Are Students Getting Worse?

when Co 19 forced students to take classes from home we all had a funny feeling that it wasn't going to go well and it didn't consider the case of Vivien carbo according to AP carbo thought her daughter's Boston School District was doing the right thing when officials kept classrooms closed for most students for more than a year carbo a caregiver for hospice patients didn't want to risk them getting coid 19 and extending pandemic school closures through the spring of 2021 is what many in her community said was best to keep kids and adults safe but her daughter became depressed and stopped doing schoolwork or paying attention to online classes the former honor rooll student failed nearly all of her eighth grade courses she's behind said carbo whose daughter is now in the 10th grade it didn't work at all knowing what I know now I would say they should have put them in school then again putting children back in school especially with the halfhazard nature of getting kids to follow safety measures was probably not going to go well either according to the American Academy of Pediatrics as of May 11th 2023 nearly 15.6 million children were reported to have tested positive for Co 19 since the onset of the pandemic according to available state reports and according to Oxford Co was the eighth leading cause of death in children and young people with over 1300 in 2021 and 2022 that's not to mention the countless effects of long coid now presumably even if you press ter carbo would probably prefer her child not be stricken with a potentially deadly autoimmune disease even at the cost of a few test scores then again who's to say ultimately is it not true that online classes and the overall strains of Life under coid have caused negative reactions from students resulting in something we can call coid learning loss this seems to be the charge of a vast amount of news stories and social media posts of recent times some of which involve teachers showing out outright disgust for the appearent state of their classrooms no y'all can we talk about it can we please talk about let's take a moment to discuss let's take a moment to debrief let's take a moment to unpack I'm going just say this I teach seventh grade they are still performing on the fourth grade level then ibody talking about how they just keep moving passing them on they just keep passing them on passing them on passing them on passing them on passing them on passing them on I can put as many zeros in this gra book as I want to they going to move that child to the eighth grade next year let's unpack because y'all be quick to talk about oh the teacher this the teacher this it's your job it's your job baby I just got here 30 days ago she was performing on the fourth grade level since fourth grade and fourth graders be nice I still have kids performing on grade K 1 2 and third grade levels I could probably count on one hand how many kids are actually performing on a grade level and these our Future Leaders our future doctors our future nurses our future please please now what that teacher's viral Tik Tok has expressed is not something that's exactly new to hear from teachers the response to it has been mixed next some can complain about the tone and how dismissive it seems to be of the students which teachers are meant to care for and should be mortified at the prospect of embarrassing publicly others can respond by saying that sometimes the truth needs to be put harshly in order for people to listen what I'm wondering is is he right is what he's describing even new is he describing it accurately for what it is and why does he think confronting parents about it in this way will do something to solve this structural issue in my opinion students are not getting worse in this video we need to talk about the myth of learning loss and rethink schooling as a whole because the education system has not been undermined by poor choices and Global crises it has been exposed by them during the really terrible year of teaching at the community college where everything was very structured then I was fueled by bitterness into looking into different ways of doing things and I was like you know what this sucks like I can't do pbl what are other things like this whole system is terrible today's video is sponsored by endle endle is personalized soundscapes to help you focus relax and sleep I downloaded the app recently I enjoyed it I like how you can move the pad around to adjust the soundscape however you see fit it sounds really cool and it'll bring something entirely new to the field of ambient music I I think by creating these personalized soundscapes for you which according to your input can help you relax can help you focus and sleep it's is very advanced technology there have been some positive reviews from people who have ADHD that it's helped improve their focus there have been some folks who talk about it helping them sleep folks with sleeping disorders ttis I found it to be a enjoyable experience when I used it so maybe you should give it a try the first 100 people to download endle by clicking the link below will get a free week of audio experience es sounds pretty good give it a try thank you to endle for sponsoring this video let's get back to it to get a sense of whether there's really a crisis going on like that teacher says I needed to talk to people in the field so I reached out to a friend of mine and this was her response dear Elliot you asked me if as a school teacher I agree with the idea that Co has made students worse here's my response I I don't agree that Co is the sole reason students are getting worse because there have been problems preceding Co that people are now seeing but Co complicated things kids are not being taught the same way other kids or their parents have been taught before obviously the education system is bound to change but kids are being taught to pass a standardized test or other assessments not actually learning what they're being taught I talked to a teacher a couple years ago and she mentioned that she's been a teacher for a couple decades now and she loved it before she was able to be creative and had more input while making her lesson plans now she's not loving it as much of course she still wants to make a difference for her students and wants to see them succeed but she doesn't feel like she's really doing much with the curriculum she has to follow a lot of the sentiment with the