I like Peter Boghossian's idea: Burn it all down. However, these suggestions, all great, are much more practical and, more importantly, proactive. I would only add one thing.: Many young people don't seem to know how to use their hands, or tools, or how to problem solve in the physical world, to make and fix things. That would be addressed by classes like shop, but why not incorporate "Regularly update facilities with a combination of skilled tradesmen (carpenters, tile layers, plumbers, etc.) and summer jobs for high school students, who learn from the professionals," right into the curriculum, from the very early years? Rather than having kids walk around the plumber fixing the sink, why not get them all to have a hands-on lesson? That way, the skilled trades are seen as equals, not some outsider who gets his/her hands dirty to fix things, who you don't talk to, but a problem solver who is part of the community. This assumes, of course, that such tradespeople would want to act as teachers, but why not? Let's encourage this sort of egalitarian cross-pollination. Please send this list to the new head of the Department of Education!
Agreed, seniors, especially younger ones cities be used to help facilitate a lot of this, ie, gardening, fix it stuff, niche stuff like clock making or ham radio- involve the community in educating- your as creative as your community is willing.
I agree with SO MUCH of this. YES to Music and Shop. So incredibly important. I am 50+ year old man and I can sew, use a table saw, cook etc. because of shop. I happen to live in a town with a surviving music program. It bring me such joy to watch kids walk down the street to school holding a clarinet or violin case.
Things I would add -
a) Emphasize getting to and from school by walk or bike. Get mom and dad out of way. Independence!!
b) Learn cursive; handwritten notes;
c) English grammar; know when to use "me" or "I" in a sentence; know importance of oxford comma; difference between then and than; whether and weather....
Good luck with getting rid of pronoun abuse. Where I live I have yet to meet one member of the school system who can keep pronouns straight, not the teachers, English teachers or administrators. Where would we find the people to teach this?
From tutoring local students, the two biggest problems I see are common core math and disability accommodation. Common Core math is not bad in and of itself, but it was written and designed by mathematicians who had no understanding that very, very few math teachers are proper mathematicians who love and understand math. It's a fabulous guide if you're me (or you, Heather) and homeschooling a kid -- i.e. you have the same student(s) for a long period of time and can ensure that constant connections are made between the branches on the mathematical tree. It is ideal for a situation of a passionate, numerate teacher who will have the same kids for longer than a semester. A kid who is *exceptionally* lucky might have one such math teacher in his or her life. Most will have zero. In the absence of such teaching, Common Core math just doesn't work.
Regarding disability accommodation, it's both too widespread -- basically any kid with access to regular medical and mental healthcare is being accommodated for *something* now -- and too indulgent. Dyslexic kids have to learn to *cope with* reading and writing. Assigning them "scribes" to write their exams for them is not helping them. Likewise -- it's fair and appropriate for a deaf kid to have an ASL interpreter and/or to get someone else's notes to supplement their own with whatever they might have missed in the lecture. It is going too far for a deaf kid to be fully excused from homework since sometimes the YouTube videos that other kids use to help with homework aren't properly captioned. (These are just two real examples; I could list dozens, some of which are so unbelievable that I verified them with the parents.)
Your ideas are all amazing and reading this almost made me cry. We could actually have something great, if we tried.
Schools run by bureaucrats will inevitably teach students to be bureaucrats. Schools run by ideologues will invariably teach students to be ideologues. If we had a shortage of either of these, that might be desirable. But in fact, we are choking on them.
I was a teacher. I think a big problem with people living in today's world is that so few people make their living dealing with physical reality. Many years ago, most people had jobs/careers centered around farming, construction, factory work, etc. It's a fallacy that these jobs are for stupid people. These jobs are for people who are betting their lives and their safety that they comprehend the reality they are immersed in. In the meantime, in the ivory tower, reality can be and is, easily ignored. Hence, we have the fairy tale that men and women can switch genders. True enough, in their imaginations, they can. In physical reality, they can't.
So, yes, more activities and classes in school that promote comprehension of what is real, not what is in the imagination. Clearly, the imagination counts, but it is good for very little if a person has only a slight comprehension of physical reality.
