It is specialisation in education which is needed to fix a failed public education system, as well as streaming by ability within schools. To do otherwise, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment for kids across the spectrum of ability and especially lets down those with Special Educational Needs. The lack of specialised education provision is also one of several factors leading to an ongoing educational disaster across the West. This essay was inspired by an article in Quillette entitled Remedial Education for All
The drive for equality of outcome in education harms virtually every child in K-12, regardless of ability. The smartest quickly become bored with classes in which they are mismatched by ability, because they are asked to learn at a snail’s pace. Those in the middling range are similarly disenfranchised, but have the added disadvantage that when they fail to grasp a key concept, the teacher has little time to devote to middling pupil, as the majority of any classroom teacher’s time is likely to be eaten up by the four or five pupils who need the most help.
But by far the worst experience is reserved for the child who the ‘inclusion’ model is supposed to help. It verges on daily trauma. Imagine if you were one of those kids who struggled in every class. Wouldn’t you feel singled out, stigmatised and embarrassed by being one of those kids for which the teacher had to devote a major portion of their time, constantly checking to see whether you were following along, and often having to pause the class and explain in the frequent case of you struggling to keep up? Whatever the stigma of being placed in a special education class or specialised environment, surely it is less than always being the one who always holds the class back.
Kids who receive specialist education outside of mainstream classes clearly do better than those who are subject to the baleful influence of misguided inclusion practices. This is personal to me. My brother is dyslexic. He has a high IQ, has a Bachelors in Management Science (B.Sc) and a Masters in Computing. He has worked in highly cognitive jobs including as an actuarial technician specialising in the then burgeoning field of computer modelling risk, before finally fulfilling a personal calling to become a chef, training at the Savoy, and cooking for everyone from Hollywood ‘A’ listers to royalty.
But much of what he achieved in his early career simply wouldn’t have been possible if he had been subject to the inclusion model for those with special needs. He was lucky enough to have a teacher as a mother, so his dyslexia was caught early- my mother noticed quite quickly the emerging gap between his verbal ability and other areas. Although the British Education system at the time wasn’t fully geared for Special Needs, my mother was able to get help from the Dyslexia Society in getting him diagnosed. As a result, he benefitted from countless one-to-one hours outside mainstream classes with a qualified Special Needs specialist, a rarity in those days, as well as my mother’s help.
And here’s the tragedy, especially amongst the neurodiverse and the dyslexic, many can be high functioning in terms of cognitive abilities. There are strong suspicions that both Albert Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci were dyslexic. Many have looked at the behaviours and obsessions of Isaac Newton and Nikola Tesla and wondered whether they may have had autism spectrum disorders. Much of Einstein’s early educational life tallies with the experiences of a kid today being educated today in the inclusive model- despite showing early promise, the effect of his dyslexia on his reading and writing skills probably acted as a barrier to learning in other areas. With specialist one-to-one help early on, or even better a special school, he probably would have bloomed a lot earlier, and likely wouldn’t have spent a year disillusioned with science.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the idea that 'schools should embrace the Rawlsian ethic and direct the majority of their attention to supporting the least advantaged, whose environments or talents make them less likely to become successful students. Such sentiments are particularly common in education, where I’ve often heard teachers make the case that: Good students don’t really need you. They will do well no matter what.’ is the effect this has on the broader society.
For a start it simply isn’t true. There is ample evidence to suggest that, although there are always those who possess hidden potential who fall through the cracks in conventional education, there is likely to be substantial portion of ability which, if not stimulated and cultivated during the right periods during cognitive development, is forever lost. There is some debate whether this lost potential is more due to negative factors associated with lower socio-economic status or more because of the absence of positive factors, but the fact remains that we learn better when we are young and although the claim that those who fail to learn a second language by 11 years old will never match a native speakers has been somewhat discredited, early learners do possess an advantage and there can be little doubt that a failure to utilise one’s full learning potential in these early formative years will have a profound influence later in life.
Some have gone as far to dub this phenomenon Lost Einstein’s. In the main, the research looks at how lower socio-economic status creates a barrier to becoming an innovator or inventor. Doubtless socio-economics are a factor, as a Swedish Sibling Adoption study shows, adoption to more advantageous environments can lead to just over 7 points of IQ gained, from large socio-economic jumps. Interestingly, there is also evidence that the gains may be more social than economic, given that minor downward shifts in socio-economic status to what are generally more stable family home environments also result in IQ gains.