teachers I've met is that the kids are just memorizing to pass these tests and if the students were asked to apply what they learned into real world problems they wouldn't be able to do it also they're not being taught to read I mean yes they're learning their letter sounds and learning site words but I don't know I feel like the focus on reading changed there are a handful of kids who read for pleasure and at least in the classrooms I've been in I don't see much focus on reading books they read passages from a workbook or worksheet and are asked to answer questions about the passage like how they would on a standardized test but I haven't really seen time dedicated to reading and enjoying a book if there's time it's after the teacher finished everything she wanted to accomplish that day and they can have book clubs or guided reading time which is pretty rare or the class is a higher grade fourth or fifth grade gifted class social studies and science is barely taught in the school I work at science is treated the same as music class or gym class the kids have science with an outside teacher once a week social studies is taught by The Home Room teacher but again if they have time and if they finished reading the math and Ela lessons of the day they're also taught of a special holidays coming up but it's usually like let's read this passage about or let's watch video on and make a craft Reading Writing and math takes priority throughout the school day and it's definitely catered to standardized testing Co made things worse now students had to be taught through Zoom parents had to pull a lot of the weight since they were the ones with their kids now many parents had difficulties during these times whether it was because they weren't techsavvy they were sick they were at work or they had a kid or kids that thought they were on vacation and didn't take it seriously I don't blame them the kids had their beds kitchen bathroom Etc at their disposal so of course some were going to get distracted or not log in at all and yet when students were welcomed back to school they continued like normal some students may have adapted during online learning but that was not the case for the majority I remember I had to be the one teaching my cousins and the kids I tutored when they didn't understand the lessons of the day and I became my brother's guidance counselor as he transitioned from being a high school senior to a college freshman can't say I was amazing but I was a big help to these parents most parents didn't have that luxury so many of their kids fell behind but that didn't matter to the Department of Education because the kids just passed to the next grade I think this is where the argument of students got worse because of coid comes in if the student was in the third grade during the pandemic and didn't quite learn much online and was still promoted to the fourth grade they're technically still in the third grade level if the student was held back he would have lost one year but they would have caught up and continu their educational Journey the this part might get complicated instead this child who was a third grade level and was passed to fourth grade level finished fourth grade level and was passed to fifth grade without actually mastering the third or fourth grade they're now even more behind because they're playing catchup and it will continue to happen because they didn't have a chance to make up for that one year Co also affected the students behaviors students had freedom when they were learning online they didn't have to ask to go to the bathroom they could choose to take class in the comfort their own bed if the students were hungry or wanted to be on their phone the teachers couldn't do much to stop it even when they asked the students not to do so so when it was time to go back to normal the students didn't want to they were used to getting what they wanted and doing what they wanted they learned what it was like to be comfortable so why would they change this caused problems for teachers it didn't help that most disciplinary measures have been eliminated gone or the days of sending kids to the principal's office or suspensions no I think students shouldn't be suspended for every little thing but some students get verbally and physically violent and there are no consequences even if there are consequences some kids just don't care I deal with this with my third graders now in my after school program I can ask them to quiet down and get into two lines and they look at me turn around and continue to talk totally ignoring me I can even tell them that my supervisor will have to talk to them because of their behavior and they act indifferent they'll just continue to do the behavior after the supervisor leaves other students flat out cause physical harm to one or more students and the most that happens is they get removed from the classroom for a while and they return to the classroom after they calm down parents are notified but many parents also don't do much to resolve the issue some parents don't have their resources and others claim that their kid would never do that can't say much about the parents because I don't really interact with them as much but this is what I've heard from other teachers and supervisors from what I've seen the issues not only come from the administration not providing support to teachers students and their families but the overall education system making it difficult for everyone involved to do what they need to do basically we got to go to the main source to fix this problem there are movies of the inspirational teacher helping the kids no one believed in and helping them succeed in life but that one teacher isn't going to be our savior the administrations in these schools need to support their teachers students and their families but they can't solve this issue because they need support too the Department of Education isn't the most helpful or flexible system it expects everyone to follow the same curriculum with a little to no accommodations and when students fail to follow along or fall behind they basically shrug and say oh well will there be a change soon sadly I doubt it but when things get worse they may try to come up with solutions to fix issues that could have been fixed a long time ago or blame the next pandemic blame the next pandemic blame the next pandemic blame the next pandemic blame the next pandemic blame the next pandemic okay we did it we