To the editor:
Re “What is school?” (Sunday remarks, Sept. 4):
The 12 essays that answer this question were interesting. Are public education issues outdated structures? K-12 grades, nine-month grades, 3:00 p.m. dropouts, promotions as a group rather than based on individual needs, etc. have changed little in 100 years. not.
Online learning options, mass media, technology and readiness for different types of employment seem to warrant drastic rather than incremental change.
Are there old structures in which our educators work and blame them for the results?
peter kestenbaum
Philadelphia
To the editor:
I teach introductory courses for undergraduates who want to become teachers. Our focus is the same question you ask: What are schools for?
School, as Bell Hook writes, is for practicing freedom. According to Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, they are for liberation. Shawn Ginwright suggests that schools are for healing and replace the factory model with a greenhouse model. He focuses on the conditions children need to grow rather than the output they provide.
School is for children. They are for hope, joy, creativity, play, growth, community, critical and radical love.
Our youth classroom is in a world reeling from the effects of the climate crisis, the ongoing effects of the Covid pandemic, rising global inequality, gun violence and the effects of fascist regimes. School is for understanding how we got here, for dreaming and pave the way.
Suki Jones Mogenter
Duluth, Minnesota.
The author is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth Professional School of Education and Human Services.
To the editor:
On “To Waste Time and Money” by Bryan Caplan (“What Are Schools For?”, Sunday Opinion, Sept. 4):
I disagree with Mr. Kaplan. Effective schooling equips adults with the skills they need to be successful employees, parents and citizens. Reading, writing, arithmetic, or knowing the he three branches of government are not the only skills that can be acquired with effective schooling.
Effective education includes reading news stories about the war in Ukraine, asking about the latest phone technology at the Apple store, understanding and viewing the latest art exhibits at your local museum, and learning how to install solar panels on the roof of your home. Develop enough academic curiosity and skills to explore suitability. .
Effective schooling helps voters weed out disinformation and outright lies and select the best candidates for public office. Effective schooling is used every day by many adults.
Most of the adult skills and knowledge gaps Kaplan points out are not because schools failed to provide the tools they needed, but because too many adults aren’t using the academic skills they learned in school. Academic ability atrophies like a body that does not exercise.
The school’s greatest failure is its failure to instill in its graduates the curiosity and academic confidence to research the best answers to the questions we encounter every day in our increasingly complex world.
Lifelong learning for career, parent and voter responsibilities means spending more, not less, on education. Public schools need to be rebuilt to meet our needs, but they don’t have to be abandoned.
Ronnie Palmer
Palm Beach Gardens, Florida
I am a retired teacher, principal, superintendent, and author of Why We Failed: 40 Years of Education Reform.
To the editor:
Bryan Caplan argues that school is useless because adults tend to forget what they learn in school and most learning is useless after graduation. disagree. His argument is based on the misconception that the main purpose of school is to learn facts and formulas. Don’t get me wrong.we conduct learn facts and formulas in school, But the reason we learn them is to acquire skills, not to memorize them that’s why we learn them.
When studying or cramming for a test, you need to comb through your textbooks and worksheets, trying to make sense of their relevance to what is being tested. and the sheer amount of information that needs to be managed. Students learn how to process large amounts of information in dynamic environments.
Mr. Caplan believes that we go to school to remember these facts, but I believe that going to school is about developing the skill of remembering general facts rather than the specific facts that the facts tell us. I think it’s for polishing.
Jayashabari Shankar
Midvale, Utah
The author is a third-year high school student.
To the editor:
The perspective expressed in this essay is diametrically opposed to all human experiences encountered with inspirational teachers. Decades later, there were many teachers whose names, faces, and lessons I could still vividly recall. Their guidance was formative in shaping the person I grew up to be.
These dedicated and talented instructors have taught us how to read and write, appreciate poetry, understand other languages, understand the intricacies of mathematics, explore nature using the tools of biology, chemistry and physics, and much more. rice field.
America’s founders, especially John Adams, recognized that maintaining democracy required an unwavering commitment to public education.
Jeremy Thorner
Berkeley, California
The author is Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
To the editor:
By claiming that schools are primarily a waste of time and money, Bryan Caplan seems to be trying to provoke. This made him successful. His major failure was to go beyond mere quantification of the academic knowledge retained after high school, to the development and maturation that young people must go through to enter the adult world in a meaningful and productive way. It focuses on the important role that schools play in the process.
School is a place where you learn how to deal with authority figures who are not your parents. It is where they are confronted with expectations of action and achievement that in many ways mirror what they will encounter later.
Kaplan makes a fair point by claiming that once we get a job, we learn most of what it takes to do the job. However, your ability to learn what you need to know is greatly shaped by the time you spend in school.
Peter E. Muller
Wilmington, Dell.