I am reading comments before my own reply, and could not agree with you more. The structure of the system, including compulsory education, is the problem
Love this list of yours, it’s proactive and positive. I would add in bringing back the art of debate and teaching civics as a means to create intellectually nimble citizens, and I would personally emphasize high quality literature again, the foundation of so much of our culture (for better or for worse). In the words of the great educator, Charlotte Mason : “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life” and we want a society of enthusiastic life-long learners!
I live in Australia but we have the same issues with schooling.
I totally agree about removing phones from the classroom. My daughter's high school did this and looking back she agrees that it's a good practice.
I find that kids are required to know more but learn less. e.g. I teach Ethics to 10 year olds. They know the phrase Climate Change but were unaware of where water comes from!! I went off script and explained the process.
Kids need more opportunities to explore and demonstrate natural talents and curiosities. e.g. my son is great at listening, info recall and reading schematic drawings but struggles with writing. He can't write a letter but he can fix your aircon and not blow up the house.
I'd also like to see high performing kids paired with those who struggle in project work. This situation will be encountered at work. Knowing how to communicate and capture ideas with others whose brains operate differently is a powerful skill.
In my opinion, teaching life skills to high school students is essential for preparing them to navigate adulthood with confidence. Skills like understanding checking accounts, retirement savings, and health insurance terms—such as deductibles, premiums, and copayments—equip students to make informed decisions about their healthcare. Learning to fill out a W-4 form ensures they can handle their first jobs responsibly, understanding how taxes impact their earnings. I would also like to see reintegrating driver’s education into the curriculum not only promoting safety but also empowering students with independence. Teach them how to respond to a police officer if they should get pulled over. Practical life skills can help bridge the gap between academic learning and world readiness, setting students up for success as adults.
Well Heather, you nailed it. First I have to defer to my wife who taught high school for many years (she is now retired). She noticed rigor diminishing over time. Schools are expecting less of our youths, maybe that’s where competition comes into play. She also thinks more outside the classroom learning is needed. I think you covered that. As a hiring engineering manager, I see new recruits reflecting that trend. It’s now left to corporations to not only train but to educate new hires, let’s debate that someday. I have to mention one more. When I started seeing a steep decline in math skills in adults, I quickly concluded that this was by design. Ignorance in math is allowing financial institutions (including rent seekers) to massacre adults financially. If it’s by design, it’s a crime.
I've thought about this a bit since retirement from the local and more than a bit before when I was more directly impacted. With the college track unavailable or undesirable for so many students there must be a better way. My thought was that there should be two tracks (at least) in middle and high school. One traditional track of three hours classwork, lunch and a further three hours of classwork. And an additional track of three hours of instruction and lunch and an additional three hours of paid work. Landscaping, custodial work, meal prep, library and media maintenance for example. All jobs that schools need to be done and that an adult would have to be paid a living wage to do. Cash remuneration and class credits for any job done satisfactorily. Morning shift and afternoon shift for those students who view six hours of inactivity as torture, with the incentive of a paycheck. This is of course likely to be "gamed" so it would require adult supervision. I also saw one of our high schools experiment with a different class schedule: hour and a half classes with 15 minute class changes. The biggest effect was to reduce the madness of a HS class change but I can't believe that the longer classes did not have a beneficial affect as well. Curious to see what other people in the system have to say?
Agree with so much of this! Smaller schools would indeed benefit most kids. So many of the rules and ways things are done are purely to keep a lid on a building of hundreds of kids. I would love to see more practical skills like managing finances, especially with regard to understanding budgeting and understanding the ramifications of debt and credit.
A huge part of MAHA has got to be teaching young people to cook and enjoy healthy food. This has been forced on my daughter because of her many food allergies, and she is successfully preparing healthy, homemade food, even while at college, while most of her friends subsist on junky boxed stuff. It can be done! Mastering practical skills gives young people a true boost in confidence, which is very different than constantly being fed therapeutic platitudes about how great everyone is.
