Tag: government school

Scott McNealy is one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and a big proponent of something called open source education. I am on board with what he says. His public education philosophy tracks closely with mine. He explains the whole concept of open source education materials and what he has done about it here:

Here is a link to the Curriki, the free K-12 curricula and resource website he describes in the video.

What brought this back to my radar was a link my friend Andrew sent me to an online video interview of McNealy. He said, “Discussion of education starts around 28:50.  Right at 31:55, he says a few words that I thought would really ring true for you.” Boy howdy was he right. I transcribed just a little bit of it here to give you the flavor McNealy’s remarks on education, part of which is about his ideas on education. I could not embed the video, but you can get to it by clicking here. I might note that he starts talking about education well before 28:50 and that is certainly worth a listen, too.

Interviewer: What is the state of the art right now? What’s going on in classes these days?

…

Scott McNealy: Monopoly is the wart.

Interviewer: In this case, the teachers union monopoly?

Scott McNealy: Who is the biggest monopolist out there? The government. So now we have the government sector union teachers driving the architecture, the process, all the rest of it. Meanwhile technology is going up, up and away.

There is much more in the video. McNealy talks about the concept of going to school, not to live one’s dream, but to get a job. The thing I really like about McNealy is that he put his money where his mouth was and did something about the whole educational mess in America. Our little family did it on a micro level by pulling our kids out of the traditional/government school morass while McNealy did it on an über-macro level and set up a system whereby every kid in America and around the world can benefit. Kudos to him!

Lorena texted me this a couple of minutes ago after reading my previous blog post. It is a video that is quite illustrative of a point or two I was trying to make.

I have a cousin who is a government school teacher in Nevada. She is very, very good at her job as is attested by the scores of her students on national normed standardized tests both in terms of the scores themselves and the improvement from previous years. We regularly talk about a lot of things on the phone, but every conversation eventually makes its way around to education. The best of both homeschoolers and and traditional schoolers is that they maintain focus on education. I certainly believe that our country is in big trouble because of the state of our public school system.

That being said, I think the problem is bigger than the education system. The reason the education system is in trouble is that our culture as a whole is in trouble. The reason the schools are failing is because the students, teachers, parents and administrators are all a product of a culture on the move toward secular humanism and paganism, even in the church. Still, there are people out there fighting the good fight to educate our children. We should cherish them. They have to deal with things in the classroom that are way outside the venue of teaching.

My cousin in Nevada has a great blog called Roll Call Tales. If you want to read a great blog by a teacher who is giving it her all down in the trenches, this is a great one. She blasted out a rant there yesterday titled Pray for Teachers that is well worth reading. You should read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt.

Pray for teachers. Please. In one corner we are talking to the child whose mother may have ended her life with pills when she was three and she “doesn’t even know what she liked.” In another corner we are working with a student who has every excuse in the world to not do a thing and a parent that backs him up. Then he wants the grade adjusted because effort doesn’t always equal ability. The bully that is learning to bully from home? It has to be from home right? The quiet one in the corner that you have to beg to speak. The English-Language learner that looks at you in panic every time you call on them. Please don’t call on them. The student that is obsessed with food. The student isn’t malnourished and you can’t figure it out. Until you find out the cupboards are locked at home and food is taken out of their hands and eaten by the parents. The student that cries whenever the teacher has to leave because being left in the classroom with the “scary” sub just fills them with anxiety and they can’t even think. The student whose eyes fill with panic when you say the word “test” or “writing” and you have to find a way to reassure them they can do this. Just getting words on a page that make “sense” is the most amazing accomplishment. The students whose eyes sometime sparkle and sometimes look so flat and dead and not there, You are chilled wondering what put that look there.

She wins some and she losses some, but she keeps on fighting the fight. It is worth it.

