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I’m going to do a write up of how I think education curriculum should be reformed. For context: I went through highschool in Ontario, Canada. The way it worked was from kindergarten to grade 8, we’d have a set curriculum every kid in the grade followed, with lots of english and math classes, some science classes, history, geography, French, and gym, and one each of art, music, and health classes a week. Then starting in grade 9, which is highschool, we are given two elective choices, where we choose a minimum of one between art, drama, and music, and the second may also be a general technology course or a general business course. Each year of high school there are more electives choices offered and fewer mandatory courses, with the priorities of what the school system requires us take being the same as elementary school. There were also choices between more difficult and easier options for some classes like math, english, and science as well. Universities and colleges would also require higher level math and sciences for STEM programs too, and there is a standardised literacy test needed to graduate.
I think a lot of people when talking about school want to just add more requirements without thinking about what to cut. It’s very easy to say “all kids should learn to program” or “all kids should have PE every day”, but if you’re adding you either have to keep kids there longer, or cut something. First, I think the elementary school program is basically good, I wouldn’t change anything there. Maybe take a little of time out of science and add it to more PE.
For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
There will be extra emphasis on making sure every single person who graduates is literate and numerate. I wouldn’t really require anything else to hand out a highschool diploma, but if they can’t do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, they don’t get the diploma. They’re stuck in adult night classes until they can or they give up. Ontario high schools also require 40 hours of volunteer community service which I like and anywhere else that doesn’t have that should implement it.
It might be a good idea to have a class on how to get the most out of AI too because it’s looking like that’s becoming an ever more important skill, but it’s changing so fast I don’t know.
I'm going to take the opposite position and insist that schools shouldn't be wasting time on gym at all. I don't think the point of school is to provide children everything that we think is "good". Schools should not be thought of as substitute parents with a broad mandate to produce good student life outcomes in general. Schools should be narrowly focused on basic instruction in reading, writing, math, and science.
I also don't think there's any place for literature in the curricula of any non-elective classes in middle school to high school. Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.
Yeah, that "old literature is unlikeable" meme is marketing-addled cope on the level of "how could I enjoy a trip two states over when it's so far awaaaaaaay and anyway their food is weird?" For a solid 350 years I'm not aware of anyone complaining that Shakespeare was especially hard to read, and certainly nobody found him boring. Same was true of classical literature for 2000+ years. If all that suddenly changed in the ~50 years since the invention of cable TV, is it likelier that a play's 36th decade contains some sort of magic cultural expiration date, or that we're just experiencing a long superstimulus-driven atrophy of kids' ability to read, focus and explore?
Or, of course, you're mistaken about how readable and enjoyable people thought these works were in the past.
English-language fiction and drama weren't taught in schools until (I believe) the 1900s? 1890s? So prior to that time, nobody would have read these works at all unless they enjoyed them and found them valuable. Some university lecturing on drama seems to have started up a decade or two earlier, 1870s, but that would be about sophisticated analysis of the rhetoric for students who already loved the content, like a film studies class today-- certainly not walking through the plot.
And yet, famously, the general American public of the day was so organically into Shakespeare that speeches from the plays were popular additions to vaudeville acts, and audience members would shout back lines at the actors. I've encountered lots of writing pre-1950 casually referring to how delightful and meaningful Shakespeare is, and it's interesting how free from defensiveness or concessions those statements are: nobody feels the need to add "... although obviously it's really hard to understand the words" or "... even though of course it's pretty boring and confusing," because they don't seem to find those things to be the case.
If we have 350 years of human beings demonstrably finding Shakespeare entertaining, meaningful, and easily comprehensible, followed by 70 years of intensifying complaints that the words are now too hard and the sentences now require too much focus, then my assumption is something has changed about our vocabulary, reading ability and stimulation threshold, not about the plays themselves.
Anti-excellence hot takes are pretty fashionable in these narcissistic times- the SBF-style "old books are booooring and useless" meme rhymes well with the education professors' "algebra is white supremacy," the admissions officers' "the SAT doesn't actually measure anything" and the fat activists' "actually size has nothing to do with health"- but I notice that they suspiciously often come from people who failed at those things themselves, thus have strong ego-defense incentives to convince themselves that anyway the grapes are sour.
