Public vs. Private Education - Who Sets the Curriculum?

[RuralRon]

I was just watching an interview of Charlotte Iserbyt on Tragedy & Hope and she makes a great point: it would be much worse if private educational institutions overtake the public schools, b/c at least the public school system has an elected board where grassroots efforts can influence the school's direction.

 

I would expect that most private schools are corporations and are not open to direct public involvement. It would thus be much easier for an outside influence (i.e. Rockefeller Foundation) to control all aspects of the education provided at private schools.

 

I realize these statements are rather broad in scope, and that it is possible for a private school system to implement a corporate charter that requires direct parental involvement. Whether such institutions exist or not I do not know.

 

But I thought the point Iserbyt made was worth thinking about and considering. In the process I thought I'd raise it here to stimulate additional input.

 

One thing is clear, that the public schools are seriously broken, and unless more parents wake up and realize why, get personally involved and do what they can to reduce the state's influence their kids will be doomed to a dismal future. Of course the best way to do that isn't by using an institution, but rather to homeschool. Sadly, most parents will be unwillling to go that route.

 

At this point I'm not sure the public system can be saved, meaning it may be too late to restore real educational value to the students.

[dsayers]

First of all, public school is a misnomer. It is a government school if you want to pretty it up and a coercive institution were one to be honest about it. An elected board doesn't change the fact that money is stolen, residents whose money is stolen cannot opt out, and people who do not vote for the person who wins is bound without consent. In order to even consider if this is better or worse than an alternative, they'd have to say that the moral consideration isn't important.

 

Secondly, the argument is akin to saying that coercive restaurants would be better than McDonald's because people do not vote for it. Except that they do. They vote with their money, feet, and voices. If a privately owned school did something that people didn't like, they would receive less money which would act as a signal that it is a decision with consequences.

[Guest Exceptionalist]

 If a privately owned school did something that people didn't like, they would receive less money which would act as a signal that it is a decision with consequences.

 

 

A decission with negative consequences to be precise. Otherwise you could assume that every consequence would be negative. Which is not the case, as you can see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequence

[cab21]

Private education is open to many forms of decision making.

 

owners can be all sorts of situations.

[Mike Fleming]

We don't even know if schools are the best way to educate children.  They are basically an idea from, I assume, the 19th century.  Right now you are starting to see many different methods being tried, especially with new technology.  Is there any reason classes can't be conducted over the internet for example?  I think you would be pretty amazed if the free market took over education.  It wouldn't just be a case of actual physical schools becoming private.  A whole host of different options that people haven't thought of would pop up.  And they would probably be more efficient too.  If you think back to your own schooling, how many years were wasted?  For me, I feel like at least half of my schooling was a complete waste and totally unnecessary and even detrimental in many ways.   I think an important part is to take away the idea that going to a physical school should be compulsory.   Because if you don't you are just handing over a public monopoly to a private cartel basically.

[dsayers]

For me, I feel like at least half of my schooling was a complete waste and totally unnecessary and even detrimental in many ways.

 

English class for me started off learning words and structure, which I liked. Then it moved on to creative writing, which I really liked. Then it went on to reading, which I HATED. To this day, I cannot stand to read books, which is hugely detrimental.

[Mishelle]

Back in my highly propagandized Lefty days I used to think "how can these people not want education for all children whether they have them or not, because we don't want all kinds of idiots running around?!"

 

I said this even as I hated high school and breezed through university.  I still said it as I was a TA and then through the first years of teaching university.  It's been one of the last threads of Statism in my mind for years!  Chomsky, Charlotte Iserbyt and JT Gatto finally made me see it for what it was, or actually made me remember that's how I saw it way back when.

 

I wanted to add this to the conversation because I think education is a big blind spot for a lot of well-meaning people.  Like spanking I think, that deeply embedded, that it's "for your own good" -- "this is the world we've got, better train to play the game."  Because of this for me it's important to tread lightly with the sea of Lefties out there so as not to completely alienate them and call us crazy and dismiss every argument because of their deep bias--because they are the ones running the show in education, media and well the whole damn world it seems sometimes

 

I appreciate the convo very much, I don't have the answers but I'm definitely searching with y'all.  At this point I don't see much difference between public/private--I think it's a question of whether it's compulsory first and the social stigmas around homeschooling, unfortunately

.

[LovePrevails]

since there is a lot of data on how people best learn and schools are set up completely in opposition to what the evidence says, it's virtually impossible that privatizing school could make it worse.

[Mishelle]

But what does private/public even mean anymore?  The university I work for calls itself "public" (American Public University)  but that doesn't mean as in government-run, it means publicly-traded, I guess!  Our biggest clients are Wal-mart and US Armed Forces--we're "accredited" like other universities by the requirements set by the state, but get no (direct) funding from the government.  It seems to me there is too little separation between public/private now when they all have the same "One World" agenda.

