Anyway, my youngest couldn’t adapt during high school, similar to your situation, and we struggled constantly with the system to make it work.

It’s an excellent topic but check out Hartmann’s articles over at his website or CommonDreams.

My sister is a junior high school teacher back in my home state of Alabama. I remember her talking about this kind of thing all the time.

You make a very strong point, that the role of the educators themselves is crucial. I don’t know what the scenario is like abroad, but in the US, the curriculum itself along with a piledriving need for political correctness seems to very stringently limit what educators are able to do to develop the individual.

There’s always, at every US election, lots of talk about who’s going to spend more on education. So education is just this huge machine into which dollars must be fed, and the more dollars, the better it’s going to work. There is almost never any talk in politics of re-evaluating the methodology and the structure of public education–primary, secondary, or higher. If it is proffered, it’s not taken very seriously by the public. They have enough to worry about just getting their kids back and forth to school, making sure they’re safe from gunmen, etc., etc. It’s like a taboo unthinkable to discuss things like restructuring the education system.

The education system in the US offers the best solution to the captains of industry; all the other benefits, as far as I can see, are trickle-down and come with their fair share of hidden unpleasantries. Maybe that’s a naïve or overly caustic-idealist point of view. I’m willin’ to accept that.

A really interesting subject of study to me, and one that I need to peruse much more deeply before writing any further on this topic, is the beginnings of public education in America. I imagine there are strong parallels with the development of education in Britain, but I don’t know. A lot of historians, particularly leftists, have pointed out that it was very openly discussed in the dawning years of the system that a major goal of the education process was going to be to take a certain sense of independence out of all the kids who were growing up on family farms. It was to be replaced with state-subservience. Of course it wasn’t phrased anything like that, but that’s what the line of thought in government amounted to, according to some. It was necessary, for purposes of structuring the new industrial economy, to indoctrinate young people into embracing what amounts to wage slavery as an acceptable and respectable way of life, because that sort of lifestyle and social condition was highly antithetical to the tenets widely valued in early America. It’s been written that Thomas Jefferson, for one, absolutely abhorred the idea of separating workers from their means of production by treating time and labor as an intermediary commodity.

So it was once an American ideal; now it’s called socialism and is generally reviled. I guess discussing the issue of education reform at this level really sort of irresistably points towards economic reform; because I think it is true that the education system as it stands is the best method of feeding fuel to the inexorably hungry economy that we have. I’ll agree with that, certainly.

I found your anecdotes and those of the others who’ve respondd the most interesting. I had a good friend at school who was a brilliant writer. She was obviously extremely intelligent and very able but she did abseloutely no work. Her girls school streamed classes into two bands reflecting their grades: a,b,c and d,e,f. Because she was essentally disaffected - she loathed both school and all the girls at the institution she attended, she ended up in the d,e,f band. Thus an absurd situation transpired where she would achieve high A grades in English and Drama, but was in the D class for both subjects. She never fully recovered from the effects of this and, last I knew, she was still a waitress at 30 havingg never studied.

Personally I’ve always enjoyed the odd ones - they’re often the best writers - and will always do my best to encourage and motivate them but often to no avail. I have a previous student with whom I still keep contact who slept through most of my lessons but has done very well at University, completing a degree in film studies.

I think the horrible conformity that school insists on, and the bullying some receive for being different, can, ultimately benefit some in a perverse way: think the creators of South Park and Marilyn Manson. But it can be cruel it’s true -I just wish teachers were generally more responsive to the needs of disaffected, bright students. Sometimes it’s because they’re just too dumb themselves.

Drima–yes, I do have a MySpace page. If you’ve got one, pass it along, I’d love to hear your stuff. These are quickly-made, sort of sloppy demos that are a couple of years old and the range is really narrow as far as representing all the types of stuff I’ve done. Everything on the tracks is 100% me, so it sounds sort of thin at times but I think the tunes are good, they just need to be developed a little more and re-recorded when I can take it more slow and easy and can be thorough. I haven’t been to the studio in a while; that’s a goal for the first of next year. Enjoy, and thanks as always for your interest.

The thing is that I don’t even see the point of getting a 4.0 CGPA. I’ve got my own unique interests and I would rather get 3.5 every semester while having time for things like music, reading things that matter and blogging too ;)

It’s sad how society defines “smart”. A degree is supposed to mean you’re smart when it doesn’t mean anything. I find EQ more important than IQ. At the end of the day what matters is having the emotional capacity to execute logic and information. IQ with no stable EQ means you perform differently under different situations with varying intensities.

Nice post.

BTW do you have a Myspace page so I can listen to your music??

What always irritated me was why he received bad grades in all his subjects. As you described, averaging good test scores with bad homework scores will give a bad grade, but he became a “marked man”. When a writing assignment was given, there was nothing wrong with the technical elements, but they didn’t care for the subject matter, so they would give him a bad grade. The most confounding example was his doing an art project that was described as “excellent” in art class, but he still received a bad grade for it. The teacher said he talked too much in class. Not yelled or screamed… “talked”. The one class he should have received a good grade and the teacher still managed to cut him down. By so doing, teachers cut down students’ self-esteem. They expect a strict conformity from everyone that is unfair to demand.

Yes, those school shootings. Whenever I express sympathy for the shooters, I am chided and sneered at. I’m sorry, I can’t help feeling that a child – and to me, these students are still at the tail end of childhood – must have gotten to a pretty awful place to do something that drastic. Their inability to conform, or to fit in, or to perform, or to learn must have caused them more pain than they could deal with in a healthy manner. It’s just so extreme. And remember, to sympathize with the shooter in no way detracts from the sympathy one feels for the victims.

Me? I was a straight-A student. I followed all the rules and conformed. It was nauseating. As far as school is concerned, I suppose I qualified as “successful”. But that was a long time ago… just ask my kids: they like to tease me and say I got to and from school in a covered wagon… :-/