did it Joe the more you understand how capitalist governments systematically defund schools and produce inequality and disengagement the more you start to see that the idea of learning loss is kind of a red herring I know that there's another YouTuber out there who does coverage of this type of topic and I really needed her opinion on this so I reached out to Zoe B sure so I am Zoe B I am a college professor turned YouTuber and I make video essays about education and writing and I think one person described it as social commentary which is a better term than any I have ever come up with for it so that is what I do in preparing for this video Zoe sent me a bunch of really good resources to analyze the issue at hand this includes the learning loss handbook by the human restor ation project which examines the history of learning loss as a concept and how intimately it is tied to the epidemic of standardized testing the handbook dates the concept as early as 1957 and the US response to the Space Race being one of catching up with Soviet Science Education in the'80s summer learning loss became researcher Carl Alexander's focus in studying Baltimore specifically finding that students from low socioeconomic status keep up with their High socioeconomic status peers during the school year but fall behind during the summer in 1983 Ronald Reagan's secretary of education published a report titled a nation at risk which argued that American schools were failing kids putting the nation's economy and security at risk more oversight standards and rigor were required sounds kind of familiar this sort of stuff has happened before this sort of stuff happens all the time you can go back like 200 years in American history essentially since the concept of like schools became a thing and you can see every generation there is this issue of my students don't know anything kids are constantly being you know worse behaved the stuff is getting worse things are terrible in 1955 we were being told that Johnny can't read and then in the 1980s Ronald Reagan and his the people that he you know had do the study published ation at risk which was all about how students are struggling and we're falling behind you know like the USSR is going to take over because nobody can do science and so like basically every generation we have had these sort of panics but what does this idea come from and is it really backed by statistics to some degree it's hard to say because we know that disparities do exist in terms of school performance that have some compelling linkages with socioeconomic background and interruptions but let's be honest we also know that school performance and grades are not exactly the best ways to gauge learning and can be affected by all manner of things this is something that Zoe covered in her viral video grading is a scam and motivation is a myth from 2021 how well do grades actually meaningfully measure our learning imagine you've written a paper and when you get it back you see that it says a minus at the top what does this communicate to you does it mean that you have successfully learned how to write a paper if you received a c minus does that mean you didn't successfully learn how to write a paper if you taken an algebra test and you see you have a B+ what does that mean does it mean you know all the concepts but just made a couple arithmetic errors does it mean you understand most of the concepts but it's just one type of question that really throws you off does it mean you actually understand everything but you didn't eat breakfast that morning or you were distracted during the test because you had a headache or you didn't get enough sleep last night because you had to stay up late to work on that English paper the final problem with extrinsic motivation is that it's about control as we've seen rewards don't actually produce better work what they produce is obedience Toronto educator Mario Mao's article learning loss is a dangerous myth notes that the whole idea of learning loss changes depending on which data collection method you use to track it he cites a University of Iowa paper as one example which found that the vast majority of data arrays generated with scores from a variety of measures and grades suggests that loss of reading knowledge or skills is not the common outcome for students who do not participate in a summer reading program most of our graphs suggest that not only did students fail to exhibit an accumulated loss from year to year but also that they generally maintained or improved their reading abilities over summer relative to the proficiency Benchmark okay so to break that that down think about your own experiences let's say you're learning how to play a video game depending on your enjoyment and level of Engagement with the game you may learn how to play it really well within like 3 months then after playing it with high engagement for 3 months you put it down for another 3 months maybe you get a bit bored a bit caught up with other things when you pick it back up again will your skills at the game completely regress no you experience some Rust at the beginning sure and forget to do a few things but but after a certain period of time you'll find yourself right back at the same level again and in fact you may also pick up some other things that because you're more engaged and more focused on the game now you're able to do even better some might think that this kind of gaming example is not a great measurement for the learning experience but I think that that's poppycock I think it's because learning is actually fun if it wasn't fun then folks wouldn't be watching hour-long YouTube videos rabbit ho holding into random historical subjects which I know you do learning is a part of the human experience that somehow becomes extremely unfun thanks to schooling to the point where we think of it as this completely different category from something like learning a skill we actually care about and so when we think about this gaming example we can see that there are inherent problems with how we conceive of learning when it comes to schools for example learning is not just a matter of constant repetition without stopping in fact starting and stopping can be a great way of continuing your learning and getting better and better because you're taking a break when you're not engaged and you're getting back into it when you're more engaged versus when you try to do something over and over again