"Kids are dumb because they're not learning the essentials"

[fireheart17]

This got prompted by the comments in this article: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/s...-1226251091254

Quick background: the NAPLAN tests are basically the tests provided to every student in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. They test literacy and numeracy. The results are then used for a myriad of reasons. (why those years I have no clue)

Anyway, in the comments, and in past articles as well, I have noticed a number of people complaining about the "frills" that we should not be teaching in schools anymore. The frills that they're complaining about? They fall in the areas of science, health, technology and the arts. Apparaently if we settle for just the 3 R's, then somehow that'll prevent kids from becoming dumb. The SCHOOL system does not make children stupid. Teachers can teach until their voice is gone and their feet are numb, but if the child does not want to learn, then he will not learn, no matter how hard the teacher attempts to engage him.

The only frills I can agree that SHOULD be cut are the programs that should be left up to the parents. And before I get people flaming on me about how those programs SHOULD be taught, the programs I am referring to are: dog safety, fire safety, ROAD safety (yes, apparently some parents think that it should be up to the schools to teach their kid how to safely cross the street), Keys to Success (my school did this -.-), driver education (for the record, driving instructors down here are run independently and charge a fee, they are not run through a school and unless there's a reason for it, all lessons are one-on-one. The drivers ed I am referring to is basically a one-hour lecture that consists of: wear your seatbelt, don't drink and drive, don't do stupid stuff with your mates.) and so on.

The programs that I DO think should be taught in schools as they fall under health and PE anyway are sex education and alcohol education. Sex education for a number of reasons: false information can have serious consequences down the track, we've all seen the glory of abstinence-only education and especially at the age when it's taught (usually around 11-15 years old, I went through it from around Year Six to Year Nine) down here, the kids may not want to approach the subject until they start bleeding from between their legs.

Alcohol education for another reason entirely: misinformation.

People need to realise that yes, there are benefits to doing other subjects aside from English and Maths.

Science teaches us how the world works and more often than not, science and maths go hand in hand (physics anybody?)
Various technology classes teach kids safety, how to respect others, and on top of that, it also provides a practical application for-you guessed it-maths. Or does the furniture fit into a bedroom magically?
Social studies (down here that involves civics, geography, history and world cultures) teaches kids tolerance for others rather than relying on misinformation from unreliable sources, as well as encouraging social justice and helping people to see that a problem may not be as simple as it appears (for instance, the Indigenous population tend to have a problem with petrol sniffing. Although there are sniff-proof fuels around, then they try something else to get high, including strangely enough, Wite-Out/Liquid Paper/Tipp-Ex).

And as for The Arts....well let's see....if it wasn't for drama, then Shakespeare's works would just be words on a page that couldn't be read aloud because there was nothing to set the scene or explain how a person is feeling. Dance provides a great form of exercise and also allows for one to do so much with it: tell stories, communicate feelings, even messages. Music allows for that communication without words, a song can be played so many different ways: it can encourage someone to be happy, to communicate how someone feels about something, to tell a story, to set a mood, to provide backup for someone to sing a song about how they feel. Painting, drawing, sketching, sculpting: the way I see it is that they simply immortalize those feelings, those stories, those messages onto a medium where everybody can later find their own message.

As for health and PE (home ec tends to fall under this banner down here), students learn how to look after themselves. Particularly when you have some abusive families, you can at least educate the students on how to be healthier at home. On how to get out and about, even if they can't kick a ball or throw a punch at a bag.

There are benefits to going through the eight areas of learning (Yes I know I forgot number 8, which is Languages Other Than English-the reason why I didn't include this is because a lot of the benefits of learning that other language stem over into English) and cutting one or two of them does not result in a well-rounded education.

[BlaqueKatt]

Alcohol education for another reason entirely: misinformation.

I wish US schools taught this, especially with the attitude on alcohol we have in the US, it's scary.

Teachers can teach until their voice is gone and their feet are numb, but if the child does not want to learn, then he will not learn, no matter how hard the teacher attempts to engage him.

