Category: News

Schools don’t need to teach democracy

April 11, 2021

Stephen Gessner criticizes the failure of schools to teach about democracy in his op-ed “Our schools fail to teach democracy,” Opinion, April 7]. But I believe he misses the point.

The need is not for schools to teach “about” democracy, critical thinking and decision making. Students need to grow up practicing democracy, to be “in” democracy.

Obviously, the best way to prepare students to participate in a democracy is not to be subjected to 12 years of authoritarianism in schools.

In our current system, students get rewarded for doing what the teacher and the system tells them to do rather that initiating their own directions of learning, based on their interests. They do not grow up making decisions democratically about their education or their school.

It is important to note that the education revolution has just happened, thanks to remote learning. At one point, we went from less than 5% of students learning alternatively to more than 90%! Now, 50 million American families know they have choices.

Where will this lead? We don’t know, but we should make sure that it leads to a learner-centered, democratic experience for all children. This actually is practiced by more than 250 schools around the world and, for example, over 30 public democratic schools in Israel.

Jerry Mintz, Roslyn

Editor’s note: The writer is director of Alternative Education Resource Organization, based in Roslyn Heights.

The following is a satirical piece by John Merrow about the great “learning loss” panic.
As I’ve said before, we just inadvertently experienced the Education revolution because of the pandemic. Over 50 million families in the United States and perhaps 2 billion around the world now know that they have educational choices, that they are not necessarily stuck with the local school to which they were assigned.
That means that most students and families are no longer a captive audience. They can choose to go to the local school–or not.
This seems to have given rise to a massive campaign to convince everyone that the move to various forms of homeschooling, virtual learning and other innovative approaches has led to tremendous “learning loss.” This seems to me an attempt to get their previous captive audience back. But it doesn’t seem to be working. A startling number of families are choosing not to send their children back to their previous situation.
Of course many of these virtual attempts by unprepared teachers were indeed boring and led to learning loss, because many teachers simply tried to teach the way they had in the in-person school, a talking head pushing a rigid, set curriculum. This was minus the thing that was most important to many students: peer interaction. Instead of taking advantage of the networking we have all discovered in Zoom meetings, many teachers didn’t have that as an option at all! No wonder many students hated it. During the pandemic, almost every student I’ve asked has said the only thing they missed about not going to school was the other students.
And when the representatives of the system pushed “learning loss,” they apparently have net considered or tested for the increase in creativity, responsibility, innovation, and entrepreneurism that the extra time and freedom has engendered in many students. I’ve done many consultations with parents who have been stunned but t he improvements they seen in their students in these areas. In one case, for example, a father who was not at all interested in homeschooling was amazed when he daughter said one day they she wanted to start working with the horses at the farm next door. Since then she got up every morning at dawn to work with the horses and has also be researching them on the Internet.
Let us know what you think about the idea of learning loss and we might put it in a future e newsletter. HERE’s a link to this essay if you’d like to send it to someone.
With all that in mind, HERE’s the link to John Merrow’s satirical piece.

Speech Liam Berell

A standardized test is not a true measure of what a student can accomplish

We all know that feeling when you get a bad mark for a test. Your stomach sinks and the stress becomes overwhelming. What will my parents say? How will I get into a university? What did everybody else get? We start to beat ourselves up and compare our results to the rest. And through this obsession, we allow them to define us.

We are all good at something. Some of us can draw, some can surf, some can cook and not one of these skills requires being able to find the average gradient of a line. Of course education is important and don’t get me wrong, I am not at all going against it. However, I do disagree with the marking system. Marks put a label on us. All of us are expected to get amazing numbers and if we don’t we are punished. Personally I have become used to the wooden spoon so now they’ve decided to send me to extra
lessons for basically every subject- far more painful. What society fails to realize is that some of us are just not made to be doctors, lawyers or accountants. This situation fits perfectly with the quote “ Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid ” Many of us just were not created to get good marks and when we are judged off of them, we believe that we are stupid.

For those of you who know me, I have grown a burning passion for photography and videography, however, I have always looked at it as something I can only do on the side. I can’t say I have got 83% for photography but I can assure you that I am pretty good at it. The funny thing is I didn’t learn how to take photos or edit videos by writing tests. I learnt through a genuine passion and urge to learn about something that I really enjoyed. This is precisely the opposite of what marks teach us. Marks teach us that we don’t have a choice. They shape our understanding that we have to be good with numbers and words otherwise we will not get anywhere in our futures. We are never taught to do what we are passionate about or what we are actually skilled at. As a result, a lot of us fall into the 9 to 5, get married, have kids and settle down kind of life. Not that there is anything wrong with this, there are plenty of people who live this life and are happy, but a lot of us feel that we have to live like this, while actually we seek a more adventurous and spontaneous life which is not as planned out.

I read the other day that around 32% of students in a school have depression and 27% of it is caused by school stress. As a student, our stress levels are always through the roof and with stress there is depression. We are constantly trying to do well in school on top of doing homework on top of playing sports and on top of having a social life. Many of us become obsessed with getting good marks because that is what we are told to do and as a result we often begin to move away from certain things that make us happy or what we are actually good

at. Bad marks also cause us to believe that we are worthless compared to everyone else. We become highly critical of ourselves and some of us lose motivation to try and do anything at all. I have become a victim of this and I have found that my obsession over my marks drives me away from photography and hanging out with my friends.

What do marks actually measure? To be honest I don’t think that most of us even understand the work we are taught. We are loaded with so much information that we end up parrot learning everything for a test and forget all of it by the next week. Most of the information isn’t applied into our lives either and so none of it sticks. I’m also one of those people who get really stressed before a test which often results in a bad mark. Not because I don’t know what to say but because I read incorrectly or I forgot to put something in my answer. Surely that is not a true measurement of what I can achieve.

Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Charles Dickens and so many more dropped out of school. They realised that school didn’t teach them what they needed to know and so they dropped out to become extremely successful people. I’m not trying to say that dropping out of school is the answer because for every one successful drop out there are hundreds that have remained unemployed, bankrupted themselves, lost everything. Marks have proven to be the safest way to secure a future, even if it is a future you may not have dreamt for yourself. However, I am telling you that your standardised test marks do not measure what you can accomplish.

So now the question is, how do we change the marking system? Through some research, I found an academic system called Ungrading. In this process, work is marked as it traditionally has been, then, through revision and repetition, is gradually improved. Eventually ‘lesser’ performance is replaced by better work, but without the marks. Schools should also start to offer a broader range of subjects and renew the current education system to be more relevant. Students are then able to choose subjects more suited to them and learn helpful knowledge and skills which they will be able to apply to their lives

So a message for my peers is don’t worry so much about your marks. I know most of us have strict parents and stressful teachers and the mark system probably won’t change anytime soon however you all have that one thing that you’re good at. Keep working at it and remember that a standardized test is not a true measure of what you can accomplish.