But consider another hypothesis. What if in addition to the socio-economics of cognitive development there is second factor at play in the dearth of innovation and invention in the bottom 90% of the population, by birth income? Simply put, the more affluent can buy access to better peer groups and selective schools, more geared to their child’s abilities special needs and limitations. Kids with more severe learning disabilities are far more likely to be enrolled in highly specialised schools, and those with less severe problems are far more likely to get the specialised one-to-one help, and out of class support that they need to overcome their difficulties.
Overall, private schools are far more likely to stream, separate and segregate by individual need and ability, for the simple reason that their ability to extract fees in highly dependent upon their ability to achieve high academic test results. Crucially, education works better in circumstances where abilities are most closely matched within a class, for the simple reason that the teacher doesn’t have to pitch down to the four or five students who are struggling most, and even if they do (because there will always be some range in ability), the course content being covered twice is far more likely to be of benefit to everyone else in the class. What we are really talking about is specialism of education, through the often inscrutable mechanisms of the market.
One of the views which plagues more progressive educators is the emphasis of skills over knowledge. It’s deeply rooted in the erroneous postmodern belief that there is no such things as objective knowledge. What this fallacious thinking overlooks is that, whilst current scientific knowledge is necessarily imperfect and only lasts as long as it takes for someone to come along and generate a theory which better fits the observable empirical evidence, the process generally only works one way, with theories gradually becoming less imperfect over time, unless culture, politics or most especially ideology intervenes to pollute the process.
In layman’s terms, the progressive educator asks, is it really necessarily for kids in elementary school to spend hundreds of hours in the spot drill learning of multiplication tables, when they can just use a calculator? Or why bother committing a small encyclopedia of knowledge to memory when kids can just Google it? With Maths, it is vital to commit the basic building blocks of knowledge to long-term memory, because you have to instantly know what 6 times 8 equals, without even thinking about it, if you are to have any hope of ever accomplishing more complex Maths, for the simple reason that often sums and products are embedded within a question. It’s called Cognitive Load Theory and it’s the best scientific theory as to how our brains learn and perform complex tasks. Simply put, unless by the time you are a young adult you have a vast store of basic knowledge committed to long-term memory, the fact that working memory is puny means that you will always fail at any cognitively complex task.
What makes matter worse is that many teachers and educational theorists suffer from what can only be described as an intelligence-rooted blindness. Many would have found those frequent, two minute recitations of multiplication tables interspersed throughout the day, mind-numbingly boring. The probably nursed resentment for the tedium of having to laboriously go over the basics of grammar and sentence structure again and again and again. What they didn’t understand, and what their resulting prejudices against rote learning fail to take into account, is that for a sizeable portion of their classmates those repetitious rote drills were entirely necessary for them to achieve a degree of functional literacy and numeracy.
Statistics on this subject are misleading. Because what constituted illiteracy and innumeracy in the 1950s is a world apart from the looser and looser standards which have been applied over time. As the requirement of hundreds of hours of drill recitation and memorisation of the basic building blocks has gradually been eroded, so to has the rate of functional rate of illiteracy and innumeracy inexorably risen. In many areas parents should be given far clearer expectations as to their responsibility to contribute to the education of their child, but this one area where the burden of responsibility falls entirely on the school- although it is hardly fair to blame secondary schools for structural failings in course curricula at the elementary level.
With the internet the problem is even more significant. There is vast store of high quality well-curated knowledge out there. But it is almost impossible to access unless you know exactly what questions to ask or how to phrase your questions. Those who have a large store of existing knowledge are necessarily better armed to extract higher value and more useful knowledge from the internet, and are also far more likely to have developed the rights habits and mental discipline to identify key salient points to absorb, assimilate and add to their existing knowledge schema.
What all this translates to is a massive advantage for the very smart who, by accident of birth, manage to find themselves in the rarefied conditions of a private or selective educational environment which spoon feeds them a steady stream of high quality knowledge, where they are well-matched to their peers. The smart kids from a poorer or middling background should count themselves very lucky if they happen, by chance, to find themselves in Magnet schools- and only then if the school is set-up to operate selectively. Most amongst the 90% who attend public schools in America and happen to be smart are not so fortunate. Many will find they have hidden depths a discover a metier, but it unlikely to be the same one for which they were ideally suited at birth, for the simple reason that they will have forever lost a sizeable chunk of their optimum potential- through the simple mechanism of not being placed in classes with students close to their ability, or by lacking the benefits of a high volume of high quality knowledge being force-fed to them as children.
