Re: Micro Society Teachings

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I think you have combined two key issues, and might be
better served by separating them, and addressing them
serially. The first issue is what do we want to have
students learn in our schools. On the surface that might
appear to be a trivial question, but schools teach much more
than facts, and need to make decisions about waht they want
to teach, based on goals received through the political
process, and the resources available to teach those subjects
and skills.

Some education is value-based. One of the first reasons for
public education in the United States was to wean new Irish
Catholic immigrants away from Catholicism. Today, schools
may teach humanistic values and tolerance, but they have
served many other philosophies in the past. It was not so
long ago that Native American children were deliberately
cleaved from their cultures. Now we have other goals, which
have broad support, and more than a few detractors, and
which may at some future time seem as absurd as the
doctrinal goals of public schools circa 1920 do now.

The best way to achieve the doctrinal goals depends on what
those goals are. The greatest experts on how to promulgate
that doctrine are the teachers who do that promulgating on a
daily basis. I do not know what they would recommend. On
the other hand the choice of doctrine would seem to be up to
the voting public, through their representatives.

Some education is skill based. The choice of what skills to
to teach depends on philosophical views of what a good
citizen needs as skills, and often are driven by perceived
needs of the economy. Labor economists have a pretty good
track record of telling us what jobs the economy will
create, proportionally, although the track record of
predicting the overall size of the economy is less
enviable. Even here, there can be philosophical choices.
Some of these are implicit choices, and may not reflect
concious thought. Schools are measured by the percentage of
students going on to college. Going to college is great,
but it is only one way to be a functional and productive
member of society. We need craftsmen and we need
enterpreneurs. A school curriculum designed to encourage
entrepreneurs would look very different from a high school
curriculum designed to prepare students to go to college and
become teachers.

Were the choice made to teach students to be bank
professionals, your idea of role playing would seem to me to
be excellent, but even here, I woiuld suggest that
experineced teachers know a lot of very useful things about
teaching skills.

Further, real vocational education has a place in our
society. I attended one of the finest vocational high
schools in the United States, and although I was well
prepared to enter a craft, I was equally well prepared to
enter college. Several of my high school classmates are
attorneys, at least one is a neuro surgeon (who boasts that
he can fix brains or planes) and many others became
professionals in other disciplines. I think the vocational
program added an air of motivation that I do not see in my
children's schools.

Finally, your idea of students teaching other students has a
lot of merit. I have seen this kind of teaching used very
effectively in the US Army. When an instreuctor in the Army
teaches a task, he or she starts out with a pretest. Those
soldiers who perform well on the pretest are made assistant
instructors for the balance of instruction on the task at
hand. Of course, only the students who excel at the pretest
are made assistant instructors. Your example of using
students who speak Spanish as instructors only works for
those students whose grasp of Spanish includes good grammar
and spelling.

Your ideas have merit, and I hope my suggestions help you to
flesh them out and move them to implementation.

On 10/06/08, pintada kid wrote:
> What our Nation needs is a Micro Society way of
teaching our kids. We still need Math and English and
History but we need to make it interesting and let kids go
in to Bank Cubicles or Insurance or Credit Cards or
Automobile Cubicles and learn the Tricks all these big
Companies use and one day one can be the Banker the next day
he can be the Customer. Also lots of Mexican kids know
Spanish let them Teach the other Kids and Vice Versa. Have
some kind of Way to Implement Rules for learning about the
Predators out there like the Big Companies that have been
taking advantage of the Little People and now is the time to
learn all this in the Classroom. Theres lots of
people out there with Talents to teach kids to read or write
whether Teachers or Retired people as long as they have good
police records. I would think that with the Unemployment
going up so high the Government would be able to Pay
Qualified People a little money since money is tight for
everyone today and the Government is Giving the Money away
to the Poor Big Companies anyway. el pintada kid

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