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This seems completely backwards. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that school can improve someone's mind, but if you have control over someone's body for a thousand hours a year, you can certainly accomplish something with their body. Further, I would say that the body must come before the mind, and that much of our failure in schooling is because we don't respect this, and somehow think that mind and body are independent and separate, rather than the mind being a subset of the body.
Also, school forces children to sit down at a desk for a large part of their day. It seems reasonable that school also is responsible for counteracting the bad effects thereof.
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Agreed. If kids were able to run around and get their energy out more throughout the day, I'd imagine they would be far more receptive to sitting down and learning.
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I understand that the point of literature has been completely lost in the regular world, but it is very blackpilling to see not one but two motters consider it entirely useless and fit for the rubbish heap.
Culture is what unites us. Our literature and plays and films and songs allow us to communicate with each other through metaphor and allegory, and when people can communicate prosodically they think more alike and don't have to spend all their time explaining in jokes and slang, or adding throat clearing in deference to the people who refuse to participate in the culture.
You can't do that with non fiction, because people get really upset when you use them or their family as examples, not to mention removed relatives and very common names. Beyond that, real life doesn't play out like stories, which makes it much harder to work into teachable lessons, fables and parables, and those are the tools with which we teach morality.
As for older literature - for starters why do you care what modern readers can understand or are interested in? You got rid of 50% of the school library on the basis it was entertaining. Why not make them suffer The Tempest or The Odyssey? Seriously, I would be much more on board with you guys if you said "only old shit they won't find entertaining", partly because they would actually find it entertaining, if not at first (and I really think you haven't thought through the implications of removing all entertainment, so students have no respite from studying fucking fractions at the rate of the class' slowest students) but mostly because it would rebuild an understanding of the world that would allow us to communicate across generations, instead of intra-generational like we have now.
Also that last line about snobbery makes me think this is more personal than you are letting on.
I totally get that and don't disagree at all. I just don't see how reading plays from 400 years ago or novels from 150 years ago does much for that. We all effortlessly absorb our culture by simply growing up in it and living in it.
I'm not I understand. You're saying that people would be upset about, say, learning about the Irish potato famine or Newton or the causes of WWI or the invention of the telegram because some students might be related to some of the people involved in these incidents? I'm genuinely not trying to strawman or make you look stupid, I'm just totally lost. Maybe we're talking about different things?
Why should a high school teacher be teaching morality? That makes me bristle.
I do see some value for very young kids being taught simple stories, which is why I went out of my way to specify middle and high school.
Because if students can't understand it and aren't interested in it, it's going to be harder to teach them whatever you're using it to try and teach them (e.g., grammar, reading, metaphors, whatever). Additionally, they're going to have a rather dim view of the magnificence of their own civilization if that tedious and stodgy sludge is what we put in front of them as the supposed crown jewel of it.
Yeah, I harbor quite a bit of resentment for English class, and I don't care who knows it.
You only say that because you have been saturated in a culture which bases 75% of its popular storytelling on remaking plays and novels from centuries ago. Without Shakespeare we don't have 10 things I hate about you, She's the man, west side story, the lion king, ran, brave new world, and way more than I can list here. Not to mention all of the phrases and sayings and aphorisms we use every day, like it's all Greek to me, love is blind, in such a pickle, heart of gold, cruel to be kind, pound of flesh, and wild goose chases. I mean for goodness sake, we even get for goodness sake from Shakespeare!
Yeah I'm saying you can't fashion allegory and metaphor out of real people's lives without upsetting people. Well you can for positive things of course, but not negative things. Like, pretend Helmedhorror is your last name. But it turns out the most vicious guard at Auschwitz was a distant relative also named Helmedhorror or some guy named Helmedhorror was a soldier in a war who got scared and ran away, getting his squad killed. Kids are vicious, and they will use that to ruin your school life.
They literally always have and always will. At least if they are using old books and plays to do it they can't exclusively jam a bunch of current year bullshit down their students throats, and if some try their students will be able to find smarter and more sensible writing on the subject.
