Rethink High School

nitro

nitro

With the Democrats finally seeing the light on education, now we have to make sure that kids entering College are super ready. But high schools are mostly shit.

I think high schools should be divided into three:

  • Learn a trade: Learn a real skill that makes you money right out high school should you not choose college. Things like fix cars, etc.
  • General Liberal Arts: Learn to write beautifully, read critically, understand the world around you. Career is the soft services.
  • Extreme Tech: An accelerated path to any STEM. No courses in either above. Beat China and India at their own game.

Rethink High School

https://xqsuperschool.org/
 
nitro said:
With the Democrats finally seeing the light on education, now we have to make sure that kids entering College are super ready. But high schools are mostly shit.

I think high schools should be divided into three:

  • Learn a trade: Learn a real skill that makes you money right out high school should you not choose college. Things like fix cars, etc.
  • General Liberal Arts: Learn to write beautifully, read critically, understand the world around you. Career is the soft services.
  • Extreme Tech: An accelerated path to any STEM. No courses in either above. Beat China and India at their own game.

Rethink High School

https://xqsuperschool.org/
More...
I vote no on this idea. In my high school we were exposed to all three parts you describe, and just for the sake of understanding "why the other guy thinks that way", much less a wider appreciation of the universe, that's crucial.
 
nitro said:
With the Democrats finally seeing the light on education, now we have to make sure that kids entering College are super ready. But high schools are mostly shit.

I think high schools should be divided into three:

  • Learn a trade: Learn a real skill that makes you money right out high school should you not choose college. Things like fix cars, etc.
  • General Liberal Arts: Learn to write beautifully, read critically, understand the world around you. Career is the soft services.
  • Extreme Tech: An accelerated path to any STEM. No courses in either above. Beat China and India at their own game.

Rethink High School

https://xqsuperschool.org/
More...
This was High School in the 60's. I was there. The failure of the system has not been the classes offered as much as it has been the social stigma of pursuing something other than a college bound course. All perpetrated by the educators themselves.
 
“In education, you can only create change from the bottom – if the orders come from the top, schools will resist. Ministries are like giant oil tankers: it takes a long time to turn them around. What we need is lots of little speedboats to show you can do things differently.”




Germany
Half full: solutions, innovations, answers

No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

Pupils choose their own subjects and motivate themselves, an approach some say should be rolled out across Germany

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...able-berlin-school-turns-teaching-upside-down

Philip Oltermann
@philipoltermann

Friday 1 July 2016 15.00 AEST
Last modified on Saturday 2 July 2016 07.00 AEST

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Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year, when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.

Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old.

The Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until students turn 15, no timetables and no lecture-style instructions. The pupils decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.

The school’s syllabus reads like any helicopter parent’s nightmare. Set subjects are limited to maths, German, English and social studies, supplemented by more abstract courses such as “responsibility” and “challenge”. For challenge, students aged 12 to 14 are given €150 (£115) and sent on an adventure that they have to plan entirely by themselves. Some go kayaking; others work on a farm. Anton went trekking along England’s south coast.

The philosophy behind these innovations is simple: as the requirements of the labour market are changing, and smartphones and the internet are transforming the ways in which young people process information, the school’s headteacher, Margret Rasfeld, argues, the most important skill a school can pass down to its students is the ability to motivate themselves.

“Look at three or four year olds – they are all full of self-confidence,” Rasfeld says. “Often, children can’t wait to start school. But frustratingly, most schools then somehow manage to untrain that confidence.”

The Evangelical School Berlin Centre (ESBC) is trying to do nothing less than “reinvent what a school is”, she says. “The mission of a progressive school should be to prepare young people to cope with change, or better still, to make them look forward to change. In the 21st century, schools should see it as their job to develop strong personalities.”

Making students listen to a teacher for 45 minutes and punishing them for collaborating on an exercise, Rasfeld says, was not only out of sync with the requirements of the modern world of work, but counterproductive. “Nothing motivates students more than when they discover the meaning behind a subject of their own accord.”

Students at her school are encouraged to think up other ways to prove their acquired skills, such as coding a computer game instead of sitting a maths exam. Oberländer, who had never been away from home for three weeks until he embarked on his challenge in Cornwall, said he learned more English on his trip than he had in several years of learning the language at school.
pupils at the ESBC
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Reinventing education: pupils at the ESBC, which is gaining a reputation as Germany’s most exciting school. Photograph: Handout

Germany’s federalised education structure, in which each of the 16 states plans its own education system, has traditionally allowed “free learning” models to flourish. Yet unlike Sudbury, Montessori or Steiner schools, Rasfeld’s institution tries to embed student self-determination within a relatively strict system of rules. Students who dawdle during lessons have to come into school on Saturday morning to catch up, a punishment known as “silentium”. “The more freedom you have, the more structure you need,” says Rasfeld.

