Kid Logic

[sartorias]

Yesterday I went up to visit some relatives, and my mom gave me a scrapbook of keepsakes. Now that she's finally retired, she's been going through old family photos and miscellaneous stuff. She's never been much of a packrat, so I was curious to see what she'd saved. A lot of it (most) had to do with ancestors, like a xerox copy of the daily

Comments

[sartorias]

I agree about historical content, for the most part. And the writing was often aimed at a more sophisticated reading level--which narrowed access. (So very many dyslexic and other people were silently flushed out of the system as stupid/bad/incorrigible/unteachable)

[sartorias]

Yes. Yes to all these things.

[6_penny]

Some kids were better educated. A lot (like one of my aunts) left school by age 15. And in my grandmother's generation - at 7th grade. She was unusual in that she finished High School.

[sartorias]

Yup. For so very long education was a privilege not all had access to.

[sartorias]

Yep. Teaching real history was one of the first things out the door in one of those curriculum revamps that have been so disastrous.

[joycemocha]

As someone who has recently left the trenches, I can honestly say as Sherwood does below that No Child Left Behind is to blame for a lot of these failures. One of the things that NCLB did was to make school funding dependent upon increasing test scores--and teaching to the test became more and more important throughout my ten year tenure, which spanned the life of NCLB. By my last year, even the brightest kids were more concerned about "what's the answer, is this on the test" than learning to think. And I couldn't take the time to do the things that engaged them sufficiently to start thinking because those activities were not viewed as adequate test prep. New York has been one of the testing battlefields for years.

[sartorias]

I was talking to a young Texas teacher back in February when I took the train to Dallas, and he said the same thing.

[danceswithwaves]

"Even umteenth generation U.S. students don't know why there was a Civil War, that there was a Civil War. They don't understand why we keep talking about Civil Rights, and so on and so forth."

I would suggest you might check out the Tumblr universe, which is mostly populated by teens and 20-somethings, as far as I can tell. Although it has major flaws in some of the information that is passed around and some parts of its internet culture, you might be surprised by what said teens do actually know about history and Civil Rights. Obviously Tumblr is just a slice of a demographic, but it does give insight into how teens themselves know that the education system is failing them, and they're trying to do something about it on their own. For instance, there is a lot of current Civil Rights activism going on in the Tumblr-verse, with references to the previous Civil Rights movement.

[sartorias]

That is wonderful to know. Thank you for pointing that out.

I have always maintained a belief that most teens not in survival mode will reach for information and understanding, wherever they can find it.

[danceswithwaves]

Oh yes, I agree. And the Tumblr-verse has other things I didn't mention, like sex education, feminism, history of women in science, current events where people around the world are inventing cool things that the media doesn't report on for various reasons, etc. There are bad parts to it because it's the internet and misinformation can spread easily if it's catchy, but within that context I believe it's pretty good. And there are a fair number of adults running informational-type blogs that teens go to for questions and advice when they can't/don't want to ask elsewhere.

And all that overlaps with fandoms that have graviated towards Tumblr as their medium, so even if kids are on there for fan-related things, they'll see other things in passing or participate a bit in activism related things.

[sartorias]

I suspect that a lot of these are the downside of mass education, accelerated by that well-meant but stupidly administrated "No Child Left Behind." Kids got passed along up the system for someone else to deal with, and graduated to get them out the door

[silkiemom]

It think part of this is because people used to be able to get decent paying jobs with a 6th grade education, and now you can't. So even if they are not remotely ready to perform at a college level, kids today are pushed to go there.