One of the most unfortunate aspects of education over the past seventy years is that as soon as there is push to increase creativity in schools, it is almost inevitable that standards will decline by almost every measure, including creativity. There is strong liberal bias which believes that creativity arises from the freedom to explore and play in education. Quite the reverse, most writers only become commercially successful because they are able to offer their readers access to their vast stores of highly specialised knowledge, which offers the reader a curated window to a world with which they are largely unfamiliar. Whether we are discussing the macabre fascination of the crime thriller, the rapidly expanding field of non-fiction or journalism itself, the dollars tend to accumulate in the hands of writers who have thoroughly researched their subject matter, and conscientious work to expand their knowledge.
And writing is by no means an outlier in the creative fields. A disproportionately large percentage of successful music artists know how to play at least one instrument, and many play several. A music degree may only be useful for teaching music, but a large proportion of music artists know how to write sheet music, and many have spent hundreds of hours learning how utilise the best sound recording software. You may find your dreams of music stardom never materialise or that playing lead violin in your local orchestra doesn’t pay very well, but earning $6,000 for a weekends work as a set musician to successful artists several times a year may help to soften the blow, and if all else there is always the option of private tuition, teaching music to the children of the affluent.
In almost every instance the desire to liberate education as a means to engender creativity falls flat its face and only leads to declining standards. We know this because over a decade ago in the UK, those educated in the 1950s were asked to complete current exam papers, whilst kids making ready to sit their national exams at 16 were asked to try to complete the exams set in the fifties. The older generation passed with flying colours, even managing to obtain passes in subjects like French- which they hadn’t used for decades- whilst kids from the current generation were simply unable to tackle the more difficult subject matter found in areas like Maths. Meanwhile those countries which have stuck most closely to the traditional teacher-led model of education and innovated along the way, have managed to outpace progressive education by a long mile:
In the debate over charter versus public school, and heavily disputed claims about the infrastructure of education, nuance has been lost in the search for understanding why so many aspects of K-12 education produce less than ideal outcomes, which are often disastrous in societal terms. If there is an extent to which the high performing charters do outperform their more successful public counterparts, especially when one considers the socio-economics of child intakes (with many higher performing public schools drawing their children from higher income neighbourhoods with better educated parents), it is because choice in the marketplace tends to lend itself automatically to tailor-made solutions to individual children.
A school which specialises in kids with dyslexia or neurodiversity is necessarily going to be better at equipping these kids for later life than kids unfortunate enough to be lumped in with the general educational model, through inclusion policies. Similarly, the smaller class sizes which should be a feature of schools catering to acute behavioural kids, are more ideal for tackling behavioural problems head-on, and out of class resources are vital in this regard, especially in relation to male mentoring for boys (boxing is a common fixture of the more successful programs aimed at averting pupil referral units in the UK).
Above all, there needs to a major shift in K-12 education towards the vocational at 14. In any demographic which is not extremely high performing, there are likely to be at least 50% of the population who won’t do well academically. Quite apart from the fact that it’s inhumane and dehumanising to arbitrarily designate children as failures, simply because they fail in one single dimension of human value it creates a whole pool of young people who are of little constructive use.
Ultimately, it is this hurtful truth which pushes compassionate educators to focus solely on increasing the outcomes of the most underperforming students, to the detriment of all other students. Their motives may be pure, but the outcomes are catastrophic. Positive change in America’s failed public education system can only be achieved by far more radical reforms.
All the economic evidence tends to suggest that people flourish most and are most happy when there is the maximum amount of difference in any cultivated innate ability, but where people have the maximum number of dimensions across which to discover their true forte. Heterodox economics produces rich professional sportsmen, musical divas, peerless writers and scientists who can cure cancer, it helps mathematicians and physicists unlock the key to the universe, and aids climate engineers in their search for innovations which will solve climate change.
But to judge every child on the basis of the single criteria of academics, and to then enforce a form of blank slate equality of outcome approach by investing everything in those who don’t do well, is in the first case cruel and the second instance insanely wasteful. For the lack of vocational training during the all important teen years, many of these kids could have found themselves in dignified jobs, providing vital and specialised work for society, as trade professionals- instead they are let to rot at the bottom of society, feeling like failures because of their educational experiences and their lack of vocation.