I homeschooled my own and worked as an au pair in Switzerland. As well I was exposed to the Japanese system by our Suzuki violin teacher. Our kids spend too much time in school, the little Swiss kid I helped with never spent more than 4 hours in school. Most days it was in 2 hour blocks separated by 2 or 4 hours off. The schedule was for the children and the school, not babysitting for working parents. Their high schools were set up like our colleges where students attended single subject classes and the rest of their time was their own. My kids spent very little time doing "school" and more exploring and learning on their own. Any kid who can read, write, and do math, can go on to do anything later. Mine went straight to community college for their high school years. Our community colleges do an excellent job and hire for teaching ability and to teach what kids should have learned in high school and did not.
Another example is the alternative programs set up for kids who have failed in classrooms. My aunt taught in one of these after years as a classroom teacher and it changed her. She had doubted it would work, but it was extremely effective and her students did well. They just checked in as needed and worked mostly on their own
I learned more working than I did in school and that is illegal now. Let young kids work, we can do field work, we can wash dishes, we can work helping wherever needed. How about letting young kids assist mechanics and otherwise explore the real world?
This discussion cannot happen without mentioning John Taylor Gatto's seminal work, "An Underground History of American Education". The system must be changed, not reformed. Gatto was an educational genius.
Kids can learn what we now learn in high school and more by 8th grade, enough with so many years in school. Reading the Little House books and teaching my own kids made it clear that they could attend school half the year or less for a few hours a day and come out ahead if they were not wasting their time. You would get your small classes if people switched off and shared the same facilities year round.
All school decisions need to be local where there is accountability, get rid of school districts, they did not used to exist and we got better results then, no state or federal departments of education. For that matter, getting rid of compulsory schooling would be great, make it a privilege again. Kids who don't want to be there don't learn much anyway. The school cannot fix what is lacking at home, it certainly did not for me. I had to leave home and school to get my life together.
Allow for (optional) spiritual education, and social science that supports insight into spirituality, including indigenous (embodied) spirituality and human consciousness. My preference would be for more holistic stuff based on evolutionary and developmental psychology (Robert Kegan, Iain McGilchrist) and integral theory (Ken Wilber), but other paths should be allowed, including various traditional religious morals. Postmodern pluralism/relativism ("wokeness") should be studied as a quasi-religion. In general, break up the corrupt public school monopoly. Purging DEI/woke toxicity from public education will presumably require that the corrupt US Dept. of Education be either completely eliminated or significantly downsized. Ramaswamy has stated that it is more "constitutional" (as per labor law) to completely eliminate corrupt cabinet-secretary bureaucracies than to downsize and reform them.
Excellent lists of reforms. I like the lists as well as the freedoms for teachers to be creative. We need rules and freedom to experiment within the guidelines of the rules. Rules should be freeing, not limiting. I believe students need to have some more meaningful education in health, which, based on what I hear from my kids, and what I experienced when in school, is a joke. We need to get our kids developing good habits for life with nutrition, avoidance of toxins, exercise, lifestyle factors, and to understand the science behind health. We also need to find a way for health to be "cool" -- not just a prohibition of your favorite stuff.
To add to a young person's exposure to the real world, I'd like to see some requirement to immerse them in one of three options: (a) overseas assignment with Peace Corps or Global Leadership Adventure; (b) or domestic equivalent like AmeriCorps; (c) or volunteer for military. No idea how to fund (a) or (b), and there are probably other possibilities that might be more practical.
All good points. But consider that education systems are very different all over the globe. I do not see clear correlation between education system and societal flourishing. For example, here in Germany most higher-ed science teachers have science degrees (and the German university system is very leveled; there is no Ivy League equivalent; you can get decent degrees everywhere). There are phone rules, and DEI offices are unheard of. In fact, basically all administrative tasks are handled by teachers (who get a certain reduction in teaching load as compensation). And yet we are going south as a society.
Everything is 80-20. Of all teachers, 20% will be excellent, 20% awful, and 60% so-so. This is independent of the school system, teachers' credentials, class size, teaching load, and all other variables. The most important thing, in my view, is not to encroach on the good teachers (as you write: give good teachers the freedom to teach).
The role of the good teachers is to teach the kids something about life: life can be wonderful and exciting, and you can do some good in the world.
The role of the bad teachers is to teach the kids something about life as well: life can be hard and unjust, and you have to and can get over it.
