Failures of High school Education
“Spoon feeding” may be a term used to describe the main pittfalls of the traditional K-12 system. lets consider the final 3 years of high school as the main focus of this discussion.
Teachers will go through incredibly strenuous training to really be able to become, so called “masters” of their traits, one of my colleagues compared teaching to brain surgery — though the jury is still out on this one.
So highly trained teachers are people who grasp educational theory, are reflective of their practice, offer a balanced assortment of assessments constructed to disect a students understanding and they always find a way to fortify their curriculums by mapping it to some, sometimes arbitrary, standards, sometime they may even wear a tie.
So all schools adapt some concauction of a “School wide learning outcome”, and no matter how its phrased — the emphasis unveils down to teaching students “how to learn”, rather than a specific focus on any real content. Now these circumstances alone pose some major issues — but lets overlook these for a moment, because the bigger issue at hand is that Educators at the University level aren’t “masters of their trade”, they are not highly trained teachers, grappling with education theory. They are academics who specialize in specific content areas.
So the entire education system depends on the premise that students are taught how to learn at school and are now prepared to grasp any content thrown at them by a man or woman standing in front of a lecture hall, no matter how dry or boring that content may be.
As a teacher you are taught to make your lessons engaging, challenging, and your taught to differentiate and offer scaffolding appropriately, all that doesn’t exist inside a lecture hall. Even if it did, at a personal level I don’t see this being practical given the large number of students attending lectures.
So this brings me to my main point, are we failing students at schools by employing such over researched theories? because when they enter university all this supposed “Spoon feeding” they would have been so acclimated to would no longer exist, they would be left in the bull-pit to fend for themselves.
I would love to hear different opinions on this obivously.
Please leave a clap, a comment, follow and share this article, it would genuinely help keep me motivated to produce more content
- Follow me on Twitter @TaHaque2
- Follow me on Medium https://medium.com/@tahaque