[ale] Palladium/MS: ideas for retaliation - WAY, WAY, WAYOTnow!!!

[rhiannen]

"James P. Kinney III" wrote:

<snip> 
> As the school systems lose their top students to private schools, home
> schooling, mas exodus, etc., they adjust their teaching parameters to
> what is left. As the content of school for the K12 age is absolutely
> vital, they must teach it to the bottom 50%. Not the top 50% or even the
> middle 50%. So the central, average kids get a halfway decent push in
> the way of a challenge. The top 10% are bored beyond belief.

There would be no reason to remove top students for healthier
environments if the established environment was a healthy one in which
actual learning was paramount.  

There is no reason why they should adjust the teaching of skills
downward.  It's a massive insult to children to not challenge them.  The
problem isn't that they can't keep up; only those with severe learning
disabilities have that issue.  The major problem is all the excessive,
misguided worrying about their "self esteem"(1) being "injured" if they
don't get as high a score as their fellow classmates, if they're shown
in any way of being different.  

Bull. Human civilization *requires* and thrives on differences. 
Children are amazingly resilient, and their ability and eagerness to
learn is phenomenal.  There are thousands and thousands of cases of
"disadvantaged" children reaching incredible goals simply because
someone cared enough to wake them up by pushing them, challenging them,
making them see themselves as capable and worthy and not as some poor
victim who has no say in their own destiny. That someone can be a parent
or sibling, but most often in such cases has been a teacher, a coach, a
counselor, a family friend, a priest; a non-family member.  I know first
hand, I had the privilege to coach some of those "most disadvantaged"
children from the inner projects.  These kids weren't victims, but they
were damn well being victimized by the current system.

Instead of dumbing down the curriculum, the choice should be to alter
the direction and focus of the methods.  For instance, instead of
dividing the children into small groups to do projects, leaving them
alone, then grading the overall project as pass/fail (which results in
the hardest worker doing the project while the others coast and still
get the same grade,) they could divide into groups, then assign each
child within the group a specific aspect of the project, then grade them
on their group contribution, the accomplishment of their assigned task,
and the resulting overall project.  This fosters both team and
individual effort and is a much more realistic way of teaching real
world life skills as well.

It's been proven time and time again that healthy competition *improves*
the overall abilities of the entire group.  What we have now in our
public system is a very UNhealthy environment glossing over scholastic
mediocrity and glorifying athletic ability.  We're promoting gladiators
over scholars. While athletic ability should be positively reinforced,
it should not come at the expense of learning life skills for any,
including the athletes, but especially of those who don't have athletic
skills to glorify.

Adding insult to injury, we're drugging generations of healthy, normal,
naturally exuberant kids simply because the system lacks the will and
ability to maintain discipline.  Yes, ADD/ADHD *does* occur, but in a
much, much more minute section of the populace than what is fashionably
being diagnosed.  The fashion drug of my parents' generation was Valium
for bored, unchallenged housewives.  The fashion drug of today is
Ritalin(2) for bored, unchallenged children.  Shrugging off the
responsibility of actually teaching children in favor of a "magic pill"
is a repulsive crime committed by lazy parents and lazy schools acting
in collusion. 

Sidenote:  Tragedies such as Columbine can be mitigated not by draconic,
zero-tolerance policies, but by creating a healthy environment. 
Somewhere in the early reporting of almost all of the Columbinesque
calamities has been a reference to the "poor, misunderstood,
marginalized" children perpetrators being treated with biochemicals. 
(Interesting how quickly that bit of news always seemed to fade from the
sensationalized headlines.)

1: The much ballyhooed "self esteem" is built upon self knowledge,
image, and worth.  Healthy self images are not built on enforced
homogenization and reinforced hopelessness (victimization.)  Insisting
that all children be catered down to is not only an insult, but is a
disastrous injury which leaves them completely unprepared for handling
the everyday functioning and stress in the adult world.  Learning how to
learn, how to think and make informed decisions, how to handle
disappointment, what your strengths and weaknesses are, how to utilize
your strengths to compensate for your weaknesses, how to cope with
roadblocks; these and numerous others are the skills needed both to
survive and to succeed in life.  You can't learn how to make lemons into
lemonade if you're never allowed to see the lemons.

The way to build a healthy self image is through individual
accomplishments and failures.  Teaching someone that failing at an
attempt is not an insurmountable "bad thing," but is simply a learning
process is the correct way to achieve an ability to handle the
inevitable failures encountered in life.  Recognizing and intelligently
praising the glow and pride received by accomplishment is all that's
needed to reinforce the positive aspects of succeeding, especially if
the accomplishment took real effort.  Ridiculing or avoiding failure
both have very negative results.  Denying the healthy pride of
accomplishment is just as bad.  Removing the effort to achieve or the
learning from failure is horrendously wrong.
  