I feel like you missed the point of this by skipping the next sentence. You removed all the fiction from the school because it's 'entertainment' and now you are worried they're going to get bored?
Also please list three works from the past five years that you believe demonstrate the magnificence of our civilisation better than King Lear or A midsummer night's dream.
So what? Why does anyone need to know where phrases came from or who popularized a particular trope or whatever?
We do teach nonfiction, even if it's not focused on as much as I'd like, and yet I don't have the impression there is an epidemic of kids bullying other kids for sharing a name with a bad person they read about. Since I don't expect there to be a way to resolve this difference in intuition, I'm quite comfortable letting the other readers decide for themselves which of us is most likely correct about this.
So use old nonfiction books.
No, I'm not worried they're going to get bored. I removed the boring fiction books, remember?
Who said that a demonstration of the magnificence of our civilization needs to come in the form of fiction?
I don't know, why do we need to know what air is or how it works? I'm assuming you know how air works here, but I think it's a safe assumption. Hell, I'd bet on it.
Also you appear to be contradicting yourself. If you totally understand and agree with this -
Then you shouldn't need me to explain why it is necessary to maintain a connection to the artifacts a culture is based on.
For starters I was, as I said, talking explicitly about when crafting metaphors and allegory, which we don't do with non fiction. Even when we do, like the Chernobyl miniseries, or Oppenheimer, we fictionalise elements which can potentially hurt others. But also I would note that almost everyone related to Hitler and Stalin changed their surname.
That's funny, but still a poor argument. You said we shouldn't teach stuffy old Shakespeare because kids won't understand it or be interested in it. Setting aside the fact that Shakespeare is performed to this day (indicating both understanding and interest), interest and understanding didn't matter to you prior to that part of the argument.
You did. You still are it seems. I just asked you to name three works from the last five years better than King Lear or A midsummer night's dream, I didn't say they had to be fiction.
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Maybe it not being easy to understand is the point? It is a skill to stick with hard, somewhat alien material and learn to interpret it or, more likely, give enough of a bullshit explanation to get by.
(Obviously, for Westerners, keeping in touch with the canon of one's civilization can have its own intrinsic value).
The kids who want to read Harry Potter or other YA are gonna do it anyway. That's why they're bestsellers.
We could also have kids decode, by hand, arbitrary sequences of words written in ROT13. The question is, is this more useful than anything else we might have those kids spend that time on?
This is indeed probably the best argument for literature, but I don't think it's compelling enough. For one thing, I think kids understand and internalize their civilization without formal instruction. It's just "in the water", as it were. But secondly, I suspect much of the Western canon is more likely to turn off any interest a kid might have had in their civilization. These works of fiction tend to be extremely difficult to make any sense of or derive any value from. Some of that is because the metaphors and allusions are completely lost on a child (or in many cases almost any modern person) or there's a reference to something contemporaneous that's long been lost to time. But, frankly, a lot of it is because the language is just sorely outdated and teachers seldom want to "sully" the work by using modern translations. For example, Shakespeare uses "a haggard" to refer to a falcon. Just fucking say "falcon"! But noooo, that's not "poetic" or "authentic" enough.
If anything, subjecting kids to this stuff and telling them this is an iconic and beautiful important part of their civilization is just going to result in kids thinking their civilization must be pretty fucking boring and unimportant. And I care too much about Western civilization to inculcate indifference to it.
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To push back on that: we force kids to leave their families for like 8 hours a day to go to school. We kindof do need them to teach everything that is good, because the government is forcing their parents not to. To say that they're going to take our children away for most of their childhood, and then also restrict them from physical activity, is well past just borderline evil.
Elementary schools in my area are 6 hours (8:30-2:30), so definitely less than 'most'. Leaves about 10 waking hours a day between parents and kids. Plus 24/2 on weekends.
I don't think the average parent is actively imparting wisdom to their child fro more than 10 hours a day every day - even if they don't have a job and have a maid to do all the houswework, most people can't talk for 10 hours a day without their voice giving out.
So I don't think this is an actual restriction on parents raising their kids in the way you imply.
