People harken back to a mythic time when public education wasn’t so bad—when public schools were churning out plenty of knowledge workers. But public schools sucked even back then. They just had fewer demands placed upon them, because we didn’t really need THAT many knowledge workers. But now that we truly have an information economy, the paltry number of knowledge workers our inept public education system is able to wring out isn’t cutting it anymore. The public schools in other countries suck too. We only think they’re remarkable because we absorb much of whatever measly knowledge labor they’re able to squeeze out, because most of the rest of our economy (besides the all-important education part) is fairly liberalized.

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I find an astonishing discrepancy between what the mass media tell us about teachers (that they are the salt of the earth, christ’s vicars, the hardest working members of society, worth ten times what they are paid, etc) and what I learn on reading books by people with less of an axe to grind, but who, as adults, have actually looked closely at the teaching process. (I’m thinking, among others, of David Owen’s High School and Martin Mayer’s older, but still very interesting, books on schools.) These latter books show teachers as, to put it bluntly, idiots, ignorant of any aspect of a subject outside the teacher’s guide, not much interested in learning about it, and quite happy to crush anyone with temerity to argue against what they have to say. There are, of course, those doing a great job, but they are rare exceptions. Mayer mentions a few; I don’t think Owen mentions any.

So what is it? Most of my teachers were, I’d say, pretty good, but

• I was schooled in white South Africa, not the US
• at a private school
• and even so, I’d rate my English teachers as so-so, my History teachers as not doing nearly enough to put material in context, and my Science and Math teachers as doing far too little to stretch and extend my abilities—- sure they basked in the glory as I won prizes and medals, but that was based on my outside reading and working through the problems of whatever ratty old textbooks I could find in second-hand bookstores, not through their taking me aside and putting me on a course of calculus and field theory which would have been the appropriate thing to do.
  All things considered the teachers are idiots theory strikes me as rather more convincing than the teachers are saints theory.

Does this matter? Well of course it does. If the primary problem with schools is lousy teachers, then the solution is better teachers, not more money, more computers, more PTA involvement. More money might be a means to that end, but not in the absence of a clear message that incompetence is not acceptable. Not matter how much you pay people, anyone who actually can think would rather choose to work somewhere he/she deals with other thinking human beings rather than somewhere that accepts mediocrity and punishes initiative.

Eg for School C and Bursary History we spent a fair chunk of time writing essays to past exam essay topics, was a useful discipline in learning how to connect historical facts into an argument. And all the memorisation of history, while I know it is deplored by modern educators, I’ve found very useful. Understanding modern claims and counter-claims about the Treaty of Waitangi make so much more sense if you can remember the Treaty.

And in Physics and Chemistry the working out of paper problems is important for testing whether you really understand something as in maths (lab skills were tested by some lab experiments during the year which were marked internally but counted towards the final grade).

And again for Technical Drawing, actually drawing things, eg plotting the location of a boat on a map given bearings off different heads, is important practice and also good exam preparation.

I have nothing to say in favour of New Zealand school’s English curriculum, either in terms of teaching or exams.

I think the American habit of entirely multi-choice exams can distort teaching, but a good exam should be testing the skills the subject requires, and often can.

And I think your school could have done better on that part. My high school would have us sit mock exams half-way through the school year and again a few weeks before the nation-wide exams, which would have picked up on your lack of knowledge ahead of time. I did volunteer tutoring in maths in the last year of high school for the younger forms and would revise any weak spots based on those mock exam results with my tutorees. Probably I wasn’t that effective, but I was only 17 and without training. I think there is a good deal more schools could do to pick up on failure to learn things.

It’s cool that your maths teacher aspired the best for all of you. Call me greedy, but I think a maths teacher who both aspired and achieved the best for all of you would be better.

On top of this, certain groups of parents choose to send their kids to supplemental schools. For example, it is common for Asian immigrants in the US to send their kids to after school programs in their native language—and these usually have additional homework that the parents are expected to help with.

Growing up, I remember attending a school in a highly rated district. We freely roamed the neighborhood during daylight hours and did homework by ourselves after dinner. Now most kids are not allowed outside their own yards without adult supervision and have little free time during the week—although they do get a few hours on the weekends in between soccer and taikwando.

What Kevin Rooney doesn’t mention is that the reason for increasing formalisation of the relationships between schools and parents has been driven by how schools have been failing to effectively teach a significant proportion of the population – and this has been a historical problem independent of particlar educational programmes. Schools have defined their responsibility as delivering a curriculum, not as ensuring that their students learn it. The government, employers, parents, etc, are interested in students actually learning. Which is why there’s this pressure coming on from outside.

It’s sadly possible that the outside pressure will lead to worse results. And perhaps there is no way to ensure that all kids learn. But I think Kevin Rooney’s article would have stronger if it had discussed some possibilities for achieving the goal of all kids actually learning, not just being taught.