I can only speak for US schools, but we have a "one-size fits all" approach to teaching in many schools. Which doesn't work, as children aren't robots, so some students won't be engaged because the style of teaching is wrong for them. Some subjects like math and history seem to be taught in a very "dry" manner, so It's hard to be excited about them. For me history was awful, just memorizing dates, when I got older and started reading historical novels(as in actual history about actual things), I got excited about the very same things that had bored me to death a few years prior.

for anyone with a child that's struggling in math, I recommend the book :100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World, i brings math out of the mathbook and into the real world-which can be <gasp> fun.

History(US history at least), the book "Lies my teacher told me"

And a bit of world history Disaster!: A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues, and Other Catastrophes-discusses both natural disasters, and man made(stalin, pol pot, mao zedung, the great potato famine, the burning of rome), and slightly more engaging than a standard history book.

[AdminAssistant]

The teaching of history, at all levels, absolutely has to be revamped. Now, names and dates are important, and there are a few that should be memorized. But you have to teach how all the various parts of history piece together. You can easily structure most of Western history around the fact that France and England hate each other. As long as you don't over-generalize or teach myth as fact, then you can teach history as a story. You can even (shock) teach from the perspective of, "We don't know exactly what happened because there isn't enough evidence. This is our best guess."

[jackfaire]

and seriously stop glossing over modern history. If your talking ancient history you get everything from what was the fashion, popular culture, art, facts etc but the closer to modern time the more it's dates and figures without details.

[Greenday]

and seriously stop glossing over modern history. If your talking ancient history you get everything from what was the fashion, popular culture, art, facts etc but the closer to modern time the more it's dates and figures without details.

Heck, with all the history classes I've taken, I've never had an American history class that has even reached Vietnam. Though from what I could tell in my cousin's 4th grade class, they clearly are getting taught more recent history.

[jackfaire]

Heck, with all the history classes I've taken, I've never had an American history class that has even reached Vietnam. Though from what I could tell in my cousin's 4th grade class, they clearly are getting taught more recent history.

One of our teachers was in Vietnam so all the other history teachers would have him come into their classrooms to talk about it.

[Kheldarson]

Only issue with modern history is that unless modern history is taught as its own course (which it usually isn't) by the time any class makes it to modern history, you're out of time. So it's not that we want to just sling dates and notes, but with NCLB and standardized testing, you don't have much choice.

Which is still part of the major problem with the education program in the US.

[HYHYBT]

Why shouldn't schools teach fire safety? It only takes a couple hours a year, after all. (And the idea seems to be as much to get kids to tell their parents what they're doing wrong as anything else.)

[jackfaire]

, but with NCLB and standardized testing, you don't have much choice.

Neither really existed at my school when I was in high school. Part of the problem as I saw it was how many times they taught history. I lost track of how many grades had world history. Each time starting with the American Revolution and moving on.

Near as I can tell they thought they were giving us more details each time as we were getting older but they really weren't it was the same stuff over and over. From Elementary school through High School I learned the same world history about 5 times. At any point in one of those classes they could have decided to teach modern history.

I actually asked a teacher about that once and he said one theory is people felt that events like the 60s and such were too recent to need to be in history books.

I can actually see that as being the reason because if you think about it the people writing the history books when I was in school would have lived through anything from the 50s on.

The problem with that is it ignores the fact that the intended audiences for the history books will not have lived through that. My daughter wasn't even a year old when 9/11 happened.

She wasn't even born yet during Columbine. Never saw guys from Seattle change the face of music or any other events that 100 years from now students will study as history yet these are events she may never learn about unless like me she goes to her parents and says, "Hey tell me what it was like?"

To me I think there should at least be an elective taught about 20th Century history. I mean it's a hundred years where so much changed. My grandmother was born in 1910 and I was born in 1980 and most centuries before our childhoods would have been similar but in the 20th century they were so vastly different that it was fascinating to me.

It's amazing how much changed. Sorry that's my why it was important diatribe shutting up now.