I like Peter Boghossian's idea: Burn it all down. However, these suggestions, all great, are much more practical and, more importantly, proactive. I would only add one thing.: Many young people don't seem to know how to use their hands, or tools, or how to problem solve in the physical world, to make and fix things. That would be addressed by classes like shop, but why not incorporate "Regularly update facilities with a combination of skilled tradesmen (carpenters, tile layers, plumbers, etc.) and summer jobs for high school students, who learn from the professionals," right into the curriculum, from the very early years? Rather than having kids walk around the plumber fixing the sink, why not get them all to have a hands-on lesson? That way, the skilled trades are seen as equals, not some outsider who gets his/her hands dirty to fix things, who you don't talk to, but a problem solver who is part of the community. This assumes, of course, that such tradespeople would want to act as teachers, but why not? Let's encourage this sort of egalitarian cross-pollination. Please send this list to the new head of the Department of Education!
Agreed, seniors, especially younger ones cities be used to help facilitate a lot of this, ie, gardening, fix it stuff, niche stuff like clock making or ham radio- involve the community in educating- your as creative as your community is willing.
I agree with SO MUCH of this. YES to Music and Shop. So incredibly important. I am 50+ year old man and I can sew, use a table saw, cook etc. because of shop. I happen to live in a town with a surviving music program. It bring me such joy to watch kids walk down the street to school holding a clarinet or violin case.
Things I would add -
a) Emphasize getting to and from school by walk or bike. Get mom and dad out of way. Independence!!
b) Learn cursive; handwritten notes;
c) English grammar; know when to use "me" or "I" in a sentence; know importance of oxford comma; difference between then and than; whether and weather....
Good luck with getting rid of pronoun abuse. Where I live I have yet to meet one member of the school system who can keep pronouns straight, not the teachers, English teachers or administrators. Where would we find the people to teach this?
From tutoring local students, the two biggest problems I see are common core math and disability accommodation. Common Core math is not bad in and of itself, but it was written and designed by mathematicians who had no understanding that very, very few math teachers are proper mathematicians who love and understand math. It's a fabulous guide if you're me (or you, Heather) and homeschooling a kid -- i.e. you have the same student(s) for a long period of time and can ensure that constant connections are made between the branches on the mathematical tree. It is ideal for a situation of a passionate, numerate teacher who will have the same kids for longer than a semester. A kid who is *exceptionally* lucky might have one such math teacher in his or her life. Most will have zero. In the absence of such teaching, Common Core math just doesn't work.
Regarding disability accommodation, it's both too widespread -- basically any kid with access to regular medical and mental healthcare is being accommodated for *something* now -- and too indulgent. Dyslexic kids have to learn to *cope with* reading and writing. Assigning them "scribes" to write their exams for them is not helping them. Likewise -- it's fair and appropriate for a deaf kid to have an ASL interpreter and/or to get someone else's notes to supplement their own with whatever they might have missed in the lecture. It is going too far for a deaf kid to be fully excused from homework since sometimes the YouTube videos that other kids use to help with homework aren't properly captioned. (These are just two real examples; I could list dozens, some of which are so unbelievable that I verified them with the parents.)
Your ideas are all amazing and reading this almost made me cry. We could actually have something great, if we tried.
Schools run by bureaucrats will inevitably teach students to be bureaucrats. Schools run by ideologues will invariably teach students to be ideologues. If we had a shortage of either of these, that might be desirable. But in fact, we are choking on them.
I was a teacher. I think a big problem with people living in today's world is that so few people make their living dealing with physical reality. Many years ago, most people had jobs/careers centered around farming, construction, factory work, etc. It's a fallacy that these jobs are for stupid people. These jobs are for people who are betting their lives and their safety that they comprehend the reality they are immersed in. In the meantime, in the ivory tower, reality can be and is, easily ignored. Hence, we have the fairy tale that men and women can switch genders. True enough, in their imaginations, they can. In physical reality, they can't.
So, yes, more activities and classes in school that promote comprehension of what is real, not what is in the imagination. Clearly, the imagination counts, but it is good for very little if a person has only a slight comprehension of physical reality.
I am reading comments before my own reply, and could not agree with you more. The structure of the system, including compulsory education, is the problem
Excellent observations.