[Mishelle]

Here's a good reason why Homeschooling is in trouble, imo: God and religion permeate and is the primary driver against State curriculum--ethics, learning, and liberty are secondary to the right to believe in fairy tales.

 

http://www.activistpost.com/2014/02/government-schools-common-core.html

 

 

Here's food for thought from Stef and Peter Gray on the subject:

 

http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_2388_Peter_Gray_Interview.mp3

[Xeeg]

What makes humanity so much more powerful than all the other creatures on this planet is our ability to pass down knowledge between generations. We can learn from knowledge obtained by people thousands of years ago, and how it has been built on and improved since. Most of what we think we know, we have heard from others, even language itself. We can all agree that education is very important, otherwise each generation has to reinvent the wheel.

 

Let's look at what works. Check out the NCEE top performing countries and see what kind of systems they have. You will notice that USA is not one of them. I doubt the solution is more cuts to the public education system.

 

Without a public education system, children's education is dependant entirely upon their parents ability to either teach them, or afford a good school for them. Notice that I am not arguing against private education. I have nothing to say about private education and if parents wish to privately educate their children that is their prerogative. But they should still pay taxes into a well funded, regulated and monitored public education system.

 

What do you value more, equal opportunity for children to get a world class education or private rights of parents to withhold that opportunity?

 

I know where I stand, and that is with the children's opportunity independent of their parents wealth or educational background.

[Wesley]

What makes humanity so much more powerful than all the other creatures on this planet is our ability to pass down knowledge between generations. We can learn from knowledge obtained by people thousands of years ago, and how it has been built on and improved since. Most of what we think we know, we have heard from others, even language itself. We can all agree that education is very important, otherwise each generation has to reinvent the wheel.

 

Let's look at what works. Check out the NCEE top performing countries and see what kind of systems they have. You will notice that USA is not one of them. I doubt the solution is more cuts to the public education system.

When education is measured as knowing useless, state-decided information like arbitrary historical facts or complex math that I would never need to use in my life, that might be how the ranking system is.

 

In fact, the idea that there can be a centrally-decided way as to determining what people know is absurd. I may know cryptocurrency which they have never heard of so it doesn't count for education. I also may not know useless things like who the 5th president was, but they would consider me to be less educated that someone who could regurgitate that fact.

 

I measure success in education on the lack of immoral force, violence, and theft used in creating the system, the happiness of the child in the moment, and finally their ability as children, teens, and adults to self-actualize. I can guarantee that these standards do not make the statist list of education standards, but useless and arbitrary skills and facts do.

[dsayers]

Without a public education system, children's education is dependant entirely upon their parents ability to either teach them, or afford a good school for them.

 

This is self-contradictory. You are posting on the internet that education is dependent on factors that do not include the internet. As such, you're ignoring how driven humans are to learn. Larken Rose recently released

talking about the drive to learn. One of the strongest points made is: Nobody taught you language. They couldn't have since you need a language to teach. You learned language because you live in a world where language significantly improves your chance for survival and you did it by intently studying your surroundings.

 

But they should still pay taxes into a well funded, regulated and monitored public education system.

 

What do you value more, equal opportunity for children to get a world class education or private rights of parents to withhold that opportunity?

 

There is no such thing as equal opportunity. Even if there was, it doesn't matter what anybody values one compared to the other so long as they're not initiating the use of force to achieve it. You're saying that everybody should be stolen from to provide a "well funded, regulated, monitored, world class coercive education system" but that's not what they get now. In fact, to even pretend that schooling is equivalent to education indicates you're just speaking in talking points rather than reality.

 

I know where I stand, and that is with the children's opportunity independent of their parents wealth or educational background.

 

This sounds like a good case to make to would be parents to not choose to have children until they're capable of doing so. Not a case for stealing from everybody, which only serves to teach that theft is okay as long as you can sell what you'll use the money for as good, whether that's what ends up happening or not.

[Xeeg]

So I watched Larken Rose's video, and I will admit that he mostly has some good points about how we learn. But he completely fails to understand what "TEACHING" is about. The first part about teaching he completely disregards is exposure. You cannot learn a language that you are never exposed to. You cannot learn concepts that you are never exposed to. This is a "Teachers" number one job!

 

He seems to think that people wouldn't be barbarians without teachers, he then goes on to explain how Hellen Keller was a "violent wild animal" until a "Teacher" exposed her to the relationship between water and some physical signal. Contradict yourself much? I'm surprised he didn't notice.

 

Look, we have thousands of years of knowledge available to humanity. Expecting parents to be able to sift through all of this and expose their children to the best ideas is rediculous.

