carrot soup

[keturn]

I've just read the first chapter of Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming our Schools. It's written by the Change Leadership Group at Harvard.

One of the things that stood out for me in this chapter is where they're making the case for not "reform" in education but "reinvention."

America's system of public education, especially at

Comments

[glowing_fish]

Ah, I know a little bit about the history of education in the US, mostly at the post-secondary level. I know a bit about the history of the history of education, too!

Anyway, historically, not many students finished high school in the US, and even fewer went on to college. But those numbers were always higher in the US then in Western Europe. People have a big misperception about this, when I showed people this diagram:

[linettasky]

Reading Little House on the Prairie as a girl, I was always struck at how most of the students only finished eighth grade. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about being a teacher at eighteen, and teaching eighth graders who were older and bigger than she was. Finishing eighth grade was an achievement on the prairie. I grant that the system was different, but: my grandmother's older sister, who began teaching school in 1946 in rural Idaho, experienced exactly the same thing. At a time when my suburban, middle-class Californian grandparents were being pushed to go to college, my poor, rural Idahoan grandparents were lucky to finish eighth grade. (That grandmother didn't finish high school until after she was done having children.)

Anecdotal, yes, but I don't think totally irrelevant.

[daniel_t_miles]

I'm really glad to see that this line of thinking has made it far enough into the main stream that someone wrote a book. I'm really angry about what happened to me in the public school system in CO, I wouldn't wish it on any thinking, feeling human being and I haven't seen evidence that it's much different here or anywhere in the US.

I think it'd be great if we had a national conversation about what we want from our school system and then started over from first-principles to derive a new one because this one is defective by design.