Absurdity and Pathos in Elementary School Education

At the San Francisco Chocolate Salon, which I attended because of my interest in connoisseurship and gifts, I learned some sad truths about elementary-school education. A San Francisco public school teacher told me:

1. The curriculum is mandated. Tests are mandated. And they disagree. For example, you are forced to teach what a certain word means. You spend two weeks teaching that word and then the tests use a different word for the same idea.

2. There is no allowance for differing rates of learning. Some kids learn faster than others. Teachers are not allowed to adjust.

3. There are rules about what teachers must put on classroom walls. If a federal inspector comes around and you don't have the proper material on your classroom walls, a note goes in your permanent file.

4. The Reading First program requires that reading be taught before everything else. Some kids are relatively slow to learn to read but they are able to learn in other ways. The effect of the mandate is that these other kids sit in the classroom baffled and unhappy and lose self-confidence.

5. The rigidity of the curriculum -- which must be exactly the same for all students -- squashes encouragement. For example, suppose a student is interested in bugs. You could encourage reading by giving the student books about bugs. This is a natural, effective, and easy way to teach reading. This way of teaching is not just discouraged but prohibited.

6. A friend of mine says that bookstores should be divided into "real books" and "other books." Children's textbooks, which are worse than anything in a bookstore, deserve their own category. A fifth-grade teacher got around the awfulness of the textbooks by putting real books in the center of the classroom tables and having children sit with their textbooks open around them. This allowed the students to read the real books but if the principal came by the teacher would not get in trouble because the assigned textbooks were open in front of the students.

Excellent posts about elementary-school education by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok.