I met a suburban elementary school teacher at our local airport. She has just finished her second year and is brimming with enthusiasm for the job. “Could you do nothing and still get paid the same?” I asked. She said “Pretty much.” I asked if there were any burned out older teachers in her school who did as little as possible. “Most of them,” she said.
Related:
School vouchers. I believe there’s a viable market for Soviet style private schools with a few important differences. The objective of Soviet education is to develop a productive member of a communist society. The objective of U.S. education should be to develop a self-sufficient taxpayer. A person who at some point in life will qualify for a tax bracket such that they are able to maintain a mortgage and enjoy the pleasure of mowing their own lawn on weekends. Very difficult to cause trouble from the back of a John Deere. Graduates with exceptional skills will have the responsibility of hiring people to mow their lawn, keep their living quarters tidy, and vacuum the carpets.
More, if I were school principal (Czar), rules (very few):
1. Sports — There are none. No balls of any kind are allowed on school property. None. Physical ed. is the responsibility of parents.
2. Teams — Each student must participate on one of the school teams: math team, physics team, chess team, or any of the language teams (SQL, Java, C#, C++, etc.)
3. Security — Each day’s classroom activity will be recorded and archived on the school’s server farm. At least one camera shall be mounted at the front of each classroom, up over the teacher. The field of view should capture the behavior of each student, both video and audio. Clips of discipline issues will be reviewed by parent and teacher.
Paul, I can not comment on your school curriculum proposal, but whatever gave you the idea, that “the objective of Soviet education was to develop a productive member of a communist society.” I thought it was more to produce an obedient, unquestioning worker-bee, more in line with the end product of Педагогическая поэма,” than anything else, but apparently you know better (the Russian-born members of Philip’s household can confirm my thesis).
Sort-of disclosure: long deceased MIL of one of my relatives was a young teacher at the real school of Makarenko’s. Early 1930s, still a lot of idealists around.
re: “The objective of Soviet education is to develop a productive member of a communist society.” (statements similar to this appear over and over in Soviet ed docs, analysis, etc.)
It’s a general statement that does not preclude your ideas. Soviet ed (end game) is about serving the state. Where U.S. ed is more focused on the individual. No matter how misguided the individual may be. ($100k for undergraduate psychology, marketing degrees..)
Paul, no offense but you have no idea what are you talking about. Soviet education was and is all about the individual. There are zero group projects, tests, or anything like that. Eastern European kids are shocked at the this concept. It is also brutally competitive with most exams being oral and public and all grades are public.
A modifier to Tekumse’s lathering up on realities of Paul Kramarchyk’s warped mirage of Soviet education: whatever it was (and still is), it wasn’t static. Its methodology changed and adapted with the times AND regional—Russia is a vast country, half the Asian continent, and far less homogeneous than the USA—traditions/ influences. But, other than in pious declarations, it was never implemented for the benefit of “common good”. One also needs to keep in mind that the Soviets’ ideology (however it was called) was to a large degree an adaptation/ and “lipstick on a pig”/ of the same old same old authoritarianism and despotic rule, the only one that the Russians collectively have known since… forever. What we see today in formerly independent and constitutionally democratic Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, to name just three, is in practice closer to how “the locals” had it there before the Russian revolutions of 1917, than after. In practical terms: all accomplished, locally educated PhD level and up professionals there come from the elites, formerly only the nomenklatura, now mixed up with offspring of its oligarchs.
BTW. where are THE VOICES of Russian-speaking femmes who take care of Phil in his multi-generational household[*]… now that the cat’s away, it’s their time to play; they should be out, meowing. Because what could he do from afar, delete their comments?
[^*] ObLitContent: shades of the narrative in “The Prisoner of Sex,” Norman Mailer’s Ode and Celestial Praise! to the Domestic Chores that he was forced to do one summer, published in Harper’s Magazine, and viciously taken down during the famous “Town Bloody Hall” meeting of 30 April, 1971 (on DVD).
Once upon a time education was a safe bet for upwards social mobility. I have seen in person the funerals of (late) colleagues of my dad where random people went to pay respect because they appreciated that one of them had ‘made it’ (i.e. he had become a university professor). Now education is a sure bet for debt, and not necessarily much more. Hence very few kids have parents forcing them to (1) study and (2) behave while at school. So schools are going downhill. Your young and naive friend will be beaten to a pulp (metaphorically) by her students and their families. Unless society values education (something that only happens because education == money) teachers cannot have a great impact.
Ianf,
Your comments are always passive-aggressive to the extreme and written in a dense style that makes them nearly unreadable. Are you capable of writing anything that *isn’t* obnoxious and autistic?
Thank you, James, all criticism is constructive. If only I could understand what in my comment(s) was so “dense” and “always passive-aggressive to the extreme” that “made them nearly unreadable.” Obviously, as just-recently remotely diagnosed autistic, I may be incapable of writing anything that isn’t obnoxious (“may,” mind you, but I could improve if only your critique wasn’t so opaque and oblique rhyme accidental).
“Soviet education was and is all about the individual.”
Russian immigrants I know and worked with, now in their mid/late 60s, would not say Soviet education was all about the individual. “All about the individual” conveys a freedom of choice and flexibility that did not exist in cold-war Soviet Union. If you believe I’m wrong, okay with me.
My larger point is that the academic competence of Soviet students at any level was higher than U.S. students. I believe there’s a market for affordable schools with similar rigor, without the propaganda.
None of these comments have anything to do with the post.
There are probably plenty of plumbers, cardiologists, and software engineers who do as little as possible.
Scarlet # – formally, you’re right, but then observe that Phil’s post was very much inconclusive: he reported an exchange with a young teacher, and her opinion of older colleagues (who—dare I say—maybe know a thing about it or two), and left it at that.
@ Paul Kramarchyk #9 – I wouldn’t have written under that claim of Soviet education’s allegedly being centered on individuals, either, but then you should also have begun with “Russian immigrants I know and worked with…,” i.e. the basis for your later claims, rather than that generalizing blanket praise for its advantages over American schooling. Best would be not to compare US with USSR in that regard, but pick a culturally similar nation-country for that purpose. Academic competence of Russian students that you met may have been higher than that of their local counterparts’, but then remember that you were dealing with a heavily biased selection of the former: those that made it to the US higher ed. sector. Which meant they were atypical, outlier samples of their native country’s not-geared-for-excellence educational system (perhaps that’s enough said about this, too).