The recent stuff you reblogged about education is so frustrating. It feels like a lot of people are fighting a system/teachers that existed when they were students, even though in a lot of places, those people are retired now, and the people running things are not the same ones you remember. I'm a teacher and everyone I work with is a 20-35 year old who fully believes in the need for autonomy and respect for kids we work with because we remember being treated as if we were subhuman; the kids I teach have never been assigned homework, are never told "no" when they need to go to the bathroom, and are allowed as much time and leniency as needed when they ask for extensions. EVERY single meeting you have to discuss a kid's behavior starts with "well, what are we doing to support them? Does your classroom have a social contract? Have we tried a behavior contract? A restorative justice meeting? A restorative circle?" All behavior matrixes start with teachers taking responsibility for what they have done to affect student behaviors. It's not like what you remember, at least where I've been, and it's so, so exhausting and discouraging to see smart, kind, empathetic people who haven't been in a classroom for decades who are then fighting a straw man for education. We are on the same side, and the system is obviously broken, but it's what we have? Like they still need to learn how to read? and think critically? and we're trying SO HARD to help them, but it's so hard when you're literally tackled to the ground by kids who are roughhousing because they fundamentally believe that nothing you have to say is important, or have parents throw stuff at you because they don't believe you when you say their kids are struggling with something? Like, sure, we need to fix the system, but public opinion has shifted SO far towards anti-intellectualism that I'm struggling to convince kids and their parents that reading intervention is worth their time, even when their 14 year olds are reading on a first or second grade level??? And I can help them! There are research based strategies I've been trained in! but "there's no point" in them staying in class instead of going to the bathroom for 20 minutes of a 40 minute intervention class to vape because, as I've been told over and over by kids and their parents, "ChatGPT can just read for me, so what's the point?" We try to do a unit looking at ads and the strategies advertisers are using to influence customers, and kids complain that they can't use AI because, as one girl told me, "how else are they supposed to figure out what brands they like"? We do a week of work on a Ted Talk where, after analyzing examples together and building outlines, they have three days in class (so, 45 minute class periods devoted entirely to writing) to write 3-8 paragraphs on ANY topic they're interested in, and 18 of the 45 I've graded so far were entirely copied and pasted from chatgpt? Sorry, this was long; just feels like a crazy thing to read at the end of "teacher appreciation week" (aka the week when they give you literally one yogurt cup and then tell you your insurance premiums for next year have gone up 250%). I wish people would maybe consider that people who have not stepped foot in a classroom in 10 years or more are, perhaps, not the best judge of what the current climate in education is like?
listen, i want to be clear that what i'm about to respond is a critique of systems and not something that can just be fixed via individualist action, and if i say something like "do x y z" at some point in this response i mean structurally as a society.
i am extremely educated in STEM, and the majority of my immediate family members are or have been teachers or tutors of a variety of age groups. i also am hungarian american which means that i have actively watched the deconstruction of one of the most flourishing educational systems to become more mechanical via authoritarians with american advisors, in a way that actively mimics the american education system, and because i have people close to me that have worked as teachers throughout this process (and, i might add, who have now quit because they have seen their work become meaningless and thankless in real time and are now working as private tutors to try to combat this degradation without that bureaucratic oversight that enforces this) i have seen how this affects the intellectual curiosity of the children they teach.
i assume from the way you write that you are american, and i'm sorry, but the american schooling system is very clearly hedged on meeting quotas, fitting into standardized testing, and a somewhat carceral concept of keeping children occupied while their parents work. i have close family that worked very recently in high school and college in america and were fired because their grade spread wasn't correct, because they continued adapting until their students could fairly understand the material without feeling the need for cheating, and this was seen to have made the class too easy according to the metrics based evaluation of the department. the stats based evaluation of children has not changed, and it is a curiosity killer.
so yeah. why SHOULD they learn to read if chatgpt can do it for them? to fit into a society that will file them into a system of numbers and data to evaluate their worth? we can't even say it's for employment purposes bc at this point schooling is no guarantee of employment and they are receiving the messaging all around them that they'll be replaced by chatgpt anyway. so why not get through school with chatgpt? why not fullfill the metric so they can be left alone? what do they get out of reading? you say they obviously need to be able to read, but can you explain why?
i'm obviously be facetious here. i think that literacy, media literacy, etc are vital. i believe that intellectual curiosity is extremely important to cultivate. i work in STEM and i work with combating misinformation professionally using those tools. but if you're a child stuck in this data driven world, asking what's the point... i would say that is intellectual curiosity, or at least the start of it that can be cultivated. why do they need to read? why do they need to write those few paragraphs of what their interest is? why does that ted talk matter? why do they have to be in school for the specific hours they are in school?
also i am going to be very earnest i think that these "social contracts" and capitulating to parental complaints etc etc are bread and circuses to avoid asking these questions on a structural level, and it's part of a very large cycle of avoiding education. i don't want to get into conspiratorial thinking but i do feel there are people who benefit from another layer of exhaustion for teachers, who are already not given nearly the amount of support needed to unpack any of these issues on a deeper level
all that to say i can empathize with the fact that this isn't anything that you can just fix as a singular person. you get students for a short amount of time in a sea of issues. it's not easy to treat a child's "why does this matter" as a genuine question to explore when they come in already combative, already refusing to engage in good faith, already jaded with the entire system they're in. i want to reiterate that i mean this on a structural level and not just "well why don't YOU (personally) treat every question and protest as a serious inquiry." but addressing the ways in which the educational system fails to invoke intellectual curiosity is not, in fact, anti-intellectual. america especially has extremely authoritarian structures of education which well meaning teachers cannot just undo by meaning well, and it is designed to stifle intellectualism.
this is a whole thing that anyone (myself included) who is in immigrant communities in america is very familiar with. immigrants from countries with better approaches to education will come to america, use the resources america has with that culture and make it far further in intellectual pursuits, which americans will react to with anti-immigrant sentiment rather than asking why they might be lagging behind.
idk. all this to say... i don't know exactly how to combat all this. like yeah, you can't just NOT school kids. there is an oppressive atmosphere of anti-intellectualism in this day and age and there need to be systems in place to actively counteract it. the rate of disinformation technological advances vs our own understanding of how to teach and encourage information literacy are wildly outpaced.
but ultimately like. the full day school day is exhausting. homework has been shown to be exhausting to kids. standardized testing and grades are psychologically devastating. and yes i think these things encourage ai use and it's not helping to suggest otherwise. schooling as it is currently IS authoritarian and has been set up to be authoritarian. if you accept children's autonomy you also have to accept that there are reasons behind why they choose to cheat and use chatgpt instead of just writing them off as products of societal rot. to do anything otherwise is a mark of authoritarian thinking (children should do schooling because it is their duty, they should listen to teachers because teachers know what they're talking about and are the authority) and meaningful change will have to take this in stride and respond to it on multiple levels (not just teachers but parents, lawmakers, etc)