Acclimation
School is prison for intelligent kids.
Not so sure. School does socialize children and does this through routines. Trouble is, some can’t deal with the lack of routine when done.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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April 20th, 2012 at 9:33 am
Yes it does socialize them… In the worst characteristics possible concentrated into a high security environment… A minimum security prison is still a prison…
April 20th, 2012 at 9:37 am
“Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn’t want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.”
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html (well worth reading the whole thing; it says many of the same things that LabRat said)
The “socialization” argument is flawed, because schools socialize children with other children; and most children have a noticeably warped worldview and a lack of reason. Their brains are not fully developed yet. When they create their own societies from scratch, well, there’s a reason why Lord of the Flies resonates. Far better to let your children be socialized by a broad range of adults, who have both perspective and experience.
April 20th, 2012 at 9:39 am
It surely does socialize them to socialist ideas.
April 20th, 2012 at 9:46 am
Public schools do remind me of a variation on the Stanford prison experiment…
April 20th, 2012 at 11:32 am
IEP meeting yesterday. My little girl is a square peg that does not fit in a round hole. She is ten, and she reads at sixteen age. 99th percentile, nationally. She swims, sings, plays piano, surfs, skateboards, rides horses, shoots the bow, and tells the truth, and has the same tested IQ as President Bush. Her lowest score is math, 87th percentile, because it’s not her thing.
The problem is that half the students in a classroom are smarter than their teacher.
April 20th, 2012 at 11:43 am
Schools don’t socialize kids, it institutionalizes them. Most never recover their freedom of thought and increasingly, many seek to remain in the institution rather than accept release when their up for parole.
That’s from a book on teaching kids to study published in 1909. Somewhat of a bible at the time but seemingly lost since the ’20s, for organizing kids’ ability to study and learn on their own. Now, such a skill is a much touted but increasingly rare outcome of a liberal arts degree, i.e., critical thinking.
I’ve seen similar research reported in a book published in 1886.
Here’s an animation that explains the recent results of a study in divergent thinking. Spoiler alert: kindergartners had a 98% level of geniuses in divergent thinking but that number dropped precipitously as those students became “educated”.
April 20th, 2012 at 11:58 am
We’re fighting that, JKB. My daughter is more homeschooled than she is schooled. Parents have to stand up, too. All the things I said above, that’s us not the school. My father taught me to read the newspaper at age four and to clean a muzzleloader at age seven. But not all parents are like that.
April 20th, 2012 at 12:13 pm
I always loved the “it socializes them” argument. Yeah. It teaches them to be materialistic conformists. It teaches them hierarchical behavior so they learn to be either expectant and abusive of others, or passive underachievers who acknowledge their place in the pecking order, based entirely on the social skills they possess innately.
That works out great, except when it doesn’t. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were socialized in public schools. So was Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Houston, Colt Todd, Evan Ramsey, Luke Woodham, Mitchell Johnson, Andrew Golden, and dozens of others.
If you care about your children, you won’t put them in a public school.
April 20th, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Public schools “socialize” boys to act like good little girls.
April 20th, 2012 at 12:48 pm
I believe it’s inherently a conflict of interest for the government to “Educate” tomorrow’s voters.
I also think that having large schools bigger than the colleges I attended contributes to major problems, educationally and socially. I went to a small private school. The teachers were paid very little, and the basketball team suffered because the coach was a math teacher first, and a ball coach as an afterthought. Teachers taught multiple different kinds of classes, some of which they had not been formally trained for. But collectively we kicked tail when it came time do SAT/ACT tests and appy for college. I believe it was partly because the small class sizes allowed for more supervision and student/teacher interaction. I believe we did well mostly because our parents wanted us there, and held us accountable to work hard. The kicker? That school cost our parents about $2000 per year, minus family discounts which made it affordable for large families to have 4-5 kids there at a time(I think every kid after the 3rd was free). Compare that to the amount of money per student the government schools typically spend, while asking for more all the time.
April 20th, 2012 at 1:19 pm
nk, that’s great. A kid in public school doesn’t have to become dependent on that school for their ability to learn. You are right, those kids without involved parents are the ones we need to look for solutions.
Since reading on the subject, I’ve seen where I became “school helpless” and I see it in the kids in my family. Notoriously, the “Schools out for the day, don’t bother me with learning” attitude. In reality, learning is continuous but we become indoctrinated to the schedule.
The book the quote came from is How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. It’s available as a free book via Google books. I highly recommend it to get the factors of studying that kids need to be encouraged to retain. The first four are thinking, which we all keep for subjects not offered by expert instruction. To bad, schools are set up to discourage thinking. Nothing nefarious, it slows down the class and leads to questions not in the book. Soon the bright kids learn not to think past the book as they’ll just be admonished for bringing such thoughts up.
April 20th, 2012 at 1:48 pm
In first grade, I worked my way up to the fourth grade readers. When the teacher found out, she made me stop. They weren’t all that bad — many were better, some were worse.
April 20th, 2012 at 3:41 pm
“Socialize” ought to mean “teach how to play well with others”, but in practice, in today’s, um, socialized education establishment, it means the same thing it did in the Prussian system that was its pattern.
John Taylor Gatto is an interesting read on this topic. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
April 20th, 2012 at 9:12 pm
IMHO the modern American school system is the root cause of a lot of our problems as a society. Precisely because of the true nature of the socialization that goes on there. I explain my views on the subject in detail in this post over at the New Eclectic Dragonfly:
http://theeclecticdragonfly.blogspot.com/2011/10/replying-to-email.html
The bit about the schools comes right after the Jefferson quote.
April 20th, 2012 at 9:39 pm
stuffing some kids in a room full of sociopaths and putting in a minimum of effort to keep them from hurting each other is a weak effort at socialization at best.
April 21st, 2012 at 9:20 am
“Not so sure. School does socialize children and does this through routines.”
Socialize? You mean it destroys their individual character and personality and self in order to coerce them into conforming to the bland dumb mass produced consumer sheeple stereotype? Well, yes it does, but why would any human being want to do that to their progeny?
Even dumb kids shouldn’t be treated like dogs.
April 21st, 2012 at 1:25 pm
It sure isn’t reality that mints all those Leftists.
At Kevin’s place: The Comprachicos
April 22nd, 2012 at 2:14 pm
I homeschool my kids (always have) and so I’m getting a kick out of reading all this “socialization” discussion. 🙂
Socialization.. the “s-word” of homeschoolers.