[Greenday]

It also doesn't help when certain history teachers basically just skip a lot of important history to just cover stuff like fashion of the times, music and arts and ignore stuff like politics, wars, and such. I mean, my first teacher of History II (Civil War and on) only taught that first stuff. Barely talked about the Civil War and when we got to WWI, she skipped the war entirely and didn't even talk about how it affected the US or the world for that matter. Thank God she quit mid-semester and a new teacher came in. It was her first teaching gig and boy was she good. She taught about a very broad spectrum of history. When we talked about WWII, we discussed more than the Nazis and the Holocaust. We actually learned about the Africa campaign, Italy, the rest of Europe and Japan, including the history most people didn't know at the time (like Japanese torture and research being stolen by the US for its own medical gains).

It's the newer teachers I find that do the better job. They don't gloss over the facts, don't feed us the B.S. lies of history, etc.

[fireheart17]

Why shouldn't schools teach fire safety? It only takes a couple hours a year, after all. (And the idea seems to be as much to get kids to tell their parents what they're doing wrong as anything else.)

Not down here. It's done for up to a few weeks in primary schools and then not at all in high schools apart from maybe an SOSE (studies of society and environment) lesson on how bushfires happen and how to prevent them.

The reason why I feel that fire safety should not be taught in schools is because part of the fire safety lecture covers bushfires. You are meant to do this with your family for a reason: a lot of it involves what to do around the home.

[jackfaire]

The reason why I feel that fire safety should not be taught in schools is because part of the fire safety lecture covers bushfires. You are meant to do this with your family for a reason: a lot of it involves what to do around the home.

No one in my home even thought to have a plan in place for fire safety until it was given to me as a homework assignment. For a lot of families that is the first time they think to have a plan other than "panic"

Later we had a fire and my dad panicked while he was doing so I got my brother and sister out in accordance with the plan and managed to calm my dad down and get him to leave too. Fire safety isn't something a lot of families think about talking about as a family.

[fireheart17]

Here's the real kicker: most, if not all of the schools, place their NAPLAN results in their annual report, which anybody can read. Nearly all of the schools that I studied (the public ones) had very few students in the lowest area. The students in the low band consisted of primarily students who were disabled in some way, while the number of students who weren't disabled were few and far between.

[Seifer]

Science teaches us how the world works and more often than not, science and maths go hand in hand (physics anybody?)

Yeah, but science has all these "facts" that don't coincide with religion. We can't have that in schools, no siree!

Honestly, I never understood why people think reading, writing, and arithmetic are somehow going to magically make a child smarter. Some children (like me when I was younger) have serious trouble with one or more of "the 3 Rs", and a great way to ease them into it is to include either science, art, or music. The creative arts can be massively helpful to young children, since it allows them to explore and build their imagination. You can easily teach math through art, the same way you can teach writing through science or vice-versa. It's all about finding what the CHILD is interested in and building on it.

Oh, and it's funny how schools focus on arithmetic, yet don't care that their students have no problem solving skills. A child might be able to add and subtract, but if they can't figure out how to get to a job interview on time (while figuring in the factors of traffic, speed, etc), then they're fucked.

Real-world example:

I gave my students (second graders) a problem to solve. It was something that could easily happen, and would require a bit of logic and decision making.

They were given a hypothetical situation in which they had a birthday party at home, and were trying to put together goodie bags for their guests. However, they didn't have enough of each item to put in every bag. So, they had to make a decision on what they thought would be a fair trade-off, i.e. one guest might get a toy car, while another received a few pieces of candy. The beauty of it was that there was NO RIGHT OR WRONG ANSWERS - I just wanted to see if the children could problem solve and come up with a solution they felt was "fair."

Holy shit, you'd think that I asked some of those kids to split the atom. No idea what they were doing, got frustrated easily, and one child even gave up after having a tantrum.

[fireheart17]

Yeah, but science has all these "facts" that don't coincide with religion. We can't have that in schools, no siree!

Oh, and it's funny how schools focus on arithmetic, yet don't care that their students have no problem solving skills. A child might be able to add and subtract, but if they can't figure out how to get to a job interview on time (while figuring in the factors of traffic, speed, etc), then they're fucked.

That's the problem that seems to be plaguing adults today. I can calculate speed no problem: time= distance/speed, speed=distance/time and distance=speed x time.

Fortunately the whole creationism vs evolution debate is not as hot down here as it is in the States. Evolution is not even discussed until high school usually.