Why Bill Gates’ Education Reform is Off-Target – by Shawn Beightol
http://shawnbeightol.com/blog/?p=275
Last night, ABC News aired Bill Weir’s interview with Bill Gates on Nightline. Topics ranged from the Gates’ Foundation global work on curing polio and malaria to his last conversation with Steve Jobs. The print summary of the interview concludes with Gates’ vision of education reform:
“You take at least 2 percent of the teachers, train them very well and have them do structured visitations,” he said. “And they tell the teacher, ‘OK, you were good at this, but you didn’t engage these kids very well. You didn’t create discussion here. You didn’t explain why a kid would wanna know this thing,”
In this condensed version of what Gates thinks is wrong with education and how to fix it, we see a very disturbing and increasingly popular misconception: that the public educator’s purpose, in addition to presenting and transferring knowledge and skills, is to provide the child with the etiquette and social skills needed to function in a PUBLIC setting…in an entertaining manner.
Absent from Gates’ analysis and increasingly from politicians and society as a whole is the understanding of the role and responsibility of the family to develop their children socially, emotionally, intellectually, as well as physically.
Children today can be neglected for hours and days by their parents as their parents pursue the mighty dollar or some other sense of lack in their life. Children are left to raise themselves, with pizza, soda, happy meals, frozen dinners and snacks thrown at them to fulfill the parental responsibility of physical/nutritional “care” – we see the disturbing results of this in the reports of widespread obesity.
Parent’s do the same thing with their children’s waking time: they throw toys and entertainment devices at them to occupy them so the parents can pursue whatever else is priority to them. When children are over-saturated in a culture focused on amusement, it is not surprising that they cannot function in an environment that expects them to sit, listen, read, write, and respond in a civil way. I remind my students that the etymology of the word “Amuse” is simply to “Not Think.”
As surely as the nutritional neglect and abuse has been observed increasingly among our nation’s children, so too the emotional, social and intellectual neglect is producing dysfunction in the critical development and health of our children…its just not so obviously seen…at least until the damage is long accomplished.
See here and here for a discussion on school responsibility versus parental responsibility.
But we teachers see it in hundreds of thousands of aimless and listless children who can’t sit still, can’t engage in conversation, can’t see the point of improving their mind and their skill-sets.
It is not the responsibility of public education or educators to 1) occupy/entertain a child – such a focus and expectation in a market economy would result in each classroom being staffed by Dane Cook , Daniel Tosh, and their “colleagues” (comedians) delivering superficial anecdotes rather than in depth analyses and skill transfers. 2) convince a kid of why he/she should learn something that both the federal government and the state governments have agreed are required curriculum. The assumption here is that the material being taught in the classroom is essential to producing an educated and skilled populace capable of building, maintaining their communities, their culture and their nation.
It is the parents role to send to school children who are ready to be educated.
Perhaps Bill Gates team of visiting teachers would better serve education if they were to go around visiting the children’s families.