but you're not so engaged you find that you do poorly no matter how many times you try like when you play a video game that sucks and it's boring but second and maybe more importantly this illustrates to us that learning is not something that can be measured merely by performance for example you don't perform in a game well or poorly just based off of whether you know how to play or not you may know how to play very well and have a bad day you may not know how to play at all and get lucky and usually again you play at your best when you're having the most fun and you often learn key aspects of the game and get better in a real holistic Way by failing to do things over and over again and using that failure to learn more now regardless on the subject of learning loss even measuring based off of performance in this way fails to prove anything compelling about the phenomenon from the hrp report this section is called here's the secret the data is inconclusive when we examine the limited reports that this entire facade is based on we begin to see the Illusion for profit we'll begin with the illuminate education/ fastbridge report no longer a prediction what new data tell us about the effects of 2020 learning disruptions illuminate education offers a host of measurement Scopes and sequences and partners with many other testing companies to publish and work with their data further they own the testing company fastbridge all reports hone in on mathematics and reading scores and so you can see the axes and stuff and it's it's basically like there's there's not much of a gap even when there is something of a gap the largest one is very minute between 0 to 3 percentile points which they explain away is an analytics error by nwea and that's a study that's really favorable towards proving this phenomenon so the data is a bit iffy and doesn't indicate a massive Trend even using favorable metrics fine but surely there's something to be said about students obviously being affected by the pandemic right Co you know shined a light on all of the cracks and fractures in the systems that we have including in the educational system and so I think that it just exacerbated problems that were already there with how we teach students and how we treat students one of the statistics that people like to bring up a lot is the statistic of like reading rates like literacy rates rate of students who can read at grade level do math at grade level Etc and how those have allegedly just gone down the drain and just plummeted and that's not really true like things are steady over the couple of decades like things are not suddenly getting worse that's just not statistically accurate but what has gotten much worse is student engagement student enjoyment of school student mental health all of these very like personal affective issues and like qualitative concerns of students as opposed to the quantitative things of like reading level in grades and like those are not being addressed and you know Co made those things worse they were declining before coid and continued to decline after coid and so I think that that's teachers I think are rightly concerned with students who are not able to read and write and do math to the levels that teachers think they should be but I think instead of blaming some sort of like intelligence or rigor or standards I think we instead need to focus on like are these children are their needs being met are their emotional needs being met are they being treated like human beings by schools by their parents are they being supported in all of the ways they need to be supported or are we just treating like test numbers that aren't high enough these issues of students's mental health and attentiveness are not at all being addressed unsurprisingly the same folks funding the learning loss narrative are resolving it should be fixed through for instance more standardized testing measures which we know are detrimental for the project of educating kids this is not a coincidence there is a profit motive here as the hrp report States for decades the multi-billion dollar testing industry has centered it self in schools despite objections from Educators and students and the nauseating number of Assessments that occur each year the financial interests of Pearson curriculum Associates and the like continue to press a need for additional profits to please their shareholders or board members the problem is being invented to sell the [Music] solution all right so in episode 74 of the what's left of philosophy podcast professors lilan churcha will Paris Owen Glenn Williams and Gil discussed the work of marxist philosopher EP Thompson particularly his piece time work discipline and Industrial capitalism which Chronicles how the concept of time has been changed to accommodate and justify capitalist control of workers's time which gives rise to time discipline something we talk about in our other videos about time you're going to see where this goes I want to share with you now a particular section when they talk about a particular part of the text and note how modon in particular connects it back to the subject we're talking about I was really struck in in this piece by the way he like reconstructs the very deliberate and concerted effort to make time discipline work in this way it wasn't something that just organically emerged as even necessarily a part of industrial capitalism although of course that's a part of it but he like will point to like quoting specific figures who are elaborating the problem of time use how workers are relating to time and particularly how they're not relating to time in the right way one of the figures that he quotes this person William Temple who's like advocating for order and industriousness and punctuality he says William Temple when advocating in 1770 that poor children be sent at the age of four to workhouses where they should be employed in manufacturers and given two hours of schooling a day was explicit about the socializing influence of the process there is considerable use in their being and this is Will Temple now there is considerable use in their being somehow or other constantly employed at least 12 hours a day whether they earn their living or not for by these means we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them so I I wow even if you don't get your money's worth work them like dogs I was thinking about those lines on schooling and the discipline of children children