Posts Tagged High School
The Fine and Performing Arts & Education
I see too many public service commercials-today-exhorting us to support the Performing and Fine Arts in public education. We, as a nation, have evidently become so low-brow, or unsophisticated, that we can no longer see the need for Art education in our schools. So now, we have our children pleading with us, on television commercials, to keep Art education alive. This is a sad state of affairs for us and our children, because art is what truly separates us from the beasts and allows us to rise above the mundane drudgery of life. As many others, I believe art should be at the center of education and not just because it’s good for us. Art stimulates a child’s cognitive and affective domains, as well as their motor skills, which leads to learning, discovery, creativity and motivation.
Academics are very important, of course, but too often they only stimulate a very small portion of the student’s mind and heart. There are three, basic domains of learning: the Cognitive (mind), Affective (emotions or feelings) and Motor-Skills (hands-on). These three domains are key to our thinking/reasoning, learning, problem solving and creating. A healthy mind (Cognitive) is capable of taking in, retaining and processing information, which can then be applied, if retained and used, to the individual’s life. Emotions and feelings (Affective) are closely connected to an individual’s learning, because they aid in retaining and applying information, as well as stimulating the desire to learn more. Seeing, hearing, speaking, the ability to write, walk and run are all part of the individual’s Motor-skills. Without these three domains, learning, needless to say, would be impossible. Reading, writing, math and the sciences stimulate the cognitive and motor skills domains quite effectively, but the affective is too often short changed.
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Education – We’re Failing Our Children
There are reams of reading and stacks of studies purporting to assess various problems of the United States’ educational system. Each problem turns out to be rooted in our individual failure to place an extremely high value on a solid education. Our failure contrasts sharply with societal values of China, India or Japan where admission to universities is a high calling and competition for scarce slots is fierce.
This failure to assign a high value to education is all too easily laid at the feet of society rather than each of us. Unfortunately, that approach allows individuals to escape responsibility for doing something to reverse the “… rising tide of mediocrity”, so well documented a whole generation ago by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.1 If we truly cared we would be working, really hard, to reverse that tide.
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Home-Schooling – Teaching Real Life
When I think about it, I know almost no one of my generation who doesn’t have a story about a school trauma with a teacher or other students that affected their self-image for at least a period of their youth, if not beyond. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is mostly because schools, especially middle schools and high schools, become their own mini-societies, however unnatural a society made of up people of all one age and maturity level is in comparison to the so-called “real world”. Thus, the culture of the peer group and the school becomes the “real world” almost completely to a middle schooler or a high schooler. Just at the age when they are supposed to separating to a degree from their families and realizing their own individuality, they are thrust into a daily world where some of the most shallow “values” are used to judge them and, inevitably, many come to judge themselves negatively accordingly.
Parents who homeschool and don’t offer up their children to the prevailing culture of pre-adolescence and adolescence are often though to be over-protective and trying to shelter their children from “reality”. However, I contend that since adolescent school culture only lasts for a few years and then thrusts young people who have been almost wholly pre-occupied by ideas and issues which will have virtually no future value in helping them lead productive adult lives, that homeschooling is perhaps not as odd as it seems to some.
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