The main reason why the ESBC is gaining a reputation as Germany’s most exciting school is that its experimental philosophy has managed to deliver impressive results. Year after year, Rasfeld’s institution ends up with the best grades among Berlin’s gesamtschulen, or comprehensive schools, which combine all three school forms of Germany’s tertiary system. Last year’s school leavers achieved an average grade of 2.0, the equivalent of a straight B – even though 40% of the year had been advised not to continue to abitur, the German equivalent of A-levels, before they joined the school. Having opened in 2007 with just 16 students, the school now operates at full capacity, with 500 pupils and long waiting lists for new applicants.

Given its word-of-mouth success, it is little wonder that there have been calls for Rasfeld’s approach to go nationwide. Yet some educational experts question whether the school’s methods can easily be exported: in Berlin, they say, the school can draw the most promising applicants from well-off and progressive families. Rasfeld rejects such criticisms, insisting that the school aims for a heterogenous mix of students from different backgrounds. While a cross adorns the assembly hall and each school day starts with worship, only one-third of current pupils are baptised. Thirty per cent of students have a migrant background and 7% are from households where no German is spoken.

Even though the ESBC is one of Germany’s 5,000 private schools, fees are means tested and relatively low compared with those common in Britain, at between €720 and €6,636 a year. About 5% of students are exempt from fees.

However, even Rasfeld admits that finding teachers able to adjust to the school’s learning methods can be harder than getting students to do the same.

Aged 65 and due to retire in July, Rasfeld still has ambitious plans. A four-person “education innovation lab” based at the school has been developing teaching materials for schools that want to follow the ESBC’s lead. About 40 schools in Germany are in the process of adopting some or all of Rasfeld’s methods. One in Berlin’s Weissensee district recently let a student trek across the Alps for a challenge project. “Things are only getting started,” says Rasfeld.

“In education, you can only create change from the bottom – if the orders come from the top, schools will resist. Ministries are like giant oil tankers: it takes a long time to turn them around. What we need is lots of little speedboats to show you can do things differently.”
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Sounds like a recipe for a lot of HS dropouts that fail at the STEM path. Which of course would result in the dumbing down of said STEM path. Which would result in even worse general education than we have now.

The only parents that would push a child toward the trade school is a parent that has made a good living in a trade. In which case the child is likely to have a better grasp of said trade from their parent than they could get in class.

There are already too many "artists" that can't get meaningful employment, or even subsistence employment. My sister-in-law and her former husband both graduated with degrees in Art History (for him), Communications (for her). Neither have ever had a job that would support them. Divorced after his parents stopped supporting them and they couldn't make it. He now lives with his parents in his 30's, and she lives with my other sister-in-law and her husband.

Art appreciation is great, and every school should touch on it in some way. An education focused on the arts is not something we should push our children toward. Unless they are rich and will never have to take care of themselves.
*now cue the references to outliers.
 
Computer science shud be started in elementary school. No STEM = an economic loser of the future. Everything is digital, CNC machines run even small cabinet shop operations, ditch digging , watering farms, tractors on farms thru GPS, etc, etc.
 
I think that I made a mistake by concentrating only on High School because by the time you get to High School, if you don't have certain skills, you are already in a bad spot (although, there are lots of examples of people that had horrendous pre-university experiences but then hit the ball out of the park when they got to University. But let's continue).

What if elementary education were about three things and only three things:

  1. Language (reading and writing and grammar etc).
  2. Mathematics. Don't just focus on technique, but math as art.
  3. Human reasoning skills.

The first two are relatively well understood. But it is the third on that needs to be broken down. What are human reasoning skills?

  • Before any learning happens, you must learn to calm yourself. Yoga is taught and practiced at schools. (Christians sadly will be threatened. Interestingly, Jews eat it up.)
  • Patience. Before you can engage in any long term process, you must learn that almost anything worth learning is a process of continuous refinement. Therefore, without patience, no perseverance is possible. How is this taught? Believe it or not, religion has traditionally played a role here. But I propose everyone is "taught" long distance running instead. The goal is to be able to run a six minute mile by the time you are a freshman in high school. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
  • Current events. Daily, some current events are broken down and put into historical context. So history is taught with emphasis on the current, looking backwards.
  • Wisdom, Compassion. This is a hard one. I hate the idea of using religion, but parables are powerful. Philosophy is probably too hard at this point. Maybe this is mixed in with the above bullet by putting current events into an ethical context.

In combination, this makes for a powerful mind ready to actually start to specialize in High School as stated in above posts.
 
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