In general the key to successful reform is specialisation, whether we are discussing the gifted, those with special needs or those who struggle academically- whether this is achieved through planning or the market is a distraction to the truth that it desperately needs to happen. There is however one areas where choice must be introduced, if we ever want to resuscitate social mobility in society.
Simply put, we need to offer committed parents with relatively well-behaved kids to opt into schools with a like-minded community of parents and children. It is what the wealthy are able to buy with their money to the massive advantage of their kids- to not offer the same choice to parents further down the economic spectrum goes against the best instincts of both egalitarianism and meritocracy.
When concentrated, committed parents and well-behaved kids can achieve outcomes which excel even the most prestigious private schools. With their seemingly miraculous results they overturn everything we thought we knew about the baleful effects of economic disadvantage and completely refute the worst stereotypes surrounding race. The concentration of parental commitment achieves wonders, whilst its dilution to the individual level almost completely nullifies its beneficial effects. The simple, awful truth is that you can do everything right- make sure your kids does their half-an-hour of consolidation homework every evening and listen to them read to you every night when they go to bed- but unless every parent of every child in your kids class does the same, your child’s future educational outcomes will always be held hostage to the lowest common denominator in their class.
The evidence is now so compelling as to be irrefutable. A significant number of outstanding schools outperforming expectations by every measure:
Anecdote: I will not proceed further with a math student until they've memorized their times tables. If nothing else it gives them a demonstrable success -- proof that they CAN get it done. After that, success builds on success.
Here in Canada a teacher friend observed that the bulk of his time is eaten by disruptive kids who he is not allowed to restrain or even touch - these kids hold classes hostage. He observes that the kids understand they are empowered to behave as they want and the system will revolve around them. If they become violent the teacher is to vacate the classroom of all other students who must wait outside until the principal arrives to moderate the situation. Teacher says it happens 3 to 5x times a week. Further anyone can use any excuse for not handing in homework and and can challenge being penalized for so doing. Apparently Covid has bought them time to play video games instead of doing class work and this is supposed to help them alleviate stress. Who in the world thinks this is a good situation?
Sorry, but it's been determined we are just cogs in the machine run by do-gooder and evil tyrants, two peas in the same authoritarian pod. You may not even be essential, and your body is my choice.
Geary, this is the article of yours that convinced me to subscribe. You’ve clearly worked hard to think through this issue (and the various others you’ve addressed on the site) and you offer some serious solutions/opinions. In general, I agree completely with your argument for an increase in vocational training, a jettisoning of the left-wing education fads, and a return to the basics of rote memorization and a focus on the fundamentals. Those are the building blocks upon which higher order thinking is built. Phonics, times tables (and addition and subtraction etc.), memorizing some basic historical facts and dates, and learning the rules of spelling and grammar (even if they are not always strictly applied in Substack comments later in life).
In school, my peers hated memorizing historical info. They said it was boring and unimportant. I enjoyed it, along with a few friends. Those of us who cared commanded a much vaster recall of historical knowledge that allowed (and still allows) us to make sense of current events in the world. That’s just one example.
Another example: many friends and family claim they’re bad with numbers. I’m not gifted with numbers at all. But because I stuck it out with engineering classes that did not come naturally to me, and because I use math every day in my life, I have a pretty solid ability to do basic mental calculations. I can understand relationships between numbers. Not because I’m smart but because I didn’t decide that “I can’t do math.”
As someone who graduated public high school in America relatively recently (in the mid-2010s), I have firsthand experience with a number of the problems. Luckily, my school did have a robust trades/vocational section. Given that a large portion of the student body did not go to college (poor, rural, agricultural Virginia), this allowed them to actually get jobs.
I certainly saw my fair share of idiotic educational fads, but I also had some very good teachers who cared about the fundamentals. Also, I benefited from two highly-educated and involved parents: I could read before I started school and learned more history and political science and philosophy from them than from school. My father also forced my sister and I to read books far advanced from whatever grade level we happened to be in.
In the early years most of my peers had parents who cared about school. High school was bigger and had many students who did not care. I sat through my share of classes with students who refused to turn in work. These classes were often boring and pitched at a very basic level.
