Is Fixing our Schools an attempt to make SQE look liberal? LOL

Excellent news!

I notice the big fish in no pond in particular has already chimed in with nothing in particular to add to the discussion. 

Even Manitoba is further ahead in many ways than Ontario. Ignore the bait folks - business must be slow on the liberal ed. blogs these days

Take for example the one(or two) hit wonder of “Facts in Education” with a star-studded cast of well-paid former and current bureaucrats who wanted to prove something in an effort to prove education media wrong based on the facts as they continue to spin them.

Nothing’s changed on this blog for months.

I wonder if how much the gov’t paid this group to waste on this, because it was too much.

Either education reporters are very, very good in this province and don’t need correcting very often or all this was, was another vehicle to shoot down anything critical of the axis of excuses that makes up the public education apologists.

You don’t have to remind us to laugh out loud Mr. Little, I do that every time I read one of your posts because I’m so happy you don’t represent anyone or any organization any longer - or so you suggest on another blog. Your one voice in a minority here.

This is a lengthy but fascinating quote from someone who taught in a charter school for some time.

With people like this in teaching, “standardized testing” and “learning disabilities” would I suspect not be so anxiety and paranoia-inducing as they are these days.

(Of course, I hasten to add that such techniques would be a sure route to failure for students from poor, dysfunctional, immigrant, and other bottom feeders ... )

“I ran a K-12 classical charter school for seven years. Not once did I or any of the teachers look at a state standard in reading or writing (math is something of a different case). The students did no test prep. When our students took the state exams, all they did was complain about how easy and worthless they were and how they wanted to get back to real learning. Every year the high school ranked in the top three in the state, twice coming out first. The secret was breathtakingly simple. The way to teach literacy for the twenty-first century turns out to be the same way it has been done in the last thirty centuries of civilization: to hire the brightest and best-educated teachers (usually not those coming out of a school of education considered “certified”), to put in their hands the best works of literature and history and philosophy, to invite young people to have a conversation about what it means to be a human being, and to require those students to work hard and demonstrate good character while doing so. When all the Mickey-Mouse language of plot graphs and “standards” is abandoned, it’s just you and some students talking about love, hate, war, peace, liberty, slavery, happiness, life, and death. And the students know when you’re faking it.“

I sure hope this happens here, Charles.  This description you’ve quoted brings back memories of having my children in The International School of Singapore.  They worked hard, but my son (seven at the time) used to come home from school and say to me, “I’m so happy with my life!“  His teacher thought he was a bit of a handful, so she always had to keep him busy!  By this age, he was reading Tolkien’s trilogy, ‘Lord of the Rings’, and had to talk about it every day.  His math skills were so sharp he was faster than my calculator, and by the age of eight, he was working in fractions with different denominators. 
You know I think that because he had disruptive tendencies (like many boys) over here teachers would have wanted us to put him on ritalin, and he would also most likely have been labelled as a LD child and consequently learned absolutely nothing. 
Also, while in Singapore, my daughter, in grade one came home with her first reader and read to me—sweetist thing I ever heard.  Her phonics course was annoying, and she insisted on singing these horrid jingles that went with each sound, but bottom line, she could read.

The school above was a business.  Loved it. 
We’ve heard so much propaganda from the teachers’ unions about how bad a business-run school would be that, like a lot of their other baloney, we believe it! 
It’s simply not true. 
Of course this school I’m talking about wasn’t heaven on earth, but because of competition, the children in Singapore thrived!
That’s what I want to see here—children thriving.

Thanks Bev,

Only Ubermenschen like Dewey, Sanger, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel and their intellectual descendents want to created their own twisted version of “heaven on earth” by isolating children from their parents and by making state and school higher authorities than the nuclear family.

Children want to engage, and be engaged.  Watch a child in his mothers arms, a few weeks out of the womb, fighting to move his head around and see what’s GOING ON!.  Then the reaching, grasping, wanting to see and touch everything and know what it’s called.

Give em a few years of tv and mind-numbing conformity to their peers, and they want nothing more than the right brands, the right sounds, to be stimulated 24-7.  But inside, the need for something tangible and real never goes away.

Do you know there are tutoring programs that can promise—and deliver—a full grade advance in thirty hours, and guarantee it.

What a wonderful world!

There is a bias in our public schools against knowledge that is described in Charles’s post. I had to defend the ancient history reading material at home. One of the reasons that was cited by the school, it gives children ideas that they should not be exposed to. Another reason, it was look upon that the reading material was too hard for her to comprehend. My only response to them, at least she is reading.

I did not bother to tell them, how she would lit up, her eyes dancing on a small fragment of history, running to tell me this important bit of ancient history. And than the discussions would begin on whatever it was, war, peace, happiness, home life, or as she puts it, those nasty rulers.

What is really surprising, what was originally brought for the purpose to motivate her to read, by purchasing books that had a high interest to her, even though it is rough pouring over the words, due to her reading skills; there is a silver lining. By slugging through her ancient history books, with beautiful illustrations, drawings, sometimes spending hours on two pages absorbing the words and the thoughts behind the words, has help her to understand the Shakespeare plays. I thought she would have immense trouble with old English, and understanding would not take place, the opposite happen. I am given credit to the collection of the ancient history books that is a on-going affair at our home, and really glad that I did not heeded the words of the school.

Nancy, any educator who tells a parent that something that a child is succeeding at (albeit slowly) is too hard and should be stopped is not a teacher and should look at going into another profession.
Charles, I agree completely.  In the school I mentioned above, the children thrived the same way that you see 18-month-old children thirve—you know how they are, very curious and into everyting.  If children are not thriving in school, then the school isn’t delivering quality and challenging syllabi.