What I was getting at is that the subject matter often isn't applicable to helping them solve their specific problems. Education (curriculums) shouldn't be one-size-fits-all.
What subject matters do you think are substantially neglected by the American educational system that fails to reflect the needs of the poor? How should curricula be changed? What specific problems are unaddressed?
Well I imagine the needs of inner-city-poor and rural-poor are often different, to pick two extremes. But I myself have never lived either of those lives, and I've only interacted with the rural-poor (through volunteer organizations). So, I can't really know their needs. But where I'd start, is with what I might call the "forbidden subjects" - stuff you and I probably learned from our families, if we were lucky. Interpersonal relationship skills, managing personal finances, and probably most importantly, mental patterns/attitudes/habits/priorities for more effective use of the mind. (Because complacency is effectively the "default state" of the amygdala. And combined with ignorance of the mind's ways, it can only stay that way.)
You know, my rural poor high school had a course covering personal finance, relationships, health, home economics, and so on. It was a required course for all freshman, who were 15 or so and not yet eligible to drop out.
It did not accomplish nearly so much as you might hope.
The underground hip hop complaints as relative to material mostly cover political questions and show that he didn't pay attention to the courses that would help "get our rent paid".
OK. What might you or your friends have found to be more helpful uses of time? It doesn't have to be in a classroom setting. Or in your experience was the curricula more-or-less sufficient and you consider something(s) else might be better targets for improvement/change? I would like to understand your perspective better.
Most of us would say material directly relevant to our later specializations of choice. That's difficult to do in practice, both because of the diversity involved and because of the difficulty in predicting eventual specialization. Not everyone knows at 12 that they want to be a programmer!
More diverse electives for specialist history would have been nice, but there are practical restrictions on the specialist teachers available in a town of 50k people.
Huh. I felt the same way about my high school. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised.
I wonder if it could be feasible to rotate kids through some kind of county/state shared resource with opportunities for "demoing" various specializations. Educational almost-internships for kids, if you will. 180 days/year, 5 days/week = 36 specializations. That's probably not enough time to get much of any feel. Kids pick their top 5 or 10, and spend a year learning about those. You don't necessarily need a specialist teacher for everything, but rather a specialist skilled in teaching research / getting to the bottom of a field/industry. Make the kids teach each other; teacher is basically a facilitator? Too impractical?
I would agree it's not enough time, and plenty of workplaces aren't practical for that. Psychology and medicine come to mind for privacy reasons, and lots of workplaces are generally not kid-friendly (construction sites, heavy factories...)
Getting kids to teach each other strikes me as impractical. Most of them aren't going to learn enough in a few days to teach a useful amount, and learning about a profession through the lens of an opinionated kid seems very sub-optimal. Plus, a year is a lot of time.
I have seen a lot of schools have "career day" type things, where parents come in and briefly discuss what they do. That's a little more direct and a less time consuming at ten to fifteen minutes a parent. This is valuable in proportion to the economic diversity and schedule flexibility of parents, though.
The classes are never the suitable speed for all the students. When learning on your own, you set your own speed but you can't do that when in school. But note that all subjects are like the subjects you mentioned you took in HS. The mathematics doesn't actually go all that far. Note that all of HS mathematics can be summarized in those HS math review books that are actually not that thick. It's a travesty that fundamentally, you spend maybe like 4 years reading like 6-7 books?
The point is not to be optimal for every student - the resources required for such are not available and MOOCs are not an adequate replacement. The point is to lay a universal foundation in a series of selected subjects while socializing students.
The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful. It's not a good way to produce a shared general foundation for a modern democracy.
The main issue is that you don't really learn anything in depth. You get some sort of very general overview but your knowledge still has so many gaps. If you make the educational system more efficient, when you leave the reformed high school, you might actually be somewhat proficient at X.
Most people agree with this. What becomes more difficult is figuring out what concrete steps make the educational system more efficient.
OTOH, even that would still probably disproportionately benefit those with the best home environments and support to make use of the more efficient system, and increase rather than narrow the gap between the best and worst served. Efficiency and equality are largely orthogonal concerns.
It sounds like your complaint is that the basic primary/secondary educational system does not produce specialists. Have you considered the possibility that neither primary nor secondary education serves the purpose of specialist training, that being reserved for tertiary education?
The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.
My main issues are the lack of efficiency and lack of educational freedom.
> The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.
It's relatively efficient compared to alternative currently available approaches. We have not reached a point where Khan Academy and Udemy can replace everything - or even a major part - of education after basic literacy and numeracy.
The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful.
