The Burning Schoolhouse

Apple iBooks 2 textbook hands-on (video) -- Engadget

2012-01-21T18:38:00.000+03:00

This is a game-changer.

Apple iBooks 2 textbook hands-on (video) -- Engadget:

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Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education. | TechCrunch

2012-01-20T16:08:00.000+03:00

Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education. | TechCrunch:

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Can Technology Transform Education Before It’s Too Late? | TechCrunch

2012-01-20T16:07:00.000+03:00

Can Technology Transform Education Before It’s Too Late? | TechCrunch:

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Some US Education Stats

2012-01-20T16:06:00.002+03:00

http://www.broadeducation.org/about/crisis_stats.html

Fourteen Reasons to Homeschool

2011-12-09T12:29:00.001+03:00

Bullying kids.

Bullying was always a problem at schools. It is quite possibly made worse by the current “self-esteem” movement.

Bullying teachers.

The job of teacher is tailor-made for bullies, control freaks, and terminal bores who cannot otherwise get anyone to listen to them. Unfortunately, we have created no defenses against this. To the contrary, the culture of the public school seems to promote bullies and control freaks.

Current public school teaching methods don't work.

See “Operation (aka Project) Follow-Through,” for proof; and the many studies that show that both private schools and homeschooling produce better results on a number of measures. We are at best simply wasting our children's time by sending them to public school.

Our system of public school teacher selection ensures the worst.

We know that certain teachers can make a huge difference to scores on standardized tests, and we further know that the best teachers are those who are best at learning and who know the subject best. But our system of teacher certification values courses in education over subject knowledge. Further, we know that those who enter ed schools have lower SAT scores than for virtually any other subject, and almost nobody fails. We are selecting for those who are worst at learning and who know the subject least.

The public school curriculum has been stripped of the culture. It has become culture-hostile.

A solid grounding in one's culture—in the wisdom of one's ancestors--is almost the entire point of education. However, the current attitude in schools is that culture is oppression by “dead white males.” This amounts to a systematic attempt to prevent children from becoming educated.

The public school curriculum has been stripped of essential skills.

Besides culture, children need facility with certain useful life skills: the proverbial “reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic,” not to mention logic, foreign languages, and such. The problem, however, is that all such skill acquisition requires memorization. Current educational practice is actively prejudiced against memorization and drill as supposedly “uncreative.”

The public school curriculum has been stripped of all religious references.

So currently public schools don't teach any culture, and they don't teach basic skills. Is there anything left? Indeed there is. But they don't teach that either. Even more important than such basic skills for employability and cultural context, the core of any real education is religion. Religion is systematically banned from the public school classroom.

The public school system does not teach any coherent set of morals.

This goes with the last point. It is essential that children be taught the difference between right and wrong; the public school is not even prepared to accept that there is a right and a wrong. To the extent that there is a morality taught, in any public school class, it will conflict with any known moral code, confusing and subverting any child being raised with one.

The public school system is designed to produce employees, not leaders or independent thinkers.

In response to the accusation that they fail to teach either important information (culture) or basic skills, I expet many defenders of public schools would claim that they instead teach students to think. That, at least, is supposed to be what the resistance to memorization is in favour of. But this is demonstrably false. To teach someone to think, you teach them formal logic, logical fallacies, philosophy, the rules of debate, and the rules of parliamentary procedure. Private schools teach this; public schools rarely do.

And why not? There is a historical reason. The public schools were consciously designed at the beginning of the last century to produce reliable workers for industry, not leaders. This was a way to preserve the ascendancy of that class that could afford to send their children to private schools. Woodrow Wilson said as much.

The public school system dehumanizes. It treats kids as objects to be molded to conformity, instead of individual souls.

The modern school was more or less consciously designed on the model of the assembly line, to produce workers for industry. This is one reason for the elimination of the old one-room schoolhouse—it did not fit the factory model. The “scientific” approach to teaching necessarily objectifies the students.

The public school system is hostile to boys.

Boys and girls have very different interests and learn in different ways. Thanks to feminism, almost everything that might interest boys has been banned from the modern classsroom. Boys are commonly told they are no good. This is exacerbated by the fact that elementary teachers are almost overwhelmingly women, who think like women and give boys no role model. Indeed, few men dare teach, because it makes them sitting ducks for career-ending charges of sexual harassment or child abuse, from which women are largely exempt.

The public school system is hostile to very intelligent kids.

The system, in the name of “equality,” is invariably more interested in raising the achievement of the slow than in raising the achievement of the quick. Given big classes and big schools, one size must fit all, and the quick are the ones who end up round pegs. They can have little in common with teachers who are not themselves very bright, and may, being control freaks, resent children who are.

The public school system indoctrinates into a specific political viewpoint.

Departments of education are commonly hotbeds of radical left-wing politics; a lot of teachers are quite open about their main objective being to indoctrinate. This, of course, works directly counter to the objective of teaching students to think for themselves.

The public school system is resistant to the new technology with which it is crucial for students to become familiar.

Because they essentially cannot be fired, having tenure, and face no competition, there is nothing impelling public school teachers to adopt new technology or new methods, other than a personal sense of responsibility or personal desire. Unfortunately, matters are very different in the real world of work most students will face. There, it is essential to keep up with the latest technological innovations in order to compete. This disparity leaves schools lagging further and further behind.