Love this list of yours, it’s proactive and positive. I would add in bringing back the art of debate and teaching civics as a means to create intellectually nimble citizens, and I would personally emphasize high quality literature again, the foundation of so much of our culture (for better or for worse). In the words of the great educator, Charlotte Mason : “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life” and we want a society of enthusiastic life-long learners!
I live in Australia but we have the same issues with schooling.
I totally agree about removing phones from the classroom. My daughter's high school did this and looking back she agrees that it's a good practice.
I find that kids are required to know more but learn less. e.g. I teach Ethics to 10 year olds. They know the phrase Climate Change but were unaware of where water comes from!! I went off script and explained the process.
Kids need more opportunities to explore and demonstrate natural talents and curiosities. e.g. my son is great at listening, info recall and reading schematic drawings but struggles with writing. He can't write a letter but he can fix your aircon and not blow up the house.
I'd also like to see high performing kids paired with those who struggle in project work. This situation will be encountered at work. Knowing how to communicate and capture ideas with others whose brains operate differently is a powerful skill.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth.
I love all your ideas - keep creating.
Cheers, Sue
In my opinion, teaching life skills to high school students is essential for preparing them to navigate adulthood with confidence. Skills like understanding checking accounts, retirement savings, and health insurance terms—such as deductibles, premiums, and copayments—equip students to make informed decisions about their healthcare. Learning to fill out a W-4 form ensures they can handle their first jobs responsibly, understanding how taxes impact their earnings. I would also like to see reintegrating driver’s education into the curriculum not only promoting safety but also empowering students with independence. Teach them how to respond to a police officer if they should get pulled over. Practical life skills can help bridge the gap between academic learning and world readiness, setting students up for success as adults.
Well Heather, you nailed it. First I have to defer to my wife who taught high school for many years (she is now retired). She noticed rigor diminishing over time. Schools are expecting less of our youths, maybe that’s where competition comes into play. She also thinks more outside the classroom learning is needed. I think you covered that. As a hiring engineering manager, I see new recruits reflecting that trend. It’s now left to corporations to not only train but to educate new hires, let’s debate that someday. I have to mention one more. When I started seeing a steep decline in math skills in adults, I quickly concluded that this was by design. Ignorance in math is allowing financial institutions (including rent seekers) to massacre adults financially. If it’s by design, it’s a crime.
I've thought about this a bit since retirement from the local and more than a bit before when I was more directly impacted. With the college track unavailable or undesirable for so many students there must be a better way. My thought was that there should be two tracks (at least) in middle and high school. One traditional track of three hours classwork, lunch and a further three hours of classwork. And an additional track of three hours of instruction and lunch and an additional three hours of paid work. Landscaping, custodial work, meal prep, library and media maintenance for example. All jobs that schools need to be done and that an adult would have to be paid a living wage to do. Cash remuneration and class credits for any job done satisfactorily. Morning shift and afternoon shift for those students who view six hours of inactivity as torture, with the incentive of a paycheck. This is of course likely to be "gamed" so it would require adult supervision. I also saw one of our high schools experiment with a different class schedule: hour and a half classes with 15 minute class changes. The biggest effect was to reduce the madness of a HS class change but I can't believe that the longer classes did not have a beneficial affect as well. Curious to see what other people in the system have to say?
All good ideas.
I would have loved to go to your version of school.
Agree with so much of this! Smaller schools would indeed benefit most kids. So many of the rules and ways things are done are purely to keep a lid on a building of hundreds of kids. I would love to see more practical skills like managing finances, especially with regard to understanding budgeting and understanding the ramifications of debt and credit.
A huge part of MAHA has got to be teaching young people to cook and enjoy healthy food. This has been forced on my daughter because of her many food allergies, and she is successfully preparing healthy, homemade food, even while at college, while most of her friends subsist on junky boxed stuff. It can be done! Mastering practical skills gives young people a true boost in confidence, which is very different than constantly being fed therapeutic platitudes about how great everyone is.
