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‘Education Reform’ Category

  1. Government Schools Enfeeble Parents

    January 14, 2014 by Tunya

    This is now TWO WEEKS since I started to COMPILE a KNOWLEDGE BANK for parents dealing with public schools.  As I refresh my memory by going through my archives I see that things are NOT GETTING BETTER.  The same obstacles and mindsets of the system still prevail to stymie parents.

    Did you score 100% or near in the Dysfunctionality Rating ?  http://www.parentsteachingparents.net/2014/01/disturbing-trends-for-parents-1981/

    I am going to develop my thesis that things are GETTING WORSE.  As COLONIZERS AND USURPERS the players in the system are now employing ever more sophisticated pscyhological techniques to rob parents of their natural-born instincts and shape the language to ENFEEBLE PARENTS TO STAY COMPLIANT TO THE SYSTEM'S NEEDS.

    I will develop this theme as I go along. Deliberate deskilling of parents, in my opinion, is a moral crime.  Compliant parents actually harm the cause of public accountability in public education.  If ordinary citizens feel that parents are satisfied, or non-complaining, then they too will be lulled into avoiding DUE DILIGENCE in how taxpayer money is spent or corrupted.  

    FIVE ALERTS CAME IN TODAY that cause me to start this train of commentary EARLIER THAN LATER.

    1   The annual PARENT SATISFACTION SURVEY is now going out.  The results are always the same — parents love their school, but think the whole system is doing poorly. "Stroking" of parents in individual schools is proving very successful !

    2    REPORT CARDS are to be changed in a number of districts to eliminate grades, to be replaced with "communicating" with parents.  This is ILLEGAL and outside the requirements of the School Act (BC).

    3   Again, the teacher union, is ACTIVELY PROMOTING PARENT WITHDRAWL OF STUDENTS from standardized tests which test for basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.

    4   Our BC TEACHER REGULATION BRANCH makes it easy for parents or public to easily check ithe credentials and status history of any teacher in a public or publiclly funded school. Today, in one school district out of 60 I found I was unable to access the list of names of teaching staff.  A query is in place.

    5   I am closely following what's happening in AUSTRALIA with their just announced REVIEW.  Even on top of a recent complete curricular change, considerable criticism had arisen.  I briefly summarize one Editorial titled "Learning by Gobbledygook." Apparently the previous overhaul yielded considerable "wooly expressions and overt social engineering". ALL curriculum subjects are to integrate and contain THREE OVERARCHING PRIORITIES – indigenous history/culture, global engagement (especially Asia) and sustainability.  "In toto" this editorial continues, this "review is very much in order."

     

    Category Education Reform, Obstacles, Parent Tribal Memory | Tags: | No Comments

  2. Who Listens To Parents?

    January 13, 2014 by Tunya

    It doesn’t matter how logical and practical parents are with their suggestions — it doesn’t matter how much common sense they demonstrate — parents don’t seem to count in decisions being made about education of their children.


    The letter from the young parent in Cowichan School District, says a lot —

    "This is exactly the suggestion I wrote on my form at the Cowichan School District initial consultation. School boards should be abolished and school-based management adopted. Imagine how much money could be saved and how much more child focused the system could become."  But who will listen to such sensible suggestions?

    Far too many decisions in public education are made for the convenience of “the system”. It’s become, unfortunately, an employment agency for educators and bureaucrats who easily overwhelm any logic coming from parents who advocate for their children.


    Older parents can’t wait for the day they will “graduate” with their children and leave all these frustrating, often unsatisfactory, school relations behind.

    Really old parents, who are now grandparents, can’t believe that the same old problems keep arising, with parents still left out in the cold.

    Whereas the other players in the system have the benefit of strong organizations and an institutional memory, parents do not. Reinventing the wheel is the norm. But, of course, any parent’s blurted out commonsense is still left in the dust as the system steamrolls ahead with its own priorities. 

    And parents, on a day-to-day basis, are really too busy with their children to do much research or organizing.

    Thankfully, with the Internet, we are blessed with some enhanced ability to sort through issues. Parent knowledge is a scarce and untapped resource, rarely consulted or instrumental in decision-making. About the only time this knowledge counts is when families decide to home educate or choose a private school for their child. Or, if they live in New Zealand, they are involved in school-based management.