What I think is a restriction in the way you apply is the fact that in most families with kids, both parents have to work in order to keep the household comfortable, that work typically lasts longer than the schoolday, and typically leaves parents tired and harried when they get home. I think that's the actual largest limiting factor on how much parents get to actively mentor their kids.
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So don't force them.
Also, it's not as many hours as you make it sound. On average, American students spend about 5/6th of their waking hours outside of school.
Not having gym class is not restricting students from physical activity. Recess is still a thing. I'm not even in principle opposed to having more recess.
That link does not specify time spent in school, it specifies "instructional time", which is not the same. For example, California says that instructional time is "when all pupils in the class are scheduled to attend". This does not include the time between different classes, or time spent commuting to and from school, or time spent eating lunch, but the kids can't go home and be with their parents during those times.
While I would disagree that that time is "most of their childhood", it's more than 1/6th of their childhood. Anecdotally, my childhood experience was the same as the other repliers': 8 hours each school day, and 180 school days each year, which totals to a quarter of the year spent "in school".
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I’m trying to remember my school, but I believe it was like: bus picks is up at 7:30. 8:10-8:20 or so was the bell, then leave at 2:45 and home by 3:30 (or so).
I don’t think my point hinges on it being exactly 8 hours, though.
The point is that the state requires you to send your kids to them for a substantial amount of time, and this implies that responsibilities which could or have historically fallen on families now fall on the state.
Yes you can homeschool, but most people aren’t able to actually pull it off.
No, but it does hinge on it being a substantial enough amount of time that parental substitution is required. I don't think schools need to take over duties from parents when parents have possession of the kid for 5/6th of the kid's waking hours.
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Assuming school is 8 hours, and sleep is eight hours, it’s about half of a student’s waking hours on weekdays.
a) It's more like 6 hours; b) weekdays aren't all days; c) not all weekdays have school (because of summer and holidays).
I mean... I don't know how you can even contest this. It's all right there on the page I linked. 1000-1080 hours of school (varies by state) divided by waking hours (365*16) = ~1/6 of a student's waking hours are spent in school. Even less than that when you consider that earlier grades are <1000 hours.
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On the first point, it'd be great if we could expect parents to ensure kids got access to physical activity. In previous generations kids for the most part were fit enough without schools intervening. But today, that's not happening. Parents should make sure their kids go to sports or are otherwise fit outside of school, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not happening. And given that fitness has such a vast variety of positive benefits, I think the government should intervene to make people fitter, and school's the best way to do it.
On the second point, I 100% agree and that's my exact belief as well.
I think the ship has honestly sailed on this (there's just too many places outside scholastics where schools get involved to roll it back) but this is the exact thing that has led to the overreaches and culture wars as parents saw what their kids were learning during COVID.
If you insist that teachers should actually be substitute parents, you won't necessarily get to control where they take that. Arguably even the law doesn't: whatever pipeline produces teachers and whatever group manages them will decide.
I'm not so much viewing teachers as substitute parents here as I am viewing them as baby sitters. Good baby sitters make sure the kids get some time to run around. So should schools. Physical training probably has some of the least possibility of indoctrination of anything schools could have classes on.
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I think what you’re getting at, and this is my general impression, is that the bottom quintile or two of parenting is so awful that the public school(and lets be real, very few of the parents who opt out of public school are in this group) system is making up for basic failures and that explains its constant expansion, but that giving bureaucrats more power is just creating potential fuckups and extra paperwork with the top three quintiles of parenting. Honestly the solution is probably tracking the kids and having easy opt-outs. But that’s not going to happen.
If anything I think putting bureaucrats in charge of making sure kids get a minimum of an hour of running around a weekday, instead of that hour being spent culture like many of the proponents of English classes want, is putting much less power in the hands of bureaucrats. Let parents decide what classics their kids read, the schools can just make kids get some active time.
I don't disagree with you, but what you're describing is actually "recess", not "gym class". In any case, having bureaucrats in charge of making kids play games that aren't on a computer because we can't expect the bottom 35% or so of parents to do anything right sticks in my craw much more than having bureaucrats in charge of making sure they're familiar with the western canon. I don't really know why, exactly.
Ideally the PE classes would go over stretching and doing exercises that improve kid's fitness and be overall structured, not just recess.
