A Waste of Time

My son goes to an excellent school. Seriously, I am generally very impressed with the curriculum and with how rigorous the educational standards are. His school is also very expensive. Yet, even in his school I observe that the Middle School is devoted to some extent to simply babysitting. This is also generally the case - from what I could observe over the years - with American public schools. Whatever students learn in the Middle School does not really count, and as a consequence, they are not expected to learn much.

Basically, the REAL education starts only in high school. I am not talking about math which, luckily, is built up year by year starting from the elementary school. But science and history start happening for serious only in the high school. What a waste of time! Between the ages of 12 and 14 children are capable of learning so much, and they are offered so little! For example, you CAN teach them world history, or, say ancient world history in 6th-7th grades, and forget about it in high school. You CAN teach them some basics of physics, chemistry and biology in the middle school, so that your high school courses would be either shorter, or so that you could immediately progress to the AP skipping the "basic" course. This is what other countries do with their youth. Say, we learned all of the Russian medieval history in the 7th grade, and never revisited it again in high school (I still remember pretty much all the dates of when each tsar ruled and what happened during their rule). Our Russian language - as in grammar and composition - instruction ended in 8th grade. After that, we were only expected to write essays on the literary works we studied in depth. For most people, this was enough to provide them with a lifetime of knowledge how to spell correctly and to punctuate properly, which is more than one can say about the American school which - after 12 years of drilling English - produces people who can only rely on the spell checker, and have a very vague idea of what punctuation marks are for.

Like I said, even my son's overall excellent school wasted a lot of the students' time during grades 6-8. What happened in my son's school was this. In 7th grade, they had a science teacher who saw her mission in life to turn the kids into tree huggers by assigning some very basic and very boring tasks, like visiting a local zoo (which we had done on a monthly basis between the ages of 3 and 7), observing a 1'x1' patch of a permaculture garden (new to her, but so well known to my son who grew up working a huge permaculture garden at his Montessori school, again starting at age 3) for 2 moths and writing a REPORT of what they saw, etc. Mind you, this was a science class. When I raised my concerns about the children's lack of LEARNING anything, she more or less dismissed them by stating that it is much more important to teach the kids to love nature.

Then in the 8th grade my son got this social studies teacher whose course was supposed to be in US History and who taught - well, - practically, nothing at all during the whole year. First, they discussed the presidential elections and held mock elections of their own in their school (which my son won, by the way). Then they were assigned a project OF THEIR CHOICE which didn't have to have anything to do with history at all - and my son chose a project on Pluto (as in the Planet). He chose that because, actually, he happened to have an excellent earth science teacher in that grade who made them all passionate about science of the universe. Again, as I raised my concern about the lack of substance teaching, both the Middle School Director, and the social science teacher talked with me as a seriously troubled person explaining that it is much more important to let kids do projects on what they like because the purpose is not to acquire knowledge, but to acquire research skills. My objection that you could expect 14-year-olds to acquire both, were not valid, in their opinion.

I just read in our paper today, that a proposed change to the North Carolina high school curriculum would eliminate World History as a class. Instead, students would be taught "global issues such as human rights, the environment and international efforts to solve world problems. Eleventh-graders would only be taught the US history that occurred after 1877." (Surprise, surprise! I suppose it is getting uncomfortable - with the information widely available on the Internet - teaching lies about the real reasons for the barbarous Civil War which, naturally, had nothing to do with slaves' rights, but was a purely imperialistic war for retaining markets.) What bothered me about this was that introduction of those "issues" bumped out the proper history courses as if we could not fit in both. Just eliminate the babysitting our science and social studies teachers do in the Middle School and make them teach substantive courses, and you will have room for both.

That is to say, if anybody is really interested in educating our youth, not just in talking about educating them.