Quote:
Originally Posted by DanaC
Oh I got the point. I just think there are dangers in streaming kids to or away from academic subjects, particularly when that in practice falls along class lines.
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I'm going to broaden this a bit (and go on a tangent), but I feel this is one the big questions our countries need to ask ourselves when it comes to education.
I have gotten the opportunity to work with many people from around the world and one of my favorite discussion topics is the differences in our country's educational philosophies and the positive and negative aspects of each. Besides learning that there is no perfect system, it seems that we will need to choose a philosophy and the consequences that go with them instead of the "best of both worlds" approach we (the US, not sure about Britain) does now.
For example, the countries that produce the best math students (Russia, Iran, many parts of Europe) separate kids from a young age. The ones that show high math potential are put into a very rigorous program that blows our American schools out of the water (calculus by freshman year high school). If you do not show high math or school potential, you are usually put into an army or blue collar path. And yes, these many times do fall within class lines.
While I agree that pushing kids into career paths at a young age creates a lot of problems, I believe our current system creates even more. We try so hard to keep everyone equal, forgetting that everyone is good at different things, and hold everyone back. On top of that, we make it worse by adopting the bullshit idea that standardized tests have some correlation with education. This is the main reason why I believe our country (US) is so far behind at the high school education level. We hold back everyone in subjects they are good at and then attempt to teach them skills that have no applicability to our economic future. Many people have realized these problems, hence the increase in vocational schools.
This then leads to the question, if we are going to implement this philosophy of separate paths, how do we do it in an "ethical and practical" way? Should we let the private sector deal with the specialized paths, causing potential inequality? Do we implement this philosophy into our public schools? This may work for suburban and maybe urban schools but it will fail miserably for rural schools. Do we completely change the style of learning which promotes problem solving and not memorization (we need to do this anyways) since it applies to almost all future economic sectors? Good in theory but I'm not sure about practice.
I don't have an answer but these are questions I'm asking myself when it comes to this topic. I believe problems in the American education system are more cultural than institutional. We need to stop believing that every child has equal learning potential for every topic.