On Education

I work in a High School. A good high school, a high school that regularly achieves honors and students that excel in a number of academic endeavors.  However, we also have those low-achievers.  Not the student that can't learn, but the student that refuses to learn, refuses to be engaged, refuses to try.  High schools are judged on their graduation rate, or more particularly, on their dropout rate and the administration has tried different tactics to save what I call the "reluctant scholar".  They try things like "remediation" and "content mastery" in an attempt to bring the reluctant student around.  Some of the instructors, I'm sure, resort to grade inflation, allowing a student to pass when he should have failed.

An article at Pajamas Media talks about such things, albeit at the college level. 

The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability. Pedagogical wisdom since at least the time of John Dewey — and in some form all the way back to William Wordsworth’s divinely anointed child “trailing clouds of glory” — has stressed the development of self-esteem and a sense of achievement.

And that is the problem. At the college level and at the High School level.  Kids think they will trail clouds of glory, when in most cases they're simply trailing smoke.  Foul, odorous smoke that lingers in the hallway and taints the rarefied air of excellence in education.  For success, there must be failure.  For excellence, there must be drudgery, for brilliance, there must be darkness.  These things are identifiable simply because they contrast.  Without one, you cannot have the other.

Most of what passes for education today, at least at the high school level, is simply bullshit. Go read at the link above to see fresh thinking at the university level.  Many of us are thinking the same thing at the high school level.