Luckily, I got into mostly advanced/AP courses later and had good teachers who cared. There was a vast difference in my high school between AP and regular classes. For example, in AP classes, teachers didn’t have to focus on getting students to pass state standard tests because everyone already would. Therefore, they could teach advanced material.
Autistic students had their own classes, but kids with dyslexia and ADHD did not.
Discipline was often an issue and some teachers knew how to deal with it while others did not. This made the difference between “regular” classes where learning happened and those where it did not. And it impacted teacher burnout.
All of this is to say that you’re absolutely right about tracking and specialization. Some smart kids hated school but thrived in the trades. One guy I knew (whose brothers did well in universities) did very poorly in school by choice. He went to college for a semester or two then dropped out. He’s now doing pretty well as a welder from what I understand.
Anyway, great piece, I look forward to reading and engaging with more on the site.
What Ray said. How are you Ray? This essay is another homerun Geary, I just posted it. FB isn't the ideal media for this sort of analysis, but I hope a few teacher friends check it out.
Thanks again Geary for sharing your brain. As usual another great treat that expands my own mind in a thousand directions. I hope some of those laser paths manage to make as many connections as possible.
At my village primary school led by a fantastic headmaster that asked "why" to us all and who selected two other teachers with a similar love of passing knowledge; but essentially and importantly how to question and interpret and categorise teachings. Even as a young child I knew these teachers and especially Mr.Owen personalised their teaching to inspire interest and interpretation and collective interest. As an example I recall Mr.Owen prior to engaging us in a history tutorial, he gave a five some minutes anecdotal about life as a tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber. He had us shocked, tense, in wonder and laughing as he finished off by telling us that there was no place to urinate and most of what was spent further up the plane managed to find itself close to his seat. An annoyance he said he focussed and used to aggressively spit bullets out at enemy fighter planes.
The point being that he inspired you to absorb his lessons. He also gave us a half day split between the three teachers where we'd engage in a multitude of practical and recreational styled activities. I spent many Friday afternoons along with another two boys fixing up and repairing damaged masonry on an outbuilding. We boys were photographed all smiles along with Mr.Owen when the work was complete and the photo proudly put alongside others of this ilk in the school gallery. What an influence. I became a builder and set up my own business as you know. Such people are special Geary and shape others lives. I have a habit of repeatedly letting them know.
I'm very much in agreement with what you say throughout your article. I like and strongly believe to be the case your analogy of times tables creating shortcuts during math. My god the apprentices nowadays are awful at maths and construction requires it constantly. But yes of course if say one was needing to add say 7 times 7 plus 7 times 7 together the method would be simply 49 plus 49 (or as I do it 50 plus 50 minus 2)= 98. It's almost an automatic answer. Simple. Simple if you've learned those tables as a kid and it has far reaching positive consequences such as with adding fractions and working out percentages in ones mind. I can usually go 5 to 6 sums simultaneously in my head, but it's only due to using these short-cuts. I find it quite shocking how many young people stumble and take so much time working those individual sums out and often unsuccessfully giving a response.
The education system in my comprehensive school was pretty decent, but I doubt as intense as a generation earlier, nor do I believe there was enough emphasis placed upon those special teachers who by wit, experience, anecdotal or inspiration could reach all the students and activate their engagement. For myself and many that I knew, the marks and grades reflected such an interaction between student and teacher. So the teachers that could captivate the working class children as well as the middle class kids were not only the most popular teachers but those that received reflective corresponding and overall higher and often permanently high marks in any and all tests.
The interesting thing about this is that the kids would talk about how lucky or unlucky anyone would be depending upon who was teaching a subject. Performance wise even the low inspirational teachers would achieve a semi-decent average due to the more gifted pupils otherwise it may have become more apparent.
I guess what the secondary educational system requires is some kind of IQ testing upon entry and then appropriating classes accordingly, with the caveat that anomalies are catered for and kids that have epilepsy and such. I rather suspect that optimum performance is not encouraged in state schools and going by your strong argument it would appear that the bosses have favoured a dumbing down approach. Let's take the three main ingredients required to reach old age under probability. They would be genetic and one could ask how long your older family members survived under clean living conditions, then we'd ask if they ate a nutritious diet throughout their lives. Thirdly we'd ask if they exercised a lot and we're looking after themselves. That is the closest analogy I can think of to relate to optimal education attainment; where I'd think it: IQ, teacher interaction/ability and pupil motivation.
