Today my sister wrote a journal entry lamenting the abuse of literature by trying to teach it to high school students who are woefully incapable of comprehending it. I responded to her post and I want to copy/paste my response here because it addresses some thoughts I’ve had on education recently. The response:
I did study literature in college fairly extensively. I remember reading an essay about exactly what you just described. It cataloged how The Lord of the Flies was first analysed at a phd level and then masters, then undergraduate, and then high school. It got stuck at high school because it had reached near incomprehensibility to the students.
The goal of teaching literature to high school students is supposed to stretch their capabilities. I agree that stretching leads to growth, but I frequently wonder if we are stretching too hard too fast. No matter how many times you walk a child around the room holding on to your fingers, he isn’t going to walk by himself until he is developmentally ready to do so. Lots of parents around here lament the fact that the schools aren’t teaching enough. Kids should know MORE by fourth grade. They should know this, they should know that, why isn’t more history taught? Why haven’t they memorized the 50 states yet? My kid knows the original 13 colonies in first grade! I listen to all of this and feel like they’ve made education into some kind of a race.
Education is not a race. Education should be a process. The most important thing my kids learn from school is how to learn. They need basic reading skills, basic math skills, basic history for reference, and then they need to learn how to use a library. If they learn that, then ANYTHING they want to know they can go and find out by themselves. This is why my kids remain in public school rather than private school or a charter school. I do want them to go to college, but I don’t need it to be Harvard, the local community college is just fine with me. (And cheaper!)
When I was little I remember watching the olympic gymnastics competition. We always got totally beaten by the team from the USSR because they would snatch young girls and make them live nothing but gymnastics for 10 years. The Japanese and Chinese teams had the same sort of intense focus. I remember hearing adults lament the loss of childhood that represented. Now as an adult I watch my neighbors running their kids to soccer and piano and dance and gymnastics and karate and then to a special charter school which they deem to be sufficiently academic. I watch all this and I wonder if America is becoming what we once mourned over. Where is the time for kids to play?
That strayed far from a discussion of literature. Sorry, I’ll get off my soap box now.
You can stand there a while longer, we’re certainly willing to listen. 🙂 And I agree with your points. Filling a child’s day with Things to Do is not automatically going to get them in the college of their choice, particularly if they’re eight years old.
I was blessedly free of after school activities as a child, aside from the usual cub scouts/boy scouts thing. Otherwise my parents allowed me to do as I saw fit, which usually meant reading voraciously, or watching TV, or perhaps just running about like a lunatic outside. Didn’t effect my chances of going to college either way as near as I figure.
Hmm. I had literature classes every year in high school… I read most of the books, and skipped some of them. I had a tendency to only read what I was interested in. But I did learn how to recognize thematic elements in literature, which I think leads to the capability to appreciate a piece of literary work more than I’d be able to otherwise…
Of course, I’m a programmer. I’ll never “need” that knowledge again. But it’s nice to have. A well-rounded education – a well-rounded childhood, really – is the most important part, I think. That, and learning the sort of critical thinking and analysis skills that both literary and scientific studies are based in…
I could never understand forcing your kids into doing one single thing from age 4 or 5 on. There’s no choice in that! My little brother played football when he was 8 or 9 – “real” football, with pads and helmets and tackling and everything. There was this brief feeling in my family of “Hey, if he starts now, and gets good, he could have a career ahead of him!” Then he decided after the season was over that he wasn’t that interested in it, and that was the end of it. But he’s interested in so many things – just like the rest of my family, I guess – that it’d be thoughtless to force him to pick one now. (Of course, it’s never too late to decide to do something different with your life – something which doesn’t even need stating, at least not in this journal!)
Hm. I seem to have borrowed your soap box. Sorry about that. In short: yeah, I agree with you on pretty much everything here. 😀
I think that many people who homeschool or use private schools don’t object to what public schools don’t teach, but what they do. I don’t mean sex education or evolution, either. I mean things like this, which were taught to me:
* Bullying is a fact of life that you must live with, because they outnumber you and no one can or will stop it.
* Keeping quiet and sitting still is the most important skill to master
* Being ignored is good, because at least you’re not being tormented
* Having no responsibilities and no rights is Good, and These Are The Best Years of Your Life
* Memorization is more important than understanding
I went to public schools as a kid, and I am not trying to say that public schools are the worst of all worlds, or that my parents (or you!) made a mistake in sending me to public schools. For that matter, I got my BA and my MA at state universities, too; good value for the money. 🙂
But my point is that I understand why many people do not want to send their kids to private schools, and I don’t think it’s all about wanting them to be overachievers, either.
Fortunately schools (at least locally) have figured out that elementary school bullying has potentially huge long term consequences. There are many programs being implemented to reduce bullying.
Keeping quiet and sitting still ARE important skills for kids to learn. I wish Gleek could master them. 😉
Schools (again locally) are moving away from memorization as the standard form of learning.
Undoubtedly there are many parents who choose private schools or homeschooling for exactly the reasons you name. But in my neighborhood all the parents I’ve spoken with (and I’ve talked with lots) who have chosen alternate schools to the local public one have done it for academic reasons. What that says about my neighborhood and my local school I’m not sure. I AM sure that I’m glad that my firstgrader doesn’t have 2 hours of homework every night like some of his friends do.
I had a big lesson on kids activities this past month. They each get to pick one activity. Link and Gleek both picked gymnastics. Kiki was waffling between gymnastics and art. I nudged her into choosing art even though she was leaning toward gymnastics. I felt like gymnastics was just new and shiny and that she would get more long-term enjoyment out of art. Whether I was right or not is irrelevant, I influenced her decision. So when art got difficult last December she was there because I wanted her to be, not because SHE wanted to be. I had to back way off and realize that these after school activities are FOR THE KIDS. It is their one fun thing they get to choose. And if they stop enjoying it, they should be allowed to stop without any interference from me. I’m not going to make them stick with an activity that they don’t enjoy because “it’s good for them” they get enough of that with school and housework.