     

    Category Education Reform, Obstacles, Parent Tribal Memory | Tags: | No Comments

  3. DISTURBING TRENDS FOR PARENTS – 1981

    January 12, 2014 by Tunya

    Why re-invent the wheel?  Most enterprises learn from the past.  While institutions that parents deal with — the school boards, the principals, unions, etc., etc. all have massive resources to draw upon and an “institutional memory” to be able to advance their causes and needs, parents do not have this knowledge bank.

    I’m trying on these pages of PTP to bring forward “old” pieces of information and will also be adding new material.  For today I will briefly provide quotes from my 1981 newsletter showing DISTURBING TRENDS IN EDUCATION

    1 — DECLINE IN PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT — “If we believe in the principle that public education is of the public, for the public, and by the public, then the present trend is bad. In my study I have found that we have less public involvement that we had ten years ago.”  – Dean of Education, Art Kratzmann

    2 — POLITICS IN TEACHER TRAINING — “Too often education faculty members seem bent on pressing particular dogma or ideology”. Walter Hardwick, former Deputy Minister of Education, BC

    3 — PARENTS NOT AWARE OF DECLINE — “I don’t think parents are as acutely aware of the achievement decline  . . . I think there’s an enormous unawareness on the part of parents as to what the schools are doing.” John Goodlad

    4 — CRIME/LD CONNECTION — “I estimate that 80-90%% of the young people who came before me in the provincial court were learning disabled as revealed by their pre-sentence reports.” Judge Nancy Morrison

    5 — PURSUIT OF PANACEAS — “Schools, probably more than any other institution in our society, seem to be particularly vulnerable to fads, poorly tested concepts and the need to appear scientific.” Irwin A Hyman, Policy Studies Review

    6 — BLOATED  BUREAUCRACIES —  “In Toronto, only 5,000 of the school board’s 9,000 employees are teachers.” TODAY magazine

    7 — LIP SERVICE TO PARENT INVOLVEMENT —  “Will we as professionals welcome parent involvement . . . or will we follow governmental regulations in the most patronizing way, meeting the regulations only because they are required?” Special Education In Canada

    8 — MISTEACHING LEADS TO LEARNING PROBLEMS — “I always see far more problems in the WAY the students have been taught previously than in the students themselves.” W A T White, University of Oregon

    9 — SCHOOL BOARDS OFF TRACK —  “School Boards deal largely with fringe elements instead of more basic features of school organization and the main components of curricula.” OECD Review Canadian Education ‘76

    10 — DOMINANT TEACHER POWER —  “Citizens seek to enlarge their control of schools. This comes at the same time that teachers seek increased autonomy FROM lay control. Thus, laymen and teachers are on a collision course.” Donald Myers in “Teacher Power”

    2014 Exercise — Match the Quotes to the Issues and Score 0-10 with  0 = NOT applicable, 10 = VERY applicable today.  TOTAL SCORE ________________ = DYSFUNCTIONALITY LEVEL

    Category Education Reform, Obstacles, Parent Tribal Memory | Tags: | 1 Comment

  4. Home Education as a “Movement”

    January 11, 2014 by Tunya

    The Birth of the Home Education Movement – 1972 – Mexico

    I remember people ardently ranting and raging against oppressive compulsory schooling.  About poverty and the thwarted aspirations of the poor.  About the escalation of schooling as destructive as the escalation of weapons. About school and medical systems showing declining results as more money was being poured in …

    These were the heady discussions students and academics enjoyed at CIDOC (Center for Intercultural Documentation) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in the Spring and Summer of 1972. Deinstitutionalization was the main theme.

    I had just completed teacher training at Ottawa Teachers College and was there (two young daughters in tow) to listen to the lectures of Ivan Illich who had just published the book Deschooling Society.

    His ideas had already spread via many articles in magazines and book reviews.  His complete book is available, all short 116 pages, for reading online or downloading athttp://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/ If you dare comprehend the book, you will be a different person.

    “School is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling’s sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers.”

    “Unquestionably, the educational process will gain from the deschooling of society even though this demand sounds to many schoolmen like treason to the enlightenment. But it is enlightenment itself that is now being snuffed out in the schools.”

