My daughter was born in 1970, and even then I was aware that when she got to first grade they would not be teaching phonics any more, but rather, were focused on some sort of world recognition. So I taught her read beginning at age 4 and when she went to first grade she was already a fantastic reader. We were living abroad for most of …
My daughter was born in 1970, and even then I was aware that when she got to first grade they would not be teaching phonics any more, but rather, were focused on some sort of world recognition. So I taught her read beginning at age 4 and when she went to first grade she was already a fantastic reader. We were living abroad for most of her life so she mostly went to international type schools which not only had kids of many different nationalities, but a very high standard of scholarship. If kids didn't study well or misbehaved, they were out. Overall, it was a great and productive learning environment. When she was in 9th grade, we were living in Saudi Arabia and at the time, there were no international schools that went beyond 8th grade. So we purchased a home study high school program from Berkeley and she did that for 9th thru 11th grade. The result was that she learned how to be a serious learner and she took responsibility for her own studies, with help as needed. When we moved back to the U.S. for her senior year, she was far ahead of her 12th grade classmates. And she was shocked at what she was seeing in the high schools even back then in 1988. She frequently commented on how rude and disrespectful some students were to their teachers, how they didn't work very hard, they would listen to their Walkman in class, sometimes just get up and walk out of class, and so on. And even then teachers seemed to be losing control in the classroom. Such things would never have been allowed when I was in high school.
Exactly right. Never would have been allowed when I was in school either. Typically, when children have been educated overseas come back to the US, they find they are on average two years ahead of their peers here. But when you dump them into the US system, they regress to the class average and the advantage is lost. The US educational system now serves not the students but rather serves the profit motive of the administrators and the university system. The student loan program only made this trend go exponential. Higher education in the US is now a waste of time and money.
My daughter was born in 1970, and even then I was aware that when she got to first grade they would not be teaching phonics any more, but rather, were focused on some sort of world recognition. So I taught her read beginning at age 4 and when she went to first grade she was already a fantastic reader. We were living abroad for most of her life so she mostly went to international type schools which not only had kids of many different nationalities, but a very high standard of scholarship. If kids didn't study well or misbehaved, they were out. Overall, it was a great and productive learning environment. When she was in 9th grade, we were living in Saudi Arabia and at the time, there were no international schools that went beyond 8th grade. So we purchased a home study high school program from Berkeley and she did that for 9th thru 11th grade. The result was that she learned how to be a serious learner and she took responsibility for her own studies, with help as needed. When we moved back to the U.S. for her senior year, she was far ahead of her 12th grade classmates. And she was shocked at what she was seeing in the high schools even back then in 1988. She frequently commented on how rude and disrespectful some students were to their teachers, how they didn't work very hard, they would listen to their Walkman in class, sometimes just get up and walk out of class, and so on. And even then teachers seemed to be losing control in the classroom. Such things would never have been allowed when I was in high school.
Exactly right. Never would have been allowed when I was in school either. Typically, when children have been educated overseas come back to the US, they find they are on average two years ahead of their peers here. But when you dump them into the US system, they regress to the class average and the advantage is lost. The US educational system now serves not the students but rather serves the profit motive of the administrators and the university system. The student loan program only made this trend go exponential. Higher education in the US is now a waste of time and money.