Tangentially, this puts a huge nail in the coffin re: the debate about home-schooling (not to mention "un-schooling") - despite digital tools, parents failed en masse to educate their children, when calle upon to do so.
It chimes in harmony with my own experiences as teacher when it comes to homework, assignments and exam-prep; the parents don't step up but instead lump all responsibility on the school system and the teachers.
It also chimes in further harmony with my mother's observations from her life-long career as physiotherapist; most patients won't do the exercises she prescribed them, except when visiting the physiotherapist. At home, they did nothing. Especially the fat patients refused to exercise, instead demanding what "treatments" for poor discipline there were, provided they were chemical a/o surgical, and required no effort on the part o the patient.
My wife calls this behaviour "the Kinderegg syndrome": it must be fun, a treat and a toy or else people reject it no matter how necessary it is.
This obviously doesn't mean home schooling must fail (I always demanded/recommended it while working, but it was very much a 'being a voice in the desert'-experience) or that lockdowns and closures were correct - but now we do have empirical evidence how parents of some generations will in the majority act if they have to let go of their TV-set and social media to help their kids get an education.
And why isn't anyone, neither politician nor teacher nor pundit pointing this failure out?
Because it isn't fun, there's no treat and it certainly isn't a toy.
Same same in my teaching experience at various European and US universities--I found that the benefits of, say, elite colleges are mainly to exclude laggards/lazy people, hence creating a more competitive environment (which doesn't mean there are no more distinctions among those who remain).
As with everything else in life, if you're a dedicated homeschooler, you can make it work with your kids, I suppose--a one-size-fits-all approach seems both counter-intuitive and absurd.
As to your question about pointing these fallacies out, well, I'd offer the following thought:
There's nothing to gain, politically speaking: politicians are wedded to the issue in terms of the proverbial hammer-and-nail issue--for 250 years, centralisation, standardisation, and bureaucratisation was the one thing everyone did, hence it must continue.
Journalists and parents alike--as well as everyone else--all once went to school, which results, in practice, in everybody knowing™ what they talk about, creating distrust of experts™ and practitioners (teachers) alike.
Lastly, the solution may be to foster competition and increase individual encouragement, which necessarily means to reduce centralisation, standardisation, and bureaucratisation as much as this is possible, create free spaces for fostering individual development, talent, and interest.
Needless to say, none of this chimes with how teachers are trained (in dedicated teacher curricula that emphasise pedagogical mumbojumbo over subject-specific competence), to say nothing about overall Bildung beyond that which one teaches.
So, it's not just little to any 'fun', but it's also many false incentives across virtually the entire primary, secondary, and tertiary education systems. Since everybody went to school and considers themselves knowledgeable (enough) to understand that there's no benefits to be reaped, nothing will (can) change.
Very interesting to read about these problems. They are probably replicated in all societies where there are foreign populations and cultural divisions. The question that comes to mind is, how do these people get on when they have left school? Do they live in an environment which is completely different to the environment for which you are trying to educate them? Are they functioning in different languages and working with different cultural norms? It is a big ask for teachers or any educational system to work against this.
Had a comparable chat about these things over breakfast earlier with a colleague: the problem isn't kids with less educated backgrounds eventually reaching this or that 'milestone': the issue, it seems to me, is that those whose parents are more educated/concerned about education provide more incentives/opportunities in the same time, thus the gap between these two exemplary (stereotypical) categories only widens as kids grow up. I doubt it's necessarily connected to the native/foreigner dichotomy (although given linguistic, social, and other barriers/impediments, the most obvious manifestation may be just that (but basically, class differentials/distinctions are at-work also among 'natives').
As to your point about demands upon teachers, I'd consider a lot of these to be quite frivolous to begin with (but, as Rikard points out above, individual choice/preferences play a huge role).
Tangentially, this puts a huge nail in the coffin re: the debate about home-schooling (not to mention "un-schooling") - despite digital tools, parents failed en masse to educate their children, when calle upon to do so.
