Design an education system

[Starglider]

Pfft. Toddlers in China and Japan have no issues learning their languages on their own.

Obviously they are easier to learn as first languages and even there getting a handle on the huge character set is an issue.

Foreign language education starts at the very beginning of schooling in many countries for this very good reason and they get very good results out of it. That core primary education most people have mentioned should include at least one foreign language from Day One.

It is true that children have better language learning capabilities that adults due to various brain function details (e.g. the high level of neural pruning going on) and that teaching languages earlier works better. I'd note though that this is another gender achievement disparity issue, as girls are demonstrably better at learning languages than boys.

I'll tell you what, if you let me classify C, BASIC and Lisp as 'second languages', I will support your proposal.

[Lusankya]

Pfft. Toddlers in China and Japan have no issues learning their languages on their own. Foreign language education starts at the very beginning of schooling in many countries for this very good reason and they get very good results out of it. That core primary education most people have mentioned should include at least one foreign language from Day One.

I assumed that he meant more difficult for English speakers, since the languages aren't related. Chinese and Japanese are certainly more difficult than (say) French or German in terms of learning vocabulary, and the learning of characters makes literacy more difficult. Grammar on the other hand is much easier in both Chinese and Japanese, even with Japan's funky sentence structure, since verbs are more regular (Japanese has 3 irregular verbs, and Chinese has no verb conjugation at all, and neither language has crap like case markings or gendered nouns).

I pretty much agree with the tier systems most everyone else has mentioned. My little pet project/early experiment would be to test if some musical education (instrumental, vocal, individual, orchestral, whatever) has any benefit for general learning, and how much if it does.

I know that in Hungary they use the Kodaly Method of music teaching, which has positive effects on other aspects of learning. I can't remember too much about it though (I read this while proofreading a textbook I had to scan for a blind students who needed it for university). Perhaps some Hungarian members know more about it?

[PainRack]

It seems to me we might need to get away from the whole 'you can be/do anything if you try hard enough' mode of thinking, because while its nice and makes you feel good, it's just not true.

I propose having multiple 'tiers' of education;

Tier 1: Future doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers.
Tier 2: Service people, technicians, sales, etc.
Tier 3: Manual labor, menial work, etc.

Every year, a child will be tested and evaluated based on their scores to be placed in one of the three tiers. The categorization is by no means permanent, and it could be a child who was thought to be T3 in fourth grade might turn out to be scoring as a T1 by 7th grade. Their secondary education will be more tailored to their likely career, and instead of everyone going to college, only those whose likely career paths will require it would go to college.

It seems good, but at the same time it sounds a bit Gattica-ish to me.

We do that here and there are some major problems involved.

First of all, lets do admit that you do need some form of streaming and seperation. Everyone is not born academically equivalent, and expecting everyone to function to the average means dumbing the smarter ones and overstressing the dumb ones.

The problem however rests in categorisation. While realising that you're not as adacemically fit as another person allows schools and teachers to set more adequate cirrculium for you, along with tailoring more resources so that you can master more difficult subjects like math, the resulting morale hit to students classed as E3 in our system is devastating. I'm sure those in the UK system with their Comprehensive and etc can express this just as well.

Deciding to stream students at a very young age hits their self-esteem hard, and may be detrimental to pushing them to study harder. While some form of classification may be required so that you can tailor more resources to assisting them to grasp fundamentals, one does need to consider at what age you would assign them to such a "tier" of education.

[Starglider]

Deciding to stream students at a very young age hits their self-esteem hard

So what? We have a massive surplus of 'self-esteem' right now, and frankly it's a sacrifice well worth making if it means we can better utilise the upper range of the talent pool.

and may be detrimental to pushing them to study harder.

Personal anecdote, but I was in a thoroughly streamed (grammar) school, and we were (nearly) all trying to get into higher streams except for in a few subjects we'd written off (for me, it was French). Dropping to a lower stream spurred people to push harder to make it back up.

[Themightytom]

So what? We have a massive surplus of 'self-esteem' right now, and frankly it's a sacrifice well worth making if it means we can better utilise the upper range of the talent pool.

I was interested in challenging that statement because I am not sure sacraficing self esteem DOES permit better utilization of upper range talent, but when I was looking for evidence in advance (Yes I am actually learning something from the "Grade James T. Kirk" debacle) I came accross this article. And son of a bitch if it doesn't contradict my argument right out of the gate.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articl ... d0001.html

Finally, the whole focus on ourselves feeds unrealistic self love. What psychologists often call narcissism. One would have thought America had enough trouble with narcissism in the 70s which was the Me Generation and in the 80s with the yuppies. Today, the search for self-esteem is just the newest expression of America's old egomania.

Thats qualified opinion, (The author is a PHD psychologist from Stanford) but not statistical evidence.

It pretty much flies in the face of the prevailing notions I am exposed to in my grad courses for Mental health Counseling, which includes classes in school counseling as well (gives me a double masters when I'm done). I post it, because it actually seems that the American School Cousnelor's Association DOES consider self esteem to be important to learning (The competency scales I am trained to employ have specifically categories for evaluating self esteem as well under the academic domain.)

I'm looking for a better source or a more specific article, that is available online. I stopped paying my membership so I can't access their online journals anymore but i swear there was a statistical study linking self esteem with academic performance.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Increases ... 0198412428

Now the ASCA article above might shed some light on this, it reports that peer mentoring builds self esteem more effectively in higher education.

and may be detrimental to pushing them to study harder.

Personal anecdote, but I was in a thoroughly streamed (grammar) school, and we were (nearly) all trying to get into higher streams except for in a few subjects we'd written off (for me, it was French). Dropping to a lower stream spurred people to push harder to make it back up.

[/quote]

I had a similiar experience. I went to a private school until fifth grade then public until eight, and while I was doing pre Algebra in 5th grade at the private school the private HS I was enrolling in didn't want me to go into Algebra I because they were only looking at the previous class. Not wanting to be stuck in the remedial math program, I did my sister's algebra homework (She was a year ahead of me at the HS i was trying to get into) and ended up testing into Algebra II.

I am not sure that applies to elementary school or Junior high. I was overjoyed when i went from private to public in sixth grade because the standards dropped significantly. Suddenly I could get a minimum C grade just by putting my name on an english paper and handing it in, as opposed to my previous weekly vocab tests, writing assignments and we had F()&%* vocabulary crossword puzzles with like sixty words in them that were rediculously tedius.

I like the idea of emphasizing critical reasoning in K-8, with some overlap on conceptual learning from 4th to 8th. In HS give people the opportunity to test out of basic knowledge at any time (A lot of people already do this with the GED) with the reward being you can trade HS years for college years. I would offer state sponsored education for 12 years or up to a HS diploma, which ever comes last. We want to reward faster learners but we want to establish a baseline.

[PainRack]

So what? We have a massive surplus of 'self-esteem' right now, and frankly it's a sacrifice well worth making if it means we can better utilise the upper range of the talent pool.

and may be detrimental to pushing them to study harder.

Personal anecdote, but I was in a thoroughly streamed (grammar) school, and we were (nearly) all trying to get into higher streams except for in a few subjects we'd written off (for me, it was French). Dropping to a lower stream spurred people to push harder to make it back up.

I'm paraphrasing actually from a book published by a MOE critic here in Singapore. It was published back in the nineties and drastically different to the current problems, but the issues was about self fulfilling prophecies. Grade a person to be a no gooder early enough in life, and you essentially demotivate him in his attempts to improve.

There was some survey data from teachers that backed her assumption, mainly with regards to discipline problems as well as the rate of homework accomplishments for young kids who had been graded into the lowest stream.