Problems with public education

  My experiences with the public school system were an almost endless series of struggles, conflicts, and absurdities. I also have two younger brothers, both with learning disabilities (LD), who had various problems with school as well. In particular, there are two major issues that stand out to me: “mainstreaming” and information retention.

First is the philosophy of “mainstreaming” or “inclusion,” which strictly means the placement of special education students in regular classrooms as opposed to separate special-needs classrooms. A noble idea, perhaps, but problematic in practice.
Take the example of one of my brothers. He's a very artistic, creative type: he plays the violin, the guitar, and has been teaching himself the shakuhachi. He draws and paints. He writes stories and plays. He tells jokes with great timing and skill, and can devise puns and quick come-backs at great speed. He also is LD in both written language and mathematics. In junior high and high school, the sole help he got for these was a class period in the “resourse” room, where they taught…organizational skills; as if being able to keep track of what the homework assignments are and when they're do will compensate for not having the needed skill to do the assignments. I've heard arguements that mainstreaming helps special ed. students as the regular students will help “bring up” the special ed. students. What I've seen is the reverse: classes get dumbed down to the least common denominator, and everybody suffers.
The philosophy also spills over into gifted education. We put the gifted students into the regular classes as well, where they are left bored and restless. At best, we give them additional “enrichment” worksheets full of busy-work that contains no new information.
Further, we refuse to hold back failing students or skip ahead advanced ones, arguing that they need to be with their peers, “peers” being defined entirely by chronological age, ignoring completely the fact that individuals mature, both biologically and intellectually, at different rates. Take my case: I was years ahead of my fellow gifted students in math and science. In fifth grade, I spent the first hour of the day in the sixth grade classroom learning eigth grade prealgebra; in sixth, my mother had to drive me over to the junior high every afternoon (at our own expense, against state law) to take Algebra I. All this, and they would not skip me a grade, despite the fact that I missed the birth deadline for being a grade higher by only 16 hours!!
And we cannot hold back students who need more time to learn the material. Instead, we keep promoting them into higher and higher grades, while the material becomes increasingly hard, and they become increasingly lost, until we get high school graduates who read at elementary school levels. We seem to think that taking a year or two longer to get the material down is somehow