and their time because I don't know if you all have been following this trend on Tik Tok of teachers talking about students recently I'm not entirely sure what to make of it for those not familiar there's like a trend of teachers getting on and talking about how like specifically like elementary and middle school students are like years behind where they're supposed to be they're unruly and like have all these like behavioral pathologies can't read don't know where they are what's going on and alleging that this has to do with like you know long after effects of Co having lost 2 or 3 years of important young early socialization they're now ill equipped on the one hand like this seems possible impossible but on the other hand like these aren't studies these are anecdotes who knows this could be a trend and I was reminded of that when I was reading this stuff I was like okay right for hundreds of years people have been complaining that the youths are unruly idiots who need to be disciplined harder and better ultimately the concept of time discipline and management was invented and decreed by the rich by the elites by the capitalist class for the specific purpose of making people accept their value or their role as wage laborers schooling in the west has long been intentionally designed to create a Workforce going back to the days of British apprenticeship apprenticeship not The Apprentice ship don't think I had to clarify that in the 19th century Sunday schools Rose to prominence throughout Britain characterized by this adherence to rigid time discipline the superintendent shigan ring when on a motion of his hand the whole school rise at once from their seats on a second motion the scholars turn on a third slowly and silently move to the place appointed to repeat their lessons he then pronounces the word begin this rigidity in British schooling has been criticized by many over the years including famously in Pink Floyd's The Wall and though we don't see it often taking the same shape of this dramatic control of students's time and the punitive measures we still see the DNA of a lot of this stuff in modern schooling institutions like the Michaela School in Britain proudly retain the same practices alongside the title of Britain's strictest school it's not particularly coincidental that this school is in a poorter area of Britain depicted as a resource for its students many of whom are black and brown it all ties back to that quote from Temple there's long been a perception that workingclass students children especially racialized ones have a unruly attitude they have to be fixed their little demons that we have to discipline and we have to discipline them into understanding the value of devoting their entire life to work and that work is not something that empowers them or enriches them it's just work that is for the good of society because it puts money into a small group of people's hands this perception is rooted directly in the conception of time as a currency as something that you have to spend according to what is most valuable even as education became Universal in Britain its foundation was on a type of education that dehumanizes children that forces them to think of their time as money and this is part of the process of orienting people to make themselves productive in other words to mechanize themselves using as little time as possible to get as much done as possible as how am I going to get them to not roll their eyes here um as as Zena says in chapter 10 of capital volume 1 capital is dead labor that vampire like only lives by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it sucks the time during which the laborer works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor power he has purchased of him if the laborer consumes his disposable time for himself he robs the capitalist today all the school systems around the world have internalized this concept of time discipline to the point of being dominated by it even when teachers are not being urged to teach their students about time management the entire system through which we decide which students are good and which students are bad is based on an extension of these Logics into metrics of comparison schooling is a system of comparing kids with each other and favoring the ones who get the most work done with their time is this really a good way to figure out who's learning the [Music] most grading and standardized testing are two different sides of the same coin they are assessment measures designed to produce a Workforce which are themselves monetized for profit to the point of even compromising said Workforce existing the hrp report from earlier ties the beginning of this kind of efficiency to the beginnings of tailor ISM in schools tailor ISM referring to the father of management efficiency Frederick Taylor is a term describing the prioritization of efficiency and standardization in workforces which eventually became prevalent in the ' 50s at Harvard Business School and then became popularized within schools afterward especially in the wake of Space Race propaganda Zoe B's video on the subject of efficiency is key to understanding how this ideology is often detrimental to substantive productivity tailor ism is another measure through which capitalists can alienate workers from their labor it specifically premises the execution of efficient work on it being done with speed and constant repetition which is not the same as producing any type of transformative or thoughtful work that's why businesses that produce the most things most efficiently also produce them very simply and or poorly Taylor's views of the workers who can do this kind of work necessitates that they're not curious about it in Principles of Scientific Management his seminal text he wrote now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so fmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type the man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would for him be the grinding monotony of work of this character therefore the Workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work so he's saying you have to be stupid the entire ideology of efficient scientific management is a person saying that the best workers are stupid flat out if you are intellectually curious and thoughtful about what you are doing you are not a good worker we should not have you in the workforce because tailor ISM says you will do this work inefficiently