Word Dynamo

2011-11-22T12:23:00.001+03:00

From Dictionary.com. Looks like an interesting alternative to Quizlet et al. Enter your word list, create a variety of games and quizzes for drill.

Hat tip to John Allan.

Word Dynamo

Online Proctoring

2011-11-16T12:29:00.001+03:00

Great concept. Why didn't I think of this?

http://www.softwaresecure.com/Main.aspx

How to Use Google+ Hangouts for Teaching - wikiHow

2011-11-11T17:52:00.000+03:00

How to Use Google+ Hangouts for Teaching - wikiHow:

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Can an Online Game Crack the Code to Language Learning? | MindShift

2011-11-11T16:38:00.000+03:00

Can an Online Game Crack the Code to Language Learning? | MindShift:

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permalink

An Interesting Way to Convey Large Numbers

2011-11-10T20:45:00.000+03:00

Just keep some rice on hand.

The Pronunciator

2011-11-10T17:41:00.000+03:00

Has apparently nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Vocabulary practice, your choice of languages.

http://www.pronunciator.com/

Essay Writing Made Easy- The Easy Essay!

2011-11-09T20:02:00.001+03:00

Essay Writing Made Easy- The Easy Essay!:

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Biggs and Richwine: Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid - WSJ.com

2011-11-08T20:42:00.000+03:00

Biggs and Richwine: Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid - WSJ.com:

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Download Free Fonts - Acid Fonts

2011-11-07T19:50:00.000+03:00

Nice collection of novel fonts for materials production.

Download Free Fonts - Acid Fonts:

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BookBoon

2011-10-29T15:07:00.000+03:00

Free textbooks--downloadable in .pdf format!

Homeschooling beats Schoolschooling on Standardized Tests

2011-10-04T18:52:00.001+03:00

Canadian Study

On teaching math

2011-09-30T15:10:00.002+03:00

This reiterates a basic principle I have often stressed here: you cannot teach what you do not know. The essential qualification for being a good teacher is knowledge of the subject. Otherwise you add nothing to the textbook.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/too-many-teachers-cant-do-math-let-alone-teach-it/article2183700/

Pho.to

2011-09-16T16:33:00.001+03:00

This site offers an unusually good selection of photo effects. Good for materials development--making images interesting.

Festisite

2011-09-16T16:02:00.000+03:00

This site has a variety of tools that might be useful for materials creation, especially for vocabulary: a fake money maker, fancy text templates, and so forth.

Leacock on Examinations

2011-08-26T17:13:00.002+03:00

To those who know, a written examination is far from being a true criterion of capacity. It demands too much of mere memory, imitativeness, and the insidious willingness to absorb other people's ideas. Parrots and crows would do admirably in examinations.

Stephen Leacock, "My Discovery of England"

Stephen Leacock on the American University

2011-08-26T17:09:00.000+03:00

The American professor deals with his students according to his lights. It is his business to chase them along over a prescribed ground at a prescribed pace like a flock of sheep. They all go humping together over the hurdles with the professor chasing them with a set of "tests" and "recitations," "marks" and "attendances," the whole apparatus obviously copied from the time-clock of the business man's factory. This process is what is called "showing results." The pace set is necessarily that of the slowest, and thus results in what I have heard Mr. Edward Beatty describe as the "convoy system of education."

In my own opinion, reached after fifty-two years of profound reflection, this system contains in itself the seeds of destruction. It puts a premium on dulness and a penalty on genius. It circumscribes that latitude of mind which is the real spirit of learning. If we persist in it we shall presently find that true learning will fly away from our universities and will take rest wherever some individual and enquiring mind can mark out its path for itself.

Leacock, My Discovery of England

He puts his thumb on it, right enough.

Depressing Stuff

2011-08-25T20:59:00.000+03:00

--Michael A. Walsh - NYPOST.com:

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Memrise

2011-07-24T19:39:00.001+03:00

Looks like the best vocabulary memorization program yet.

It's Time to End the War on Salt: Scientific American

2011-07-23T22:19:00.000+03:00

It's Time to End the War on Salt: Scientific American

The Burning Schoolhouse

Apple iBooks 2 textbook hands-on (video) -- Engadget

Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education. | TechCrunch

Can Technology Transform Education Before It’s Too Late? | TechCrunch

Some US Education Stats

Fourteen Reasons to Homeschool

Word Dynamo

Online Proctoring

How to Use Google+ Hangouts for Teaching - wikiHow

Can an Online Game Crack the Code to Language Learning? | MindShift

An Interesting Way to Convey Large Numbers

The Pronunciator

Essay Writing Made Easy- The Easy Essay!

Biggs and Richwine: Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid - WSJ.com

Download Free Fonts - Acid Fonts

More Education Courses Are Not the Solution | Freedom Forum

BookBoon

Homeschooling beats Schoolschooling on Standardized Tests

On teaching math

Pho.to

Festisite

Leacock on Examinations

Stephen Leacock on the American University

Depressing Stuff

Memrise

It's Time to End the War on Salt: Scientific American