where you have to read in chorus and respond to a clicker like a dog for hours upon hours a day.

Until the pendulum swings back to a more moderate educational setting and parents stop valuing the quantity of homework as an indicator of school quality, it's going to be rough in public education.

After a 3rd grade year of 60 min of worksheets every single night, sometimes the SAME worksheets as yesterday for "more review", we are homeschooling. I realize not everyone has that option, but I couldn't watch my son's desire to learn and his spark be worksheeted out of him.

Thank you everyone for your replies. This is exactly what I was hoping for.

I would like to mention that at NO point did I place any more blame on the teachers than I did on any other member of society. The vast majority of teachers are good people doing a hard and very often thankless job.

I am basing my growing belief on observations based in a very liberal, relatively high socioeconomic bracket area.

I was talking about conventional public brick and mortar schools vs non-traditional school options (charter, IS, homeschool). Although I know a few people with children in private schools, I don't really know them well enough to have any idea what the schools are like.

Charter schools often have lower rankings (in my area) because most of the students opt out of testing. However, the students who do test tend to blow the lids of the tests. I've also been told by teachers with experience in the area that non-traditional school students often over think the tests unless they are trained in proper test taking skills.

I also never said that some or even most kids don't enjoy traditional school. Even the kid I know who is most affected by the system LOVES school, not because he is learning but because he is in the same room as his friends. In fact he would rather stay with his friends than switch to a school that might support his learning style. He isn't there to learn you see and he's only in 3rd grade. However, due to lack of a better example coming to mind at the moment, I read an article the other day about modern slavery and how the salves are "happy" and don't want to be freed because that is the way it has always been...

If we want creative thinkers something has to change. The universities are speaking out about it. What is going on in the majority of schools isn't working or it wouldn't be an issue for the universities. I'm not saying we should toss traditional schools (bad idea on SO many levels), but that people have to stand up and say that kids need to be kids. They need to move, to be engaged in an environment that doesn't cause them to shut down, to be allowed to play even as they get into the higher grades. Exercise boosts test scores. Creativity boosts innovation.

Well put, CAMom.

I highly recommend watching this video, which is an animation of a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson. It is eye opening to see how our schools developed, based on the way factories are run. He talks about different ways of grouping kids and how schools are designed to reward convergent thinking and not divergent thinking.

It's not to bash schools, but it certainly raises questions about whether our schools are the best they can be.

Open Court is a "direct instruction" (DI), and some research has found that DI helps students from disadvantaged backgrounds learn to read. DI may not be fun for teachers, but students spririts' are more likely to be "crushed" if they never learn to read. Different schools may need different curricula.

I agree with Wyldcat's general idea about the spirit-sapped children. I hate to be a pessimist but I don't see it changing anytime soon. For differnt reasons in different area and socio-economic groups, it seems as though the schools have "taken over" the care of the kids, not just education but character development, fitness, health...things that would have traditionally been the responsibility of the family structure, and the kids were in school to actually learn things like their own language, maybe another, history, geography, literature, arithmetic and mathmatics. To be honest, my grandparents and great-grandparents came out of 6th-9th grade, whatever the case, with more knowledge of world history and geography, command of the English language (spoken and written) and in some cases another language as well, arithmetic to run a household budget and more advanced math as well, poetry, music, literature...and these were the "poorer" kids who were expected to start working full time at age 13-15 and never go to college or university!!!

Where I live, too many parents have a "dump and run" approach, even expecting their child to get their morning snack from the charity of the teacher making sure there is something for them in the classroom, when in fact they can afford to fly to Disney World a couple of times per year and drive really nice cars etc. It sort of morphs into the school, having so much responsibility for these kids, taking on an attitude that your child is a ward of the state or the district when you send them there, and if you're the sort of parent that looks to the school more or less for the academic education of your child and you feel that you will take care of the rest, you're in the majority.

Add that to all the mandates and assessments and constant changes of those everything is formula-ized and packaged up and same-y. The more conformity the easier it is for the teachers and administrators to knock off all the requirements.

I don't see enough people taking a stand any time soon, they're just too busy and as long as they see the school accommodating their children's needs they wouldn't join up to demand a higher quality education or critical thinking, individualism, etc.

That's just what I see and strictly my opinion.

Some good books on the general subject that I read recently. The chapter in Mei Ling's book on Japanese school discipline was very interesting. As was how parents in S America deal with sleep time.

http://www.amazon.com/Eskimos-Keep-Their-Babies-Warm/dp/156512958X

How we do not let kids be kids. And how adults exercise absolute control over kids and how this is damaging.

http://www.amazon.com/Thou-Shalt-No..._6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332509810&sr=1-6

IMHO, the schools suffer from too much centralized control. Put the power in the principals' hands, get rid of most of the non-school staff, and then actively supervise the principals. Make sure the schools have good textbooks and LOTS Of books. Break up school districts into smaller ones.