and while the ableism of this is reprehensible and wrong just wrong I mean if your entire ideology of people who are stupid and fmatic also prioritizes that their work is necessary to keep your economic livelihood then it kind of says something about your idea of what intelligence is but anyway it is based in a sense on reality not the ableism part but the part that being thoughtful about your work does make you less efficient at doing it if your task is to draw a meaningful beautiful starry night then that may take you a long time no matter what level of skill you're at especially the folks who are really passionate about art may take a really long time to produce that but if your task is to draw a thousand stars that are identical on a piece of paper in an hour then yeah you're going to have to shut your brain off and just do a hand motion over and over again as quickly as possible now you might not feel good about how our education system which adapts this tailor ISM within it in the 50s as a response to the success of Harvard Business School and more so with the Space Race as well is based entirely on trying to produce stupid fmatic oxes that it is actually about as Antonio Graham she wrote in the prison notebooks how qualification is commensurate with a lack of intellectual interest you might not you might not like that that might be a bit disconcerting for you as it should be but as you may remember from our video school does not make you smarter school does not make you smarter the education system is not actually about educating it's about disciplining my first semester that I ever taught I was told by a fellow teacher another young woman graduate student she said as young women you know people who are just a couple of years older than these kids that we're teaching we need to really put our foot down to make them respect us and what she suggested doing to make that happen was to have incredibly strict rules for like late work and plagiarism so her thing was if something is late even by like a minute it's a zero if something includes any amount of plagiarism automatically a zero and so I being this like fresh faced not really much of an idea of what I was doing because believe it or not when you get your teacher certification and you're like taking those tests and whatever or like taking those classes a lot of it is not related to like that sort of thing like those sort of like disciplinary kind of questions so I had like no training on this so I was like you know what this this other person that I trust I trust her let me try this it was so bad that semester when I had these rules I felt guilty all the time and there was this one student who she ended up like it was something late and so I I had to give her a zero and she came in and she was an international student here on a Visa and she was in my office sobbing like I cannot get a see in this class because it will ruin my GPA and I will be deported back and I can't do that I think there was a little bit of anxiety on her end where she was like okay I'm going to be deported and then I'm going to have to get in this like arranged marriage and then my life is going to be over and it's like okay I understand it's not going to go that far it's going to be okay but also like I was 1,000% in the wrong for just giving her a zero for something that was like 2 days late so I have had my fair share of being on that extreme end of things she got an A in that class and it was fine but I ended up emailing her and like apologizing and being like you know I was trying out this policy and thank you for helping me realize that it is terrible I'm sorry for the you know Stress and Anxiety that I caused you like let me know if there's any like ever anything that I can do to help if you need like letters of recommendations or whatever and I still feel very bad about it but anyway so discipline I think is a very difficult question but there is a researcher that I really really like this educational scholar named Gert Bea he wrote a book and also an article and I have read the article and not the book about what he calls the beautiful risk of education and this beautiful risk is essentially to give students agency over their educations you have to give them freedom and freedom is a risky thing because if people are free to make mistakes and to do bad things they will he tells this story of this like Headmaster at a school this was in like the 1800s or like early 1900s in England so it was this like Rowdy boys school and this Headmaster had taken over and he had started this new essentially like Freedom policy there was a student who came up to him and was like oh so I can just like do whatever I want and he was like yeah that's that's how we're doing things is you there are no like punishments for doing things and he was like okay so I can just like smash this teacup on the ground and the Headmaster was like yeah if that's what you want you can do it and so the boy ended up doing that and was like haaha I've smashed your teacup and the Headmaster was like okay I mean it's not mine but I hope you feel better after doing it and eventually where the story ends up going is that the boy realizes that having these like outbursts and like doing these things to like get back at the teachers or whatever doesn't have any real power anymore because he's not being punished like he was doing it for the punishment essentially um to show that like yes I am having an effect on the world around me it was his way of like seizing power essentially so when he was just given that power without having to take it forcibly with violence he ended up like learning how to use that power responsibly and so that's this like beautiful risk is like you have to risk students do that stuff with the power that they're given but you have to trust them to eventually learn how to wield it responsibly and how to be you know like full responsible human beings obviously things are not super cut and dry and like not every policy is going to work 100% of the time and I'm not saying that we should necessarily just like have no rules but it is something to think about I think and to I don't know I I think that things will almost always be better if the grip that whoever is in power has loosens a little bit I think that is always a good idea it's become kind of common now to say something along the lines of in life you have to unlearn everything you learned through the first 21 years of life