 

Are all educational systems in the world perfect and flawless? Obviously not.

 

You are basically arguing that we should halt any attempt at a formal education system because some are bad?

 

There are many different education systems around the world with many different approaches on what the best knowledge to teach is. And this is an evolving debate, for sure the internet revolution plays a large role in shaping the future of education. But to say that a formalized education system is somehow inherintly bad is to totally miss the point of what our alternatives are, or have been in the past.

 

There are good reasons that groups of humans all over the world have developed education systems. If they suck, improve them, but don't get rid of them. If you don't believe me, why dont you do some research on countries with the worst educational systems, and compare their population's quality of life with countries that have great educational systems.

 

If you are right then countries with non-existant educational systems should be a pretty great place to grow up and live, like Somalia where only 10% of the children go to a public school. What a shining example of the sort of place Libertarians would like to live. Basically no tax structure and a failing state, what a utopia.

[dsayers]

This is a "Teachers" number one job!

 

A teacher's number one job is to have four months off a year, stick to an antiquated curriculum, delivered in an environment originally designed to break the wills of the defenseless so that they couldn't resist when ordered to commit immoral acts of the highest order, paid for by stolen monies, that they may mentally, physically, and sexually assault children while hiding behind tenure where they are protected from consequences altogether. In fact, teachers that expose children to anything that doesn't fit that mold are pushed out of the system faster than you can say peace.

 

He seems to think that people wouldn't be barbarians without teachers, he then goes on to explain how Hellen Keller was a "violent wild animal" until a "Teacher" exposed her to the relationship between water and some physical signal. Contradict yourself much? I'm surprised he didn't notice.

 

How does somebody who is without 60% of their senses, including 100% of the senses that 99.9% of humans use to communicate a contradiction of people with 100% of their senses being able to learn without having a barbarian beat them until they perform for the sake of consequence avoidance? I won't even mention that Hellen Keller (one person) doesn't overshadow the billions of humans that have ever existed that learned how to communicate by watching others.

 

Look, we have thousands of years of knowledge available to humanity. Expecting parents to be able to sift through all of this and expose their children to the best ideas is rediculous.

 

You are begging the question of if top down is valid by assuming top down is valid. You do this twice: First by speaking as if anybody is responsible for educating somebody and that "best ideas" are a) static and tangible and b) something to be inflicted. The whole point of the video you say you watched is to point out that you don't have to make anybody do anything.

 

We are born into a foreign world and spend at least the first 25 years of our lives exploring it and learning about it. If you truly want a child to be exposed to infinite ideas and have infinite learning potential, the worst thing you could do is to place ANY barrier upon them. All a parent needs to do is help them compare concepts in order to determine what is true and what is not. This is due in part BECAUSE of teachers and government interference trying to sell them any number of falsehoods for evil purposes. If you can help a child learn how to think, they'll arrive at ideas that are better than your best idea.

 

You are basically arguing that we should halt any attempt at a formal education system because some are bad?

 

No, my issue is with schooling, not education.

 

like Somalia

 

I really nailed it with the "talking points" remark, eh?

[Mishelle]

I've taught in US, Europe and Thailand and think what's happening with the "de-prussianization" of education is a very natural process.  It was clear the teaching differences between my teacher's education and that in several Euro countries and Thailand was completely different--they were still very old-school in comparison.  Where we were taught to always strive for a student-focused classroom, where students were doing most of the talking, they were taught to lecture and keep students quiet.  They insisted on an authoritarian separation between student/teacher, the Americans were always on a first-name basis with our students. Equalizing the student/teacher relationship is surely a crucial step to creating a positive learning environment and experience that will squelch at least some of the authoritarianism in our culture.

 

The video Larken spoke of and linked to, Josie Outlaw spoke about the Waldorf Model.  I'll look into it, never heard of it before.  Have y'all?

 

[LovePrevails]

Critical Read

[RuralRon]

I haven't visited this conversation in quite awhile, but have read all the posts and thank everyone for contributing.  Some really excelent points raised here. I watched all the videos referenced except the very last one, but the shorter video by Alfie Kohn said nothing I disagree with. I particularly liked the comments and sharp focus dsayers brought to bear on Xeeg's contributions, which seem to overlook the means by which the public education system has the funds to exist. Xeeg does raise some good points regarding contradictions in the Larken Rose material related to Hellen Keller though. But to single out that aspect of the convo doesn't do justice to the other contributions made which deal with many of the crtical problems inherrent in society's views on schooling and education. Thanks to all who participated. 

[RuralRon]

Has anyone ever heard of the Kahn Academy? Why would parent's ever homeschool without this exceptional tool of the Internet?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jQQjbq0gMmE