Day 882 of 1000

I am a big fan of Matt Walsh and an even bigger fan of the idea that not everyone should go to college.  That being said, this blog post that explains why Matt did not go to college seems very wrong-headed in one of its premises.  It is an excellent post worthy of a read.  I am in complete agreement with him on his decision not to go to college.  I have described my belief that many very capable people would be much better served by apprenticeships, community college training, working in an industry to learn the business, then starting their own, etc., etc.  Matt has made quite a cogent case for those who are gifted writers to write rather than matricule.  I agree with all that.  The part with which I do not agree is this:

I think it was ninth grade, or maybe tenth, and I was sitting in afterschool detention. I’d been sentenced to hard time for being late to class, even though I had a valid excuse. See, I was only late because I hated school with a burning passion. I dreaded every class, every assignment, every test, every worksheet, every mound of busywork, every shallow and forced interaction with peers I couldn’t relate to or connect with or understand; every moment, every second, every part, every inch of every aspect of my public educational experience. I hated it. I hated all of it. I was suffocating.

It had been ten years of public school up to that point and it wasn’t getting better. It never would, and I knew it. I was able to hang on for a long time, managing adequate grades, even an ‘A’ here and there. I was “passing,” at the very least. But in high school that changed. I started failing and failing miserably. We’d take tests, I’d try my hardest, but often I’d still get zero answers correct. ZERO. Fifty questions — all wrong. It was humiliating. Eventually I earned a reputation. I was the kid who “didn’t care” and “didn’t assert himself.” I decided to go with that image — false though it was – because I’d rather be seen as the smart slacker than exposed as the moron who actually tried and still failed.

Wow. To my way of thinking, based on Matt’s very articulate blog, this is more an indictment of the government school education system than of any lack of ability on Matt’s part. We ran into any number of situatons during our homeschool years where we were frustrated our kids were not learning.  The kids were frustrated, too.  Sometimes we found a way to work around it and sometimes we fought through it just to get to a minimum level of competence that was “good enough.”  It seems to me that our society needs to educate our children to a certain level of competence whether they plan to be a PhD rocket surgeon, a millworker, a beautician, or a lawyer before they start into career training.  Probably it should only take until about eighth grade, but the government steals an extra four years of our kids lives and still cannot get the material into their heads.

So, I think the answer to students like Matt might be to try a different approach.  That is one of the things for which homeschool is better suited than any other learning environment about which I am aware.  There are probably others, but I think we are hammering a lot of round kids into square holes these days.  I am glad we got our kids out of the system sufficiently early that they did not have to suffer like Matt.

Betty Blonde #48 – 09/22/2008

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Day 766 of 1000

My cousin Trisha sent me a very encouraging story from Utah about government high school football.  There is a second article about it here.  I need to disclaim that while I am a product of the government school system and played four years of high school football, I am neither a fan of government school nor publicly funded high school sports.  Both seem to do a lot of damage to the youth of America, but that is a post for another day.  This is a story about a coach who disbanded his football team and was supported by the parents for doing it.  Here are the basics, but the whole article is worth a read:

So when Matt Labrum, head football coach at Union High School in Roosevelt, Utah, suspended his entire team — all 80 of them — last week, can you guess what was coming next from parents of those suddenly former players?

If you figure Labrum got his head handed to him as he heard call after call for his immediate dismissal, you’d be incorrect.

Believe it or not, Labrum says he’s received no ill will from moms and dads for his radical disciplinary move — and that has everything to do with the off-field problems that fueled the total team suspension (e.g., bad attitudes toward teachers, skipping classes, failing grades, and a serious allegation of cyberbullying) and his desire to correct  them.

So Labrum told the players to turn in their jerseys — if they wanted to wear them again, they’d each have to earn the right to do so by jumping through an arduous series of hoops, including extensive community service…

An event like this happened in our high school, but it was not followed up with an effort by the coach to help any of the players get their act together.  I was one of only two seniors on the team who did not get kicked off.  I was one of the privileged kids who made all the teams and got to play, but I still have a sour taste in my mouth for the predominately horrible public school sports envirnonment at a time when kids do not know how to read nor do math when they graduate.  Still, this is very impressive.  The coaches have rolled up their sleeves and are working with the players on something that actually might build a little character and academic achievement.