Friday, October 10, 2008

Public Education is Failing Our Kids

October 10, 2019

Yes they can still teach basic literacy skills by correspondence and online but science, art, social studies?

I could s c r e a m at the inanity!

The truth is public education is a tool of the state and the state is crapping in its pants right now.

They can't provide a holistic relevant education in centralized physical schools anymore. They have known this for well over a decade. But they insist on strong arm control over the data stream (no wikipedia access, no programs from home allowed to integrate with school board programs, etc) this isn't news but here they are LUMBERING ALONG WITH THIS OUTDATED CONCEPT OF THE INTERNET WHILE TRYING TO PROVIDE ALL EDUCATION THROUGH IT!

Wild Thing is taking Canadian History this year - a "required course" for high school graduation. For some reason he doesn't exactly find studying confederation to be that relevant to his life but that is not the reason I'm pulling out my hair today. Hackers rewrote the curriculum spanning from 1990-2010 to include hundreds of pages of information that is publicly available but not something the federal government or province wants taught. I mean nothing was news to me - stuff on Canada backing out of the Kyoto accord and the anti G8 protests in Montreal for crying out loud.

The Ministry of Education's response? To shut down the course for this semester.

WOULDN'T WANT KIDS TO QUESTION HOW WE GOT HERE!

Wild Thing grinned wide and shrugged at the news...more time for hacking is what that meant.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you've been mixing your kids up lately - you've got Wild Thing graduating from high school and Sprout talking about recycling seeds...must be the lack of sleep!

Anonymous said...

The real problem isn't that schools have bad curriculum (although it would be nice to see them up to date). I believe that most schools are failing to teach properly. Theory is nice and all, but this leads students to believe that learning is boring and that there is no real use for what they learn. There needs to be an integration of theory and application. More labs and actual use of the information taught would more then likely have a profound effect on the students. Plus lots of schools spoon feed material to the students when they should be challenged to learn. When they leave high school and go off the college, they aren't ready to learn for themselves. If teachers could get their students interested in learning, then they would learn more, faster, and better. We as people remember what we are interested in, the rest just kind of fades out.

Anonymous said...

Why are you even worried about this curriculum? Can't the kids just work on things they're interested in?

Oma said...

MudMama's in the future. Every time I start to read one of her posts I have forgotten and then have to answer the wake-up call and readjust my thinking.