Polite Paradise

Quote from: whiterose on May 27, 2018, 04:52:34 pm

Quote from: gramma dishes on May 27, 2018, 03:57:02 pm

Quote from: whiterose on May 27, 2018, 03:40:35 pm

As centrist as they come. At least by USA standards. And yes, purple is one of my favorite colors indeed.

I do have some libertarian tendencies. Basically, I am a stickler for the rights of the individual.

I am very much pro-environment. But I am also very much in favor of gifted education/ability grouping/school choice/honors and AP classes/academic competitions/academic awards and the sort.  And each major party favors one but not the other. I want to breathe clean air but to be able to learn something new in school every day at my level as well.

On more issues than not, I take the centrist position.

I'm kind of puzzled about that sentence.  I'm very moderate but lean probably slightly left.  Everyone I know is very much an environmentalist, but also very supportive of education.  (I do wish academics got as much attention as sports.)  The one and only thing not necessarily favored is 'school choice' but even that depends a lot on how each state and each individual interprets what exactly that really means.

Sadly, too many liberals I have met sponsor views such as "all children are gifted" and "eliminate ability grouping- have the smart kids help the slow kids" and so on. I have experienced firsthand as a student and a teacher that this does.not.work.

Nowadays, I am seeing some very conservative people be anti-education as well, but for different reasons. However, in no way do they favor giving everybody exactly the same hoping to redistribute academic ability as if it were redistributing wealth.

This is so interesting! I had no idea this was a thing in the states - I'm Canadian, and while I don't have kids, I don't think I've ever heard "eliminate school ability groupings" as a liberal/left principle (or really as a controversial thing at all.) Do you have any information on it? Not doubting you at all, since I'm not from there, it's just totally foreign to me (no pun intended).

I have definitely heard a lot lately talking about how children do better if you praise their hard work, more than their intelligence, which tracks with my experiences pretty well but doesn't seem to be a left/right thing. I can sorta squint and see that some of my more left-wing friends (like you I'm pretty centrist) have some views that could be seen as "equality of outcome" rather than "equality of opportunity" which can go some odd places...

When I was in teacher's college and during my short time teaching, it was always the left-wingers who disliked ability grouping and said "all children are gifted". However, students, parents, and teachers liked ability grouping.

Teaching did not work out for me due to unrelated reasons. But I still favor gifted education, ability grouping, school choice, and the sort. Why? Because I have experienced and witnessed that they work.

I'm a damn foreigner so I can't vote in this country yet (I came in and took all the jobs and clogged up the roadways as one op-ed in the newspaper very nicely put it). I'm from a socialist country, happy to have immigrated from one socialist country to another.

I'm a big fan of socialised medicine and I don't mind paying so that we can all get medical treatment when we need it. I think teachers need to be better supported and paid more and more money needs to be allocated to education. Gay marriage was finally legalised in this country (after a bloody useless and wasteful postal vote) and that makes me very happy indeed.

Failing to recognize academic ability and to provide classes tailored to ability levels in order to make things more "egalitarian" can backfire.

If you get rid of honor roll and the sort- the pretty girl still gets all the positive attention, while the smart girl with the severe allergies and the voice that some like but other crucial (ie- prospective romantic partners) dislike still gets rejected and bullied.

Having smart kids tutor slow kids instead of having teachers tailor lessons to ability levels does not work well. Tutoring works best when it comes from older students of similar ability who have already studied the material previously.

I am banned from an anime forum because the ruling elite did not like my teaching educational philosophy. Users and staff members not in that ruling elite walked on eggshells for fear of saying the wrong thing and becoming the next target. 

Um, ok. This just sounds like your own hang up and nothing to do with left vs right or even actual ability grouping.

Unsurprisingly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to education.  Some kids do better with tracking, some don't. 

Focusing solely on objective criteria (that really aren't all that objective anyway) for individuals seems most fair at the individual level, but even if you don't care about anyone else, it ignores that group outcomes affect individuals, too, and that there is more than one kind of learning that takes place at schools.  Gifted kids in enriched classes lose out on things, too.

This whole topic always frustrates me, because if we would only devote the kind of resources of money, priority, and support that we should to education, these wouldn't even be issues at all.  There would be plenty of choices without taking away from one child, or one group of children, to give to another.  It's only because we skimp so much on education that we can't get it right for all kids, gifted/special needs/poor/advantaged/male/female/minority/urban/rural/etc.