One thing that was very apparent in school was that most teachers were middle to upper-middle class and they connected easily to students from a same home background. That is the middle class kids were schooled by example at home and often knew what they wished to do in their lives and that gives reason and motivation toward learning. So for myself the teachers that cared were the ones that went out of their way to reach the young minds of those that didn't quite get the reason for learning stuff they knew their own parents didn't require.
You'd be an excellent teacher Geary and in more than just the subject matter. Great stuff.
What Ray said! How are you Ray??? Geary, this is another Homerun, I just posted it to FB. Not the ideal medium for such detailed analysis, but I hope some of my teacher friends check it out.
Geary for minster of education.
Anecdote: I will not proceed further with a math student until they've memorized their times tables. If nothing else it gives them a demonstrable success -- proof that they CAN get it done. After that, success builds on success.
Here in Canada a teacher friend observed that the bulk of his time is eaten by disruptive kids who he is not allowed to restrain or even touch - these kids hold classes hostage. He observes that the kids understand they are empowered to behave as they want and the system will revolve around them. If they become violent the teacher is to vacate the classroom of all other students who must wait outside until the principal arrives to moderate the situation. Teacher says it happens 3 to 5x times a week. Further anyone can use any excuse for not handing in homework and and can challenge being penalized for so doing. Apparently Covid has bought them time to play video games instead of doing class work and this is supposed to help them alleviate stress. Who in the world thinks this is a good situation?
Sorry, but it's been determined we are just cogs in the machine run by do-gooder and evil tyrants, two peas in the same authoritarian pod. You may not even be essential, and your body is my choice.
Geary, this is the article of yours that convinced me to subscribe. You’ve clearly worked hard to think through this issue (and the various others you’ve addressed on the site) and you offer some serious solutions/opinions. In general, I agree completely with your argument for an increase in vocational training, a jettisoning of the left-wing education fads, and a return to the basics of rote memorization and a focus on the fundamentals. Those are the building blocks upon which higher order thinking is built. Phonics, times tables (and addition and subtraction etc.), memorizing some basic historical facts and dates, and learning the rules of spelling and grammar (even if they are not always strictly applied in Substack comments later in life).
In school, my peers hated memorizing historical info. They said it was boring and unimportant. I enjoyed it, along with a few friends. Those of us who cared commanded a much vaster recall of historical knowledge that allowed (and still allows) us to make sense of current events in the world. That’s just one example.
Another example: many friends and family claim they’re bad with numbers. I’m not gifted with numbers at all. But because I stuck it out with engineering classes that did not come naturally to me, and because I use math every day in my life, I have a pretty solid ability to do basic mental calculations. I can understand relationships between numbers. Not because I’m smart but because I didn’t decide that “I can’t do math.”
As someone who graduated public high school in America relatively recently (in the mid-2010s), I have firsthand experience with a number of the problems. Luckily, my school did have a robust trades/vocational section. Given that a large portion of the student body did not go to college (poor, rural, agricultural Virginia), this allowed them to actually get jobs.
I certainly saw my fair share of idiotic educational fads, but I also had some very good teachers who cared about the fundamentals. Also, I benefited from two highly-educated and involved parents: I could read before I started school and learned more history and political science and philosophy from them than from school. My father also forced my sister and I to read books far advanced from whatever grade level we happened to be in.
In the early years most of my peers had parents who cared about school. High school was bigger and had many students who did not care. I sat through my share of classes with students who refused to turn in work. These classes were often boring and pitched at a very basic level.
Luckily, I got into mostly advanced/AP courses later and had good teachers who cared. There was a vast difference in my high school between AP and regular classes. For example, in AP classes, teachers didn’t have to focus on getting students to pass state standard tests because everyone already would. Therefore, they could teach advanced material.
Autistic students had their own classes, but kids with dyslexia and ADHD did not.
Discipline was often an issue and some teachers knew how to deal with it while others did not. This made the difference between “regular” classes where learning happened and those where it did not. And it impacted teacher burnout.
All of this is to say that you’re absolutely right about tracking and specialization. Some smart kids hated school but thrived in the trades. One guy I knew (whose brothers did well in universities) did very poorly in school by choice. He went to college for a semester or two then dropped out. He’s now doing pretty well as a welder from what I understand.
