sgeeeee said:
I also think that our large cities have created a dual education system for K-12. The affluent pay to send their kids to real schools that educate while the inner-city public schools become baby-sitting for future fellons.
In the biography of the rock group Aerosmith ("Walk This Way"), nearly every member attended a private school. Some of them even graduated.
They'd all been expelled from the public schools for felonious behavior.
fluffy said:
History and English, yes, I would classify those as "soft" disciplines. They certainly do require and develop critical thinking which is very important. I don't think they develop problem-solving abilities the same way as math and "hard" sciences do. Economics is largely applied math so it's not a "soft" discipline to me.
Eh, you're on your own here. I've known many engineers who'd benefit from the study of history and English. I'm not sure that I can say the converse, although they were eventually able to produce a diagram of the steam-plant cycle and explain its functioning.
I come from a different engineering sector than most, but I've consistently found that those "softies" are better critical thinkers than the engineers. The #1 graduate in my 100+ nuclear power school class was an economics major. Over half of the top ten were from non-engineering curricula. One of the front runners, an electrical engineering major, was dismissed from the program for appropriating sailing equipment from his alma mater.
The nuke school instructors preferred the officers from the "soft" disciplines because they didn't arrive with any preconceived notions of how the material should be learned. They just learned it the way they were taught.
fluffy said:
I'm not sure what you mean when you say teenagers don't have credibility in displaying problem-solving/analytical thinking skills? From my own experience, my problem-solving and critical thinking skills, as applied to "hard" sciences, were fully or at least mostly developed by age 13-14.
Real-time MRI and PET scans have shown that, before the age of 16 in almost all teens and before the age of 20 for many of them, most decision-making activity occurs in the amygdala (considered the brain's emotional component) rather than in "adult" locations. The answer to the typical teen question "What were you thinking?!?" is "I wasn't."
Some scientists consider that human rational decision-making skills don't really mature until age 25.
fluffy said:
I'm a huge sci-fi fan, but unfortunately I don't see the education system you mentioned being successful in real life. Those life skills are very important and its every parent's responsibility to cultivate them in kids, but I just don't see them translating into kids picking up math, sciences, and other disciplines on their own. However, if it really works, then I'm all for it
It's a component of homeschooling called "unschooling".
Last year Time magazine had a popular article on gender learning differences. Way too many kids enter school not yet ready to learn, but the system starts them at a chronological age. The bell curve is very flat with fat tails. Young boys may not be mentally ready, let alone motivated, to read until they're nine or ten years old. Yet from an early age they're forced to do something they may not be ready to do. (Some think that boys don't learn to read until they need the cheat codes for their video games.) However every kid is ready to learn to play, to talk, to get along, to figure out how to do the "grownup" stuff like traveling or shopping, and to pick up the necessary social skills as they need them.
By the time they're in the double digits ages the bell curve looks more like statistics classes. They're all probably ready to learn to read and do math, if they haven't been burned by their "learning experiences" when they were younger. Homeschoolers have been able to pursue their interests, too, and become much better at self-directed learning than their public-school "peers".
One of the biggest problems of the public education system is that the kids who aren't ready (or able) to learn the subject of the day won't sit there quietly while the other kids learn their stuff. Teaching becomes more a function of classroom management than of education.