    “Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school.”

    These words were spoken way before we had online education. If people pride themselves now on the advances of this technological magic, just read the chapter of 40 years ago, “Learning Webs”.  “Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. … a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public’s chances for learning … It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.”

    Illich was a priest, a philosopher, an inspired prophet. He laced his talks with Greek myths and poetry. When we heard his version of how Prometheus tricked the gods out of their monopoly of fire, we tried to project that concept to health, education, welfare and other fields monopolized by the state.

    Neither Illich nor any of our discussions ever conceived of the notion of home education as a movement, though we frequently talked about home care of the sick. It was not till I had a discussion with John Holt, the author of such books as “How Children Learn” and “How Children Fail” that the movement toward home education started to percolate.

    So, one morning, beneath a heavily-laden mango tree from which John partook, this was our conversation:

    John: Now that you have completed teacher training, where are you going to teach?

    Tunya: I didn’t get training to teach in a school. I took it to teach my own children.

    J: Is it legal?

    T: Yes, I’ve studied the legislations. It’s possible across North America and England. Parents are to cause their children to obtain an education at a school or elsewhere. It’s this “elsewhere” clause that allows home education.

    J: Well, at least you’re now qualified to teach them.

    T: I also found out that you don’t need a qualification to teach your own children.

    J. What about socialization? They’ll be different.

    T: Kids should be individuals. They’ll have plenty of friends from the groups we belong to. Besides, there is a lot of negative socialization in school …

    J: What if they want to go to college?

    T: They will probably be strong, independent learners and will have an advantage to transfer in…

    J: SMART CITY!

    5 years later John Holt, who already had a large mailing list of people interested in education reform, started the Home Education Movement with his newsletter, “Growing without Schooling” and the rest is history …

    Meanwhile, Dr. Raymond Moore was spreading the word amongst his mainly Christian audience (The Learning Home) and paid frequent visits to Vancouver, Canada, especially when we held Home Learning Fairs in the 80’s.

    Besides jump-starting the home education movement John Holt had the wisdom and foresight to caution against the threats and antagonisms that arise from people splitting off from conventional schooling. This quote is worth posting front and center on our bulletin boards, and deserves a lot of pondering in our present day (Feb 2010):

     

    “Today freedom has different enemies. It must be fought for in different ways. It will take very different qualities of mind and heart to save it.”

    The link to my article which helped validate the movement in Canada is here: Home Education – The Third Option (1987)http://education-advisory.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/homeeducation-third-option.pdf

    See also: Parent Rights and Their Children’s Education (1977)http://genuine-education-reformtoday.org/2010/04/06/parent-rights-and-their-childrens-education/

    by Tunya Audain

    Education Advisory http://genuine-education-reform-today.org/

    2010/02/09

     

    Category Education Reform, Parent Tribal Memory | Tags: | 1 Comment

  5. Thinking Skills Then & Now

    January 10, 2014 by Tunya

    Critical Thinking is one of the competencies deemed essential for career, college and citizenship in the 21st Century.  However, there is still a tug-of-war between what shape CT will take — logical approaches to issues or political analyses regarding domination/victim issues (also called critical pedagogy).

    In the 80s thinking skills were still free of political tones and undertones.

    These quotes are from a Dec 28, 1988 News Release from the Ministry of Education, British Columbia, Canada (25 years ago, a quarter century ago !) :

    “Ministry of Education promotes thinking skills seminars

    – The teaching of creative thinking in BC schools will be fostered  . . . through a series of seminars for teachers

    – as many as 80 teams of educators will be subsidized with grants of up to $1,000 per team

    – the seminars, by Creative Learning International [will be joined] by guest lecturers Tony Buzan and Edward De Bono, both internationally known authorities in creative thinking.

    – Education Minister Tony Brummet said that the funding is in keeping with the Ministry’s emphasis on developing higher-order thinking skills in BC students.

     -“ Knowledge is growing at an ever-increasing rate,” said the Minister. “Our future citizens must be able to define the information they require, to discriminate between the important and unimportant, to set priorities, to make wise decisions while maintaining open minds.

    “They should be able to ask imaginative questions, define and set goals and solve problems creatively.” 

    Category Education Reform, Parent Tribal Memory, Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

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