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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.
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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