stuff like that I think the word unlearning itself has become kind of a buzzword in recent years especially with how adjacent it is to to therapy speak and other sort of mental health ideas I'm not going to say that this kind of thinking is unhelpful it's true that in fact especially with what we're talking about in this video that the things we're learning throughout our childhood are often things that we shouldn't have to learn things that dehumanize us we have to unlearn a lot of the things we internalized when we were younger in and out of school but I also hope this essay shows why this kind of thinking strictly is not a solution for the problem children are schooled this way for a reason and the reason is the way things are produced the economic mode of production the way money is made the way products are made the way things are consumed all in benefit to the ruling class the people who have the most the people who control these means of production even if you could just unlearn all the stuff that got put into your brain in your younger years you would still have to live in the society that did that afterwards and it's possible you wouldn't be able to make make it or to live happily without having to reapply a lot of those things that you wanted to unlearn so I think this concept is useful for understanding the debates about education in critical theory in the mid 20th century Austrian author Ivan illich and his famous 1971 book deschooling Society put forth a critique of school that is similar in a lot of ways to mind he appin that school teaches us to confuse process and substance and and thereby schools to confuse teaching with learning grade advancement with education a diploma with competence and fluency with the ability to say something new illich writes polemically about the disciplinary nature of school how it eats creativity and resources from societies taught to fetishize it and rely on it for guidance he also proposes Alternatives that prioritize people being able to choose from newly established skill centers wherein they could learn based on things that matter to them alongside other students in similar positions one such alternative he proposes is a type of state sponsored credit system where all citizens can use equally distributed credits for their own needs and education right now Educational Credit good at any skill center could be provided in limited amounts for people of all ages and not just to the poor I envisage such Credit in the form of an educational passport or an educ credit card provided to each citizen at Birth in order to favor the poor who probably would not use their yearly grants early in life a provision could be made that interest acred to later users of accumulated entitlements such credits would permit most people to acquire the skills most in demand at their convenience better faster cheaper and with fewer undesirable side effects than in school so on one hand illage is equal parts cutting and inspiring he calls out some of the key elements of our schooling systems for their dehumanizing nature and I think it's refreshing to see that kind of willingness to flesh out actual Alternatives there's a kind of optimism in that about human nature and actually trying to construct a better Society but on the other hand there's something that's kind of naive about his critique so if this guy had seen the potential in technology in 1971 he'd be mind blown at the kind of smartphone usage and social media and I don't know whatever else we got going on today the skill center he proposed with the credit system would now kind of look like a universal basic income for all citizens to access skillshare classes and as much as i' enjoy that and support it maybe I think it's fair to say that that's not an adequate way to fix the schooling system I don't even think that it would necessarily compensate for the issues with the school system much less replace it alog together one of the best ways to understand what illage is missing comes from the Lefty Economist Herbert gintis who wrote A critique of deschooling society in 1972 ginus writes that illich focuses on the autonomous manipulative behaviors of corporate bureaucracies as causing social issues such as those of schooling where the problem is truly with the basic Economic Institutions of capitalism markets and favors of production private control of resources and Technology etc for instance illich's desired use of Technology ultimately would do more of the same if the processes of production the privatization of Institutions the focus on production and profit as necessary with no regards to the human condition of the laboring classes are all left unchanged ginus writes that while he correctly recognizes that technology can be developed for purposes of either repression or Liberation his conception requires that the correct unalienated development of technological and institutional forms will follow from a simple aggregation of individual preferences over left convivial Alternatives if we left the economic system intact but we instituted a new school system where after you did a couple remedial School Years everybody got equally distributed credits so that you can go to skill centers and develop whatever skills and learn whatever things that you wanted to what do you think people would generally choose to develop what classes do you think they're going to take they're going to want the jobs that pay best and those are going to remain unchanged so they're all going to study computer science sence and business management and Finance and Accounting and there's going to be more resources in those departments and much less allocated to Art and education and literature departments or skill centers sorry like art skill centers and education skill centers and of course those skill centers are going to need money to operate so they're going to operate in a way that helps them get money in fact they're going to be incentivized to make way more money than they would make day by day to get by because they would want to ensure a type of stability especially to secure investments from others they would have to prove a type of profit so they're going to make a lot of decisions based off of how much money they'll make in the long run which often is contradictory with providing the best and most enriching experiences to students the teachers of these classes would have to spend credits on skills that would give them the