I homeschooled my own and worked as an au pair in Switzerland. As well I was exposed to the Japanese system by our Suzuki violin teacher. Our kids spend too much time in school, the little Swiss kid I helped with never spent more than 4 hours in school. Most days it was in 2 hour blocks separated by 2 or 4 hours off. The schedule was for the children and the school, not babysitting for working parents. Their high schools were set up like our colleges where students attended single subject classes and the rest of their time was their own. My kids spent very little time doing "school" and more exploring and learning on their own. Any kid who can read, write, and do math, can go on to do anything later. Mine went straight to community college for their high school years. Our community colleges do an excellent job and hire for teaching ability and to teach what kids should have learned in high school and did not.
Another example is the alternative programs set up for kids who have failed in classrooms. My aunt taught in one of these after years as a classroom teacher and it changed her. She had doubted it would work, but it was extremely effective and her students did well. They just checked in as needed and worked mostly on their own
I learned more working than I did in school and that is illegal now. Let young kids work, we can do field work, we can wash dishes, we can work helping wherever needed. How about letting young kids assist mechanics and otherwise explore the real world?
This discussion cannot happen without mentioning John Taylor Gatto's seminal work, "An Underground History of American Education". The system must be changed, not reformed. Gatto was an educational genius.
Kids can learn what we now learn in high school and more by 8th grade, enough with so many years in school. Reading the Little House books and teaching my own kids made it clear that they could attend school half the year or less for a few hours a day and come out ahead if they were not wasting their time. You would get your small classes if people switched off and shared the same facilities year round.
All school decisions need to be local where there is accountability, get rid of school districts, they did not used to exist and we got better results then, no state or federal departments of education. For that matter, getting rid of compulsory schooling would be great, make it a privilege again. Kids who don't want to be there don't learn much anyway. The school cannot fix what is lacking at home, it certainly did not for me. I had to leave home and school to get my life together.
Great discussion idea.
Allow for (optional) spiritual education, and social science that supports insight into spirituality, including indigenous (embodied) spirituality and human consciousness. My preference would be for more holistic stuff based on evolutionary and developmental psychology (Robert Kegan, Iain McGilchrist) and integral theory (Ken Wilber), but other paths should be allowed, including various traditional religious morals. Postmodern pluralism/relativism ("wokeness") should be studied as a quasi-religion. In general, break up the corrupt public school monopoly. Purging DEI/woke toxicity from public education will presumably require that the corrupt US Dept. of Education be either completely eliminated or significantly downsized. Ramaswamy has stated that it is more "constitutional" (as per labor law) to completely eliminate corrupt cabinet-secretary bureaucracies than to downsize and reform them.
Excellent lists of reforms. I like the lists as well as the freedoms for teachers to be creative. We need rules and freedom to experiment within the guidelines of the rules. Rules should be freeing, not limiting. I believe students need to have some more meaningful education in health, which, based on what I hear from my kids, and what I experienced when in school, is a joke. We need to get our kids developing good habits for life with nutrition, avoidance of toxins, exercise, lifestyle factors, and to understand the science behind health. We also need to find a way for health to be "cool" -- not just a prohibition of your favorite stuff.
To add to a young person's exposure to the real world, I'd like to see some requirement to immerse them in one of three options: (a) overseas assignment with Peace Corps or Global Leadership Adventure; (b) or domestic equivalent like AmeriCorps; (c) or volunteer for military. No idea how to fund (a) or (b), and there are probably other possibilities that might be more practical.
All good points. But consider that education systems are very different all over the globe. I do not see clear correlation between education system and societal flourishing. For example, here in Germany most higher-ed science teachers have science degrees (and the German university system is very leveled; there is no Ivy League equivalent; you can get decent degrees everywhere). There are phone rules, and DEI offices are unheard of. In fact, basically all administrative tasks are handled by teachers (who get a certain reduction in teaching load as compensation). And yet we are going south as a society.
Everything is 80-20. Of all teachers, 20% will be excellent, 20% awful, and 60% so-so. This is independent of the school system, teachers' credentials, class size, teaching load, and all other variables. The most important thing, in my view, is not to encroach on the good teachers (as you write: give good teachers the freedom to teach).
The role of the good teachers is to teach the kids something about life: life can be wonderful and exciting, and you can do some good in the world.
The role of the bad teachers is to teach the kids something about life as well: life can be hard and unjust, and you have to and can get over it.