Let students help each other!
I was just watching Aswang for my Tagalog studies and to unwind. (There's no reason you can't do both at once!) One of the characters was practicing biology with his little sister playing a video game when she tells him the next answer to the classifications of animals that he was trying to memorize.
It suddenly struck me how much we miss out on by having students so rigidly separated by age. Of course, there are benefits, though perhaps we should be more lenient in some regards. Perhaps we should group students by area and general age for recess and study time?
You see, the little girl had overheard her brother reciting the classifications and she said "family" when he forgot it. Thought she was totally engrossed in the game, she was able to memorize the order to a certain degree, while he was still struggling.
How much more benefit would younger students receive if they took part in the learning of more advanced subjects, perhaps just helping older students with their studying. How much easier could they pick up subjects in later years if they already had helped older students years before with their flash cards? How much money could schools save if older students helped younger ones with their subjects? Rather than spending extra time with the students on subjects they have difficulty with, they could be helped along, while the older students actually become more proficient in the basics, as well as learn how to teach when they're but students themselves.
Of course, if you have multiple kids yourself, perhaps they get along well enough that they can help each other in such ways, but it just struck me how much benefit kids could get.
I repeated subjects so much in school that I became well and truly bored with it far before I was anywhere near graduation. Perhaps if the repetition was done while helping younger students, it wouldn't be quite as boring, and more could be covered.
What do you think?
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I believe that in earlier times, all the students studied together and worked concurrently, albeit more independently, on their studies. Grouping school children by age is a newer thing. It's become more of a state-mandated assembly line for good citizens than anything.
Home-schooling is probably the closest to that experience now. But if you're going to do that, please know what you're doing, and please don't use it as an indoctrination tool. Too many parents home-school their children to safeguard them from reality.
LOL! I dunno what it's like when parents indoctrinate their children, but generally, homeschool students are often far ahead of their counterparts in public school. Even when they're really lazy. :P
Too bad we have the system the way it is, and we can't have different options. I have heard about homeschooling groups in some areas though, but often they're religious, sadly.
Yeah; this is the problem. The people with the most drive to home-school are typically the most "fringey" religious types who will believe any alternative truth offered to them by their leaders. Jehovah's Witnesses are notorious home-schoolers, for example. It's just a sad fact of statistics; most ordinary people who think for themselves... will send their children to school to be told how to think. o_O
The biggest reasoning I see used to justify home-schooling in these circles is sadly not to improve upon their education, but instead to shelter them from the world in some way. They don't want their children learning anything about the
real worldsecular lifestyle as they see it as impure. This means that even if they do come in ahead of their peers in terms of raw education, they've got a lot of malformed worldviews that will take time for society to correct, if they can be corrected at all.I've met a few of them, and often it ends up that they rebel of sorts. So it doesn't necessarily always work.
At my school (Berlin/Germany) we are testing a model where the first the grades are taught together. Though I am working with the 7th to 13th grade, I think that my colleagues are doing great with this system. So I guess you are very right with everything you are writing.
You just came across an interesting subject. This is also one of the reasons why spending time with smart people in general will help you develop yourself.
Check this out: You are an average of 5 people you spend most time with.
I think this really touches on an element of the failure of modern education. Divide and conquer. Noam Chomsky said something that always resonated with me. He said that the government gets what it pays for. If the government doesn't get what it pays for... it stops paying. This begs the question... if the public school system is broken, why is the government continuing to pay for a failed/failing system?!
In my opinion, I believe it is to herd the masses away from critical thinking and independent thought. Seperating the children by ages seems like a divide and conquer strategy that is apparently working if you look at the state of public education. Then of course you have your conspiracy theories that piggy-back from there... but I feel that public education is a massive failure in almost every regard.