2: "The rate of psychotic symptoms that first appear during stimulant
treatment has recently been investigated in a 5-year retrospectives
study of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD) (Cherland and Fitzpatrick, 1999).  Among 192 children
diagnosed with ADHD at the Canadian clinic, 98 had been placed on
stimulant drugs, mostly methylphenidate.  Psychotic symptoms developed
in more than 9% of the children treated with methylphenidate.  According
to Cherland and Fitzpatrick, "The symptoms ceased as soon as the
medication was removed" (p. 812).  No psychotic symptoms were reported
among the children with ADHD who did not receive stimulants.  The
psychotic symptoms caused by methylphenidate included hallucinations and
paranoia.  The authors conclude that, due to poor reporting, the rate of
stimulant-induced psychosis and psychotic symptoms was probably much
higher."  
http://www.breggin.com/ritalin.html
http://www.breggin.com/ritalinconfirmingthehazards.html

> One of the things that resulted from lawsuits back in the late 70"s was
> the abandonment of the 3-tiered classroom structure. There used to be a
> separate class of the top 25%. the bottom 25% and the middle 50%. This
> grouping was determined back in the 40's and 50's by psychologists who
> studied HOW kids learn. The boundary lines for the classes were flexible
> to meet the size constraints for the individual schools.
> The upshot was, kids who had similar learning processes and speed were
> grouped together and taught using a style more appropriate for their
> ability.
> The lower 25% got much more focus on language development and
> comprehension skills for reading. The middle 50% was geared toward
> concrete facts and applied knowledge. The top 25% was the abstract
> reasoning skills, symbolic processing of general knowledge. As one can
> guess, each of these three groups required radically different teaching
> methods.
> For the most part, this process worked.

Yes, it worked.  And was equitable.  

<snip> 
> Sometime around the late 70's a lawsuite alleging discrimination in the
> class placements was won. The basic argument was the racial and ethnic
> make-up of the 3-tiered class system did not mirror the make-up of the
> student body as a whole. Which was true. The top 25% was not the same
> mix as the bottom 25%.
> The end result of this was that the 3-tiered system was scrapped and
> replaced with a random placement of students by last name into
> classrooms. This also required a radical restructuring of the teaching
> methods used in this new, blended ability classroom.

Which was a bad decision based on a faulty premise which is correctable,
but not in the "politically correct" society we're allowing to
continue.  What would have been a better decision would have been to
look at *why* the percentages were occurring as they were, then correct
the teaching methods at the earlier grades to push more of the "poor
victim" minorities and underachievers to reach their achievable levels
of success in order to awaken them to wanting, desiring, even craving an
education.  Removing a system that educated those who wanted to be
educated was a gross mistake.

Life is not fair and teaching our most valuable assets that everyone has
the same levels of ability across the board is triply unfair.  It
teaches them, incorrectly, first a lie, second that meritocracy is an
imaginary and bad thing, then that other people are responsible for
their own self image which leaves them unprepared to cope with life.

> So the only viable choice was to teach to the bottom 50% because that
> bunch had no chance of learning it on their own otherwise. 

Wrong.  It was NOT the only viable option - it was the easiest, most
politically correct option.

<more snippage> 
> The long range solution to the decline in public school education is
> going to involve not a lessening involvement, but a much greater
> involvement in the learning process of children. We all know that there
> are huge numbers of parents who are truly not qualified to raise
> children in any form. And we also know that they tend to have more than
> 1 child. The rapid rise of the technological systems in this country
> require an even more intellectually functional population than what we
> have right now.

These huge numbers of parents are growing rapidly, exponentially as the
existing system stays in place. 
 
<more snipping>
> If the kids are going to be prepared to function in this changing world,
> they are going to need a better set of tools than they have now. Since
> the learning process for the most critical skill of language occurs,
> currently, before the public school process, maybe society should
> investigate a public school process that begins at that age.

A better approach would be to attack the real, underlying problem of a
society that is so wrapped up in keeping up with the Jones, MTV, and the
corporate ladder that it has shrugged off it's most necessary aspect;
the family.  We should instead foster a society where family and
familial responsibilities comes first.  Yes, it's hard to get by on one
income, but it's not impossible, and it's not permanent.  When my boys
were born, I knew that their well being was my responsibility.  We chose
for me to stay home during their first formative years instead of
handing it off to someone else.  Once they were settled into the school
routine, I returned to school and then to work.

Starting an education system even younger is simply passing the buck. 
In the long run, it's an extremely destructive decision which weakens
the family unit and society overall even more as children learn to make
short-term connections to people instead of long-term lasting
commitments.  The smallest basic building block of a healthy society is
a solid family unit, and we're already paying the high price of losing
the cement of the extended family.  When this government was founded, it
was common for families to live within walking distance of each other,
and if one member became unable to work due to illness or even death,
the extended family was there as a safety net to pick up the slack and
make sure that everything continued to get done. 

I'm not speaking only of blood relations, either.  A family is a
collection of people who genuinely love and care about each other. 
Many, many neighborhoods were once extended families of people who had
no blood relation to each other.

Taking children from the home even younger and placing them into the
system reduces dramatically the deep seated ties to the hearth and
increases their reliance on an external system give them the security
and sense of belonging that is vitally necessary to every human.  This
is a dangerous and costly mistake which I would NOT like to see
continue.

> Would all kids benefit from it equally? No. Some kids are going to get a
> better head start from their parental involvement. So for them, let them
> get the heavy parental involvement that will benefit them the most in
> the long run. But since we know we have a huge, and growing, population
> of kids being born to parents who can't be effective teachers at that
> critical time, society has a responsibility to itself to make the
> environmental changes that will allow for the optimum growth and
> learning opportunities for its newest and youngest members. Learning
> begins at birth. We need more qualified teachers at that age level.

I totally agree with the sentiment, but I respectfully disagree with the
suggested means of correction.

---- 
rhia
knowledge is power - arm yourself

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