It has been a disaster from the start, but it got worse and worse with time. I remember reading that the schools would give the children iPads and other things just so they would sign up for that school. Basically they would bribe the children to get the parents to send them so that they could make more money. And that’s only the top of the iceberg …
(PS: I changed the title from “free school” to “charter school” which is the correct english name for what is described in the article.)
Can you list off a few of the things you see as educational time wastes?
*Edit: Here,…in good faith I’ll throw one out— Cursive Writing.
Cursive writing helps in developing fine motor skills.
Kids of today have vastly better fine motor skills due to extensive usage of computer mouse, gamepads and touch screens.
Those are different kinds of fine motor skills than used when writing cursive. Ideally kids should be exposed to both.
Well I don’t know what Troed is referring to but my kid in the first grade is doing “Letter of the week” for the fourth time. (He learned them the first time 3 years ago in kindergarten). They also use something called Bornholmsmodellen that is from the last century and has been highly criticized for not encouraging curiosity nor building interest.
I love history, and I think people should learn about all of it, but if I had to pick I’d dump ancient history for more contemporary history. People need to know in detail the 100 years leading to today far more than the 5000 years before that.
Rote learning - anything. That’s 50% of the time currently - which can then be used to shorten school days with the same. We’re living in a world where information is available at our finger tips - and that won’t suddenly become less so.
Every generation suffers from the same faulty thinking. “Because this is the way it was for me it must be the right way also for my children”.
(Cursive writing was a waste of time already when I went to school in the late 80s)
Rote learning can be helpful for some things, if just to give an idea of what information is there and how to process it.