Anyway, great piece, I look forward to reading and engaging with more on the site.
What Ray said. How are you Ray? This essay is another homerun Geary, I just posted it. FB isn't the ideal media for this sort of analysis, but I hope a few teacher friends check it out.
Thanks again Geary for sharing your brain. As usual another great treat that expands my own mind in a thousand directions. I hope some of those laser paths manage to make as many connections as possible.
At my village primary school led by a fantastic headmaster that asked "why" to us all and who selected two other teachers with a similar love of passing knowledge; but essentially and importantly how to question and interpret and categorise teachings. Even as a young child I knew these teachers and especially Mr.Owen personalised their teaching to inspire interest and interpretation and collective interest. As an example I recall Mr.Owen prior to engaging us in a history tutorial, he gave a five some minutes anecdotal about life as a tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber. He had us shocked, tense, in wonder and laughing as he finished off by telling us that there was no place to urinate and most of what was spent further up the plane managed to find itself close to his seat. An annoyance he said he focussed and used to aggressively spit bullets out at enemy fighter planes.
The point being that he inspired you to absorb his lessons. He also gave us a half day split between the three teachers where we'd engage in a multitude of practical and recreational styled activities. I spent many Friday afternoons along with another two boys fixing up and repairing damaged masonry on an outbuilding. We boys were photographed all smiles along with Mr.Owen when the work was complete and the photo proudly put alongside others of this ilk in the school gallery. What an influence. I became a builder and set up my own business as you know. Such people are special Geary and shape others lives. I have a habit of repeatedly letting them know.
I'm very much in agreement with what you say throughout your article. I like and strongly believe to be the case your analogy of times tables creating shortcuts during math. My god the apprentices nowadays are awful at maths and construction requires it constantly. But yes of course if say one was needing to add say 7 times 7 plus 7 times 7 together the method would be simply 49 plus 49 (or as I do it 50 plus 50 minus 2)= 98. It's almost an automatic answer. Simple. Simple if you've learned those tables as a kid and it has far reaching positive consequences such as with adding fractions and working out percentages in ones mind. I can usually go 5 to 6 sums simultaneously in my head, but it's only due to using these short-cuts. I find it quite shocking how many young people stumble and take so much time working those individual sums out and often unsuccessfully giving a response.
The education system in my comprehensive school was pretty decent, but I doubt as intense as a generation earlier, nor do I believe there was enough emphasis placed upon those special teachers who by wit, experience, anecdotal or inspiration could reach all the students and activate their engagement. For myself and many that I knew, the marks and grades reflected such an interaction between student and teacher. So the teachers that could captivate the working class children as well as the middle class kids were not only the most popular teachers but those that received reflective corresponding and overall higher and often permanently high marks in any and all tests.
The interesting thing about this is that the kids would talk about how lucky or unlucky anyone would be depending upon who was teaching a subject. Performance wise even the low inspirational teachers would achieve a semi-decent average due to the more gifted pupils otherwise it may have become more apparent.
I guess what the secondary educational system requires is some kind of IQ testing upon entry and then appropriating classes accordingly, with the caveat that anomalies are catered for and kids that have epilepsy and such. I rather suspect that optimum performance is not encouraged in state schools and going by your strong argument it would appear that the bosses have favoured a dumbing down approach. Let's take the three main ingredients required to reach old age under probability. They would be genetic and one could ask how long your older family members survived under clean living conditions, then we'd ask if they ate a nutritious diet throughout their lives. Thirdly we'd ask if they exercised a lot and we're looking after themselves. That is the closest analogy I can think of to relate to optimal education attainment; where I'd think it: IQ, teacher interaction/ability and pupil motivation.
One thing that was very apparent in school was that most teachers were middle to upper-middle class and they connected easily to students from a same home background. That is the middle class kids were schooled by example at home and often knew what they wished to do in their lives and that gives reason and motivation toward learning. So for myself the teachers that cared were the ones that went out of their way to reach the young minds of those that didn't quite get the reason for learning stuff they knew their own parents didn't require.
You'd be an excellent teacher Geary and in more than just the subject matter. Great stuff.
What Ray said! How are you Ray??? Geary, this is another Homerun, I just posted it to FB. Not the ideal medium for such detailed analysis, but I hope some of my teacher friends check it out.