| My public magnet high school was a weird setup where the kids had a huge variety of educational backgrounds. It was striking to me to be alongside kids who were naturally intelligent and gifted but who had gone to really crappy elementary and middle schools. I remember a math class in 10th grade where the boy next to me was really struggling through his work and shyly asked if I knew what he was doing wrong. I, in my arrogant 10th grade way, told him "don't you know about the commutative property??" And he gave me a blank look in response. When I explained it, he immediately understood and flew through the rest of his work with no issue. That was when it really hit me that I was no smarter than him, I just had the privilege of an elementary and middle school education that didn't suck. That boy has gone on to get a Masters from Yale and I think he might be working on his doctorate now, but he had to work hard to fill in some fundamental gaps. I'm truthfully alarmed by the "free college" debate because of credential inflation. Our high school diplomas are nearly worthless, a bachelor's degree has become compulsory for a lot of careers that shouldn't need it, and graduate school is leaning the same way. I would rather see us as a country fix elementary and middle school education so we can make high school education meaningful again. While we're at it, my county took away stuff like auto shop and any kind of trade school class, which is ridiculous and even criminal IMO. Of course, so much of what we talk about when we talk about education is inequality. In the haunting (paraphrased) words of one teacher that I heard on a podcast, "How am I supposed to teach them long division when they haven't eaten in days and they're going to get raped tonight when they go home." That whole "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" study didn't control for household income, so all it really showed was that kids who are food insecure do way better on standardized tests when they eat anything at all beforehand. There was also an interesting article in The Atlantic[1] recently discussing the really strange US practice of teaching skills instead of knowledge. The idea is that kids learn how to learn, but the outcome is that they're horrifically confused and don't know what or why they're learning anything. When teachers switched back to knowledge based curricula, the measurement of skills went way up. I suppose this is a rambly non-answer. I grieve the state of public education in the US where so many good people face so many barriers (poverty, clueless administration, their own food and housing insecurity, etc.) to doing good work. [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-rad... |