Trigger Warning - Students Should be Grouped by Intelligence and Ability

in #libertarian5 years ago

http://libertarianteacher.com/blog.html

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Do football coaches let just anyone who shows up during those early days actually PLAY in the regular season games?

Of course not.

Assuming that winning is the ultimate goal, they quickly weed out the players who don’t belong and cut them from the team. Only the best - the most talented players - deserve to play when it really counts.

No one in their right mind would criticize a coach for creating a homogeneous team entirely made up of top-notch athletes rather than a heterogeneous football team comprised of a mixture of poor, medium and great players.

Yet educators are vilified when they even suggest something similar.

If we can all agree that winning is the ultimate goal in football, we should be able to comprehend that academic excellence is the ultimate goal in education. For students of higher intelligence and ability, heterogeneous grouping stands as impediments to attaining that goal.

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The title to your post is written in the passive voice.

When I saw the passive voice I was triggered ...

When I saw the passive voice I immediately asked: "Who is going to to this dividing?"

I suspect that the title turns people off because they imagine the the administration will do the dividing.

IMHO a better approach to discussing life choices is to start with the students. The students are the customers.

In a true free market education system, the students would gravitate to the subjects that interest them the most.

Unfortunately, the sports team analogy doesn't work core education.

In competitive team sports, the coaches are selecting the students.

Lets return to the market analogy. In most education, the student is the customer and the courses are the product that the students chose.

In competitive team sports. The coach is the customer and the students are the product.

This brings us back to active vs passive voice. One needs to identify who the primary actor is. Schools should organize things so that the student is the primary actor in most situations.

Different triggers for different people, I guess. I think the passive voice is OK when used sparingly.

It doesn't matter who does the dividing - public school policy is heterogeneous grouping. Administration thinks that mixing kids of differing ability is advantageous.

Unfortunately, in public schools, the student is not the customer in the typical sense. Maybe a quasi-customer at best.

The passive voice is one of the strongest tenses. I love using it.

The problem is that most people don't actually understand what the tense means. The passive voice conveys that the person in question is being acted upon.

Libertarians should recognize that the passive voice is often used when the state is imposing rules.

For example, bureaucrats tend to use the passive voice when they impose rules. This is why state agencies and education departments tend to overuse the passive voice. They want to mask the fact that they are imposing rules.

The statement beginning with "The students shall be separated ..." masks the fact that the school has taken upon itself the authority to separate the students.

By understanding the passive voice and seeing how it is used, people can often discover hidden abuses of power.

When I saw the statement "The Students Should Be Separated" I asked: Who will do the separating?

Why not allow the students the freedom of association?

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