qualifications to teach those classes but why would they do that if they still get paid so poorly to teach those classes generally only people from from higher income backgrounds will want to get the certifications to teach about English literature and abstract art film making and a lot of the people who are prospective artists will want to get graphic design certifications so that they could work in those fields which pay better than trying to make cool art in your studio that might not sell well because unless you're from a higher income background and you're from the Networks you're not going to be able to get the resources and the time to create stuff you really want to make in other words without changing capitalism this answer wouldn't change very much of anything I still want the credits though I'd like to take some free skillshare classes that's cool ginus finds that illage ultimately connects our dependency on destructive institutions to our being misled by them our internalization of bad ideas and bad habits which teach us to keep the system going instead ginst notes that these bad ideas and bad habits are necessitated by the organization of society we adapt them as a way to rationalize the way of life we are forced into he writes that the social relations of Education produce and reinforce those values attitudes and effective capacities which allow individuals to move smoothly into an alienated and class stratified society that is schooling reproduces the social relations of the larger society from generation to generation I it's it's almost like a cognitive dissonance happening in my brain right now as I'm trying to Grapple with these where on the one hand education is a good thing public education as like the last Universal public good in this country is a good thing that's just true uh but on the other hand schools are bad in a lot of ways schools do a lot of bad things for students the way that they're structured is real bad as I've been reading more and more like radical critical iCal pedagogy stuff I've been reading a lot about like unschooling and I guess still a school version of unschooling would be like Democratic schools or Sudbury schools things that are like student run like students have full autonomy decide what to do where to go Etc I find myself being drawn to that idea of like maybe schools as a structure are just a bad thing but I'm not I don't know that I'm like fully committed to that yet I'm still of figuring it out and and grappling with these ideas cuz I feel like it's I don't know it like feels hypocritical to be a teacher and to care so much about education but also be like yeah but schools are school sucks right even if coid learning loss is a thing which we're not overwhelmingly convinced that it is it's only a thing in so far as education systems are so fundamentally bad for children that any crisis will make it almost impossible untenable for kids to respond positively and stay in line especially without becoming extremely alienated as was alluded to with what Zoe talked about earlier in this video tons of Research indicates that Co 19's biggest effect on our children was on their mental health kids were already acting rebelliously and achieving poorly in the face of ridiculous schedules that had them get up far too early every day to go to a place to prepare for a bunch of standardized tests that had nothing to do with actually teaching them about reading and writing and science and math and history but all to do with being arbitrarily measured for their efficiency as unthinking laborers in the increasingly scarce hopes that one day it'll get them a job that they hate but will pay them just enough to eventually pay off the debt they've incurred along the way and maybe even own a place they can live in if folks in America want to act like their kids are getting more ignorant and less civilized it's only because their second most popular rhetorical strategy for arguing behind outright insulting people is projection projecting their own insecurities onto other things and people folks the problem in our schools is not the students or the teachers or the parents it is our social relations it's inequality it is the fact that most kids will have to grow up to be miserable wage laborers in order to keep our economy moving otherwise who's going to make the cheap products and who are we going to to buy them how else are we going to create profit if we don't have people to profit off of so those of you who are familiar with my channel know that I often go back to Pao Frei as an educator because as an educator he succinctly explained to us how true education is not about teaching and learning but rather it's about dialogue it is the process of recognizing the humanity in the student listening to what they have to say and helping them learn rather than authoritatively banking information into their heads because we know better than them our education systems will reflect this only when we change the social reality around them we cannot have a good education system in a society that is unequal and though we may never see a change in that Society rather than sit around and be sad about that Society or blame the people around us for being a part of it we need to be continuously participating and changing it as best we can continuously working to transform it freed writes attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of Liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building it is to lead them to the populist Pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated in other words if we truly want to save the kids we need to start by listening to them sorry thank you for watching this video this is the second recording of the video I'm in my living room with a candle acting super artsy if you enjoy the work we do on this channel consider being a channel member for $5 a month you get access to special emojis made by our friend befly including this one of a teacup and this one of Zena shout out to our eight channel members Renee ayur vicman Freddy gormac Smith Mo Muppet deny whiz migs Stephanie Fang and an lives I hope you're all having a wonderful day I hope you feel really good about yourself and if you don't I get it it's hard bye

Channel: Elliot Sang

Views: 576,701

Keywords: literacy, tiktok, kids can't read, school, education system, zoe bee

Id: i0Dhg6NSW1k

Length: 52min 42sec (3162 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023