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First, I'm not convinced that childhood fitness is that important. I suspect the negative health effects of fitness don't reveal themselves until many decades later, and that fitness habits started in early adulthood should be sufficient to stave off the effects of poor fitness. Yes, childhood obesity is a problem, but I'm not convinced that's due to lack of exercise.
Second, regardless of the benefits, I just don't see how that's the school's job. What's the limiting principle? Should everything that's important and beneficial be done in school? Should schools have classes on healthy eating? Healthy social media usage? General socialization? Driving instruction? Home improvement? Taking care of a baby? Household budgeting and financial prudence? I mean, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if you'd say "yes" to some or all of those if you already think schools should basically be in the business of being parents. I just emphatically disagree. One of the things I always hated most about schools was how fucking patronizing and infantilizing it was.
Finally, once you open the door to the idea that schools should be entrusted as quasi-parents with a broad mandate to do good things for children, you're giving your ideological enemies (whoever they are) license to indoctrinate your kids. They already have too much latitude to do that with reading, writing, and science curriculum, but I certainly don't want to make it any easier for them.
Only if your ideological enemies can get through ed school, get hired as teachers, and stay employed as one. Capture academia, then ensure ideological conformity among administrators doing the hiring, then use increasing conformity of the teachers you produce to bring pressure within the unions and the profession in general to push out those "ideological" teachers not conforming to the "professional standards" of the field, then be watchful to make sure nobody tries to use the same entryist tactics against you. With that, you can ensure "the other side" never gets anywhere near your children.
I really doubt this process is happening the way you describe. In particular teachers are not ideologues; they’re rule worshipping slightly smart highly conformist non radicals, and this is a personality type that if the handmaid’s tale government became a real thing instead of a fantasy that I really can’t tell if it’s paranoid or horny, they’d be asking to cover their faces too. A certain segment of the blue tribe lost their collective minds and they happen to be running the institutions teachers look up to, and that’s a problem, but there’s not actual indoctrination of teachers going on as far as anyone can tell. They’re just people who’d declare themselves colorblind if CNN said the sky was green. These people have always existed and our society tells them to teach, but we’ve been telling them that for a lot longer than we’ve been woke.
Not my experience. (My late grandmother was a teacher, so I've known a few through her. My educational career was an ongoing fight with teachers and administrators. Several of the times I got lectures from teachers it was for expressing the "wrong" political opinion in my writing. I worked as a substitute for a time, and also as a tutor. So I've picked up a fair bit of the general "feel" of at least those teachers working for the ASD. And while some of the older generations, nearing retirement, may fit "rule worshipping slightly smart highly conformist non radicals," the rest seem much more "politically-indoctrinated slightly-dim ('those who can, do; those who can't, teach') conformist activists.'
Again, my experience is that for the past ten years at least, they are "actually indoctrinated" — deeply so.
Some of it might just be that political capture has set the rules they worship and the standards they conform to such that "1619 project" attitudes aren't "radical," but only some, and I don't see breaking that consensus is anything less than a "coup-complete" problem.
"CRT bans" aren't working, will not work, because teachers — the entire profession — will openly defy them out of ideological fervor. The Left has totally conquered public schooling like they have everything else. One cannot get hired to work in a public school anymore without being a committed Leftist ideologue. And any attempt by the Right to build an alternative for their children will be crushed. The war has already been won utterly.
This is not at all true to my experience (currently teaching, in public education about a decade, got an education degree in the past 20 years).
Different places are different, I suppose?
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Yes, you can, lots of people do it.
That's not actually true. Based charter schools, homeschooling, and parochial schools are all not only not under threat, they're thriving.
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Oppression pornography is still pornography and should be treated as such.
(Maybe submissive personality types have a pathological need to identify as "oppressed"? It certainly seems that way if you've ever read any yaoi or romance novels, that's for sure.)
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“The other side” is presumably having children, which means your attempts at raising an army of military school cadets poised to recapture American institutions from the commies will be met with fierce parental resistance about half the time. Particularly once you begin trying to dictate how parents feed and exercise their children, which is extremely unpopular with parents on all sides.
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