I told Kiki that she could choose whatever she wanted. Gym, Art, or nothing at all, but if she chose Art she would need to have a better attitude about it or her teacher couldn’t have her taking up space. I was pleased that when she thought it through she decided to stick with Art. But I would also have been fine had she chosen something else. For the first time it was really and truly HER choice. I honestly do not care if she becomes a career artist. I don’t need Gleek or Link to become gymnasts. I want my kids to have lives full of enriching experiences and if that means a different activity every six months, so be it.
er. . . here I am on the soap box again. ooops.
The ability to handly boredom and find something to do without resorting to television is and incredibly valuable life skill for kids to learn. They never get the chance if both they and their parents are worn out shuttling to and from activities.
One problem I’ve seen in the public school system is that people tend to implement a lot of well-intended but not particularly well-thought-out programs to fix the rampant inadequacies.
About ten years ago the big rage in northern California was “mainstreaming”. Students in remedial and lower-level math and english courses were suffering from learned inadequacies and inferiority complexes because they were so clearly separated from more advanced students. As a solution, someone at my high school proposed combining multiple mathematics levels into a single classroom, arguing that advanced students would not be hampered by the slower teaching speed, but would in fact deepen their knowledge of the subject matter by tutoring their peers.
…um, right.
Hmm. The only thing I will say on the topic is that sometimes our schools happen to miss something important that you can only easily learn while young. Where are the language classes? My school system taught languages after 10th grade, which is long after where you can easily pick up a language.
Okay I was inaccurate. A reason that parents have given me for alternate schooling which I actually see great value in is smaller class sizes. The increase in individual attention is very beneficial to ANY child.
Putting students of different levels COULD be beneficial if the class size was small enough and if the teacher was trained to manage smaller classes and mixed level work. Unfortunately the public school system tends to large classes and minimal on-the-job training for teachers.
I read a fascinating article once which showed that reducing class sizes makes no difference in student test scores unless the teachers are retrained to maximize the benefits of smaller classes. If the teachers are trained, then smaller classes made an enormous difference.
Some of our local public schools have spanish immersion programs which teach spanish right along with reading and writing. There is a waiting list.
I can’t see what’s wrong with lord of the flies at a high school level – it’s at that stage that people start working out group dynamics, and Lord Of the Flies is all about group dynamics. Are they going to miss heaps? yes. Are they going to be able to basically understand what is going on? yes.
Lord of the Flies is easily the most awful piece of drek posing as “literature” ever foisted upon anyone.
Vorn
My experience with Lord of the Flies was that everyone became fixated on the Pig incident “He stuck the spear where?!” It’s all a haze of boys being violent and cruel to one another. There might have been something about leadership in there somewhere and for some reason glasses were important.
Teenagers are just beginning to experience group dynamics, most of them are not ready to begin analyzing group dynamics yet.
On the other hand, I’m not going to rule out the possibility that I learned something from Lord of the Flies that was truly useful to me, but that I’ve internalized so thoroughly that I’ve completely forgotten I learned it.
It is possible I’m seriously underestimating teenagers here. I haven’t been one for 14ish years and none of my kids have reached that stage yet.
Yeah, that IS fascinating. An interesting tangental question is whether teachers who’ve had the smaller-class-size training are able to leverage some of that training to improve performance in larger class sizes as well.
I occassionally wish I had gone to elementary school in Luxembourg. The country has three official languages and the way I hear it, children speak Luxembourgish in kindergarten and German in elementary school, except for math and science classes, which are taught in French.
Somewhere in early middle school they start learning English as their first foreign language. Talk about immersion programs!
You probably aren’t underestimating us much. When I first read Lord of the Flies in school three years ago (eighth grade, I think), I’m sure we wouldn’t have understood it a bit without a teacher prompting us. Honestly, we didn’t understand it all that much with our teacher prompting us, but we still learned a lot from reading it. Sure, we needed lots of help, but we enjoyed it and gained more confidence in ourselves and our reading abilities.
Our class didn’t become too badly fixated on the Pig incident, and we were able to recognize and (think we could) understand some symbols–glasses, fire, conch (if I remember correctly). I remember that book taught me what a symbol was. Even if we weren’t ready to begin analyzing group dynamics, we believed we could, and the book made us think.
Sure, we didn’t get all we could out of the book, but it definitely challenged us and I’m positive I learned from the experience. Your sister is right–we probably are incapable of comprehending it–but attempting to taught us how to learn and try. 🙂
There you go Nancy. A valid arguement for high schools and junior highs to continue to “abuse literature”.
Class Size
In California, one of the recent trends was to reduce class size. They implemented it progressively, starting with kindergarten. Each year they added one more grade until Kindergarten through 3rd had only 20 students.
One day I was substituting a 4th grade class. This class was full of kids who knew how to be students. At lunch I was talking to other 4th grade substitutes who were having a similar experience–great students, few problems. We all wondered why and then I realized that this group of 4th graders was the first group of students who had had reduced class size from the time they started school. With smaller class size, the teachers had the time to help each student learn how to be a student. Potential problems were resolved before they became problems. I have since talked to teachers who are in the classroom daily and they confirm these statements.
I don’t think a teacher has to be taught to teach in a reduced class size setting. I think (on the main) that being in a reduced class size situation frees a teacher to use what she has been taught and to focus on learning behaviors as well as learning subject matter.