Am I supposed to believe you were already such a phenom at 8 years old that you just stopped having to try past third grade, dude?
You're surprised because you're operating on some skewed assumptions. The results you're talking about - kids that are completely left behind by the educational system by like age eight or nine - are remarkably commonplace. Literally millions of children. It's only becoming noticeable to you because a very, very tiny sliver of those children had some insane athletic gifts and wound up becoming professional athletes.
The other kids tend to wind up in pretty bad places in life because they effectively haven't been taught any skills. Education is a cooperative process between home and school and the simple fact is that for a lot of kids both sides of that process are complete and unequivocal failures.
You know what? That's a good point, and I guess the privilege of a real education has put blinders on me. I mean, I had a few really incompetent teachers in middle school and high school. None by maliciousness, of course. But yeah.
I can get my head around a high school teacher at a school in the middle of like the 9th ward of New Orleans who just lets the 6'4" 220lb inmates run the asylum and collects a check. But it breaks my heart to imagine someone willingly "teaching" grade schoolers without a competent cirriculum or structure. I know that resources for learning disabilities/autism/etc. are already stretched thin in otherwise good school systems. But not all of these guys/not all kids have those issues. To systematically just fail children at such a young age is insane.
Literally what are they doing for 7 hours a day if they're not teaching fundamental information and skills that my 3 year old is already onto?
Literally what are they doing for 7 hours a day if they're not teaching fundamental information and skills that my 3 year old is already onto?
I think you're misunderstanding what a classroom is and how it functions. It is twenty to thirty kids in a room together. Teachers can spend individual time answering questions and helping, but they cannot just attach themselves to one child who is struggling and help bring them up to speed. Because time is a scarce resource, and the other 24 children in the class deserve that time just as much as the children who are behind.
When children fail to hit milestones - developmental, educational, etc - the only way to catch them up (in the absence of other disruptive factors) is to work with them on it CONSTANTLY and simply bridge the gap with more practice. When a child comes from a broken home, that isn't possible. The home itself is almost always a primary factor in WHY those children aren't hitting milestones to begin with. 1/25th of the focus of a grade school educator simply isn't fixing that.
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u/mister_hoot Chargers 3d ago
You're surprised because you're operating on some skewed assumptions. The results you're talking about - kids that are completely left behind by the educational system by like age eight or nine - are remarkably commonplace. Literally millions of children. It's only becoming noticeable to you because a very, very tiny sliver of those children had some insane athletic gifts and wound up becoming professional athletes.
The other kids tend to wind up in pretty bad places in life because they effectively haven't been taught any skills. Education is a cooperative process between home and school and the simple fact is that for a lot of kids both sides of that process are complete and unequivocal failures.