Category: Learning, Education, & Training

How High School Nearly Destroyed Me, and Why School Choice Matters | The Freedom Pub

Many say school choice is a dangerous idea because it turns parents and students into customers and teachers into something like service providers. In my experience, the absence of school choice turns parents and students into captives with no ability to make decisions that would improve educational opportunities.

Being sick all the time was hard enough, but it was nearly unbearable to be sick in a school where the vast majority of the teachers and school administrators thought I was fabricating the illness because it was officially undiagnosed. My parents had followed all the proper guidelines for ensuring the school would continue to make reasonable accommodations for my education. They took me to countless doctors and received documentation from each indicating there was a real medical problem. They also ensured I was signed up for the 504 Plan, a set of policies established by federal law mandating public schools continue to offer sick and disabled students an education, and they met with school officials constantly to try and keep them on-track.
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There was no one willing to hold these teachers and administrators accountable for breaking federal law, and there were no other public school options available.

When people ask me how I found my way into the pro-liberty movement, the honest answer is that I was pushed into it. I didn’t learn much about calculus or physics in high school, but I received a priceless lesson in how bureaucracies work, how teachers unions protect their own at the expense of schoolchildren, and why giving parents and students the freedom to make educational choices should be a universal right, not a privilege reserved for the few.

Source: How High School Nearly Destroyed Me, and Why School Choice Matters | The Freedom Pub by Justin Haskins

VALUING TEACHING – FROGS AROUND A POND

I absolutely agree with the idea that liberal education is a good thing and that the drive towards STEM is bad. I agree with the rejection of concepts like common core in favor of a more diverse curriculum. I agree with the value of an inspirational teacher no matter what subject is being discussed.  They are on the right line of discussion on the really big issues.

But then they don’t ever get to the things that prevent the inspirational teaching to think that they talk about. They never get to the problems of underpaid and overworked teaching labor. They don’t talk about the almost complete death of the full time teaching job. They don’t talk about how much damage is done by the idea that the purpose of college is job preparation rather than life preparation.

Instead they talk about Massive Online Courses.

The idea that teaching hasn’t changed and that this new technology changes everything is just bald ignorance.

Source: VALUING TEACHING – FROGS AROUND A POND

Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts – The New York Times

As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture. What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from.

A misleading distinction between fact and opinion is embedded in the Common Core.

When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

First, the definition of a fact waffles between truth and proof — two obviously different features. Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.

But second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both.

How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality? … Kids are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion.

In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.

We can do better. Our children deserve a consistent intellectual foundation. Facts are things that are true. Opinions are things we believe. Some of our beliefs are true. Others are not. Some of our beliefs are backed by evidence. Others are not. Value claims are like any other claims: either true or false, evidenced or not. The hard work lies not in recognizing that at least some moral claims are true but in carefully thinking through our evidence for which of the many competing moral claims is correct.

Source: Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts – The New York Times