It chimes in harmony with my own experiences as teacher when it comes to homework, assignments and exam-prep; the parents don't step up but instead lump all responsibility on the school system and the teachers.
It also chimes in further harmony with my mother's observations from her life-long career as physiotherapist; most patients won't do the exercises she prescribed them, except when visiting the physiotherapist. At home, they did nothing. Especially the fat patients refused to exercise, instead demanding what "treatments" for poor discipline there were, provided they were chemical a/o surgical, and required no effort on the part o the patient.
My wife calls this behaviour "the Kinderegg syndrome": it must be fun, a treat and a toy or else people reject it no matter how necessary it is.
This obviously doesn't mean home schooling must fail (I always demanded/recommended it while working, but it was very much a 'being a voice in the desert'-experience) or that lockdowns and closures were correct - but now we do have empirical evidence how parents of some generations will in the majority act if they have to let go of their TV-set and social media to help their kids get an education.
And why isn't anyone, neither politician nor teacher nor pundit pointing this failure out?
Because it isn't fun, there's no treat and it certainly isn't a toy.
Same same in my teaching experience at various European and US universities--I found that the benefits of, say, elite colleges are mainly to exclude laggards/lazy people, hence creating a more competitive environment (which doesn't mean there are no more distinctions among those who remain).
As with everything else in life, if you're a dedicated homeschooler, you can make it work with your kids, I suppose--a one-size-fits-all approach seems both counter-intuitive and absurd.
As to your question about pointing these fallacies out, well, I'd offer the following thought:
There's nothing to gain, politically speaking: politicians are wedded to the issue in terms of the proverbial hammer-and-nail issue--for 250 years, centralisation, standardisation, and bureaucratisation was the one thing everyone did, hence it must continue.
Journalists and parents alike--as well as everyone else--all once went to school, which results, in practice, in everybody knowing™ what they talk about, creating distrust of experts™ and practitioners (teachers) alike.
Lastly, the solution may be to foster competition and increase individual encouragement, which necessarily means to reduce centralisation, standardisation, and bureaucratisation as much as this is possible, create free spaces for fostering individual development, talent, and interest.
Needless to say, none of this chimes with how teachers are trained (in dedicated teacher curricula that emphasise pedagogical mumbojumbo over subject-specific competence), to say nothing about overall Bildung beyond that which one teaches.
So, it's not just little to any 'fun', but it's also many false incentives across virtually the entire primary, secondary, and tertiary education systems. Since everybody went to school and considers themselves knowledgeable (enough) to understand that there's no benefits to be reaped, nothing will (can) change.
Very interesting to read about these problems. They are probably replicated in all societies where there are foreign populations and cultural divisions. The question that comes to mind is, how do these people get on when they have left school? Do they live in an environment which is completely different to the environment for which you are trying to educate them? Are they functioning in different languages and working with different cultural norms? It is a big ask for teachers or any educational system to work against this.
Had a comparable chat about these things over breakfast earlier with a colleague: the problem isn't kids with less educated backgrounds eventually reaching this or that 'milestone': the issue, it seems to me, is that those whose parents are more educated/concerned about education provide more incentives/opportunities in the same time, thus the gap between these two exemplary (stereotypical) categories only widens as kids grow up. I doubt it's necessarily connected to the native/foreigner dichotomy (although given linguistic, social, and other barriers/impediments, the most obvious manifestation may be just that (but basically, class differentials/distinctions are at-work also among 'natives').
As to your point about demands upon teachers, I'd consider a lot of these to be quite frivolous to begin with (but, as Rikard points out above, individual choice/preferences play a huge role).
Here's some irony for you. We in the U S should have known better because in European countries that did not shutter their kids, things were FINE;
https://open.substack.com/pub/public/p/david-zweig-we-knew-from-europe-that?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1hhgqj
Oh my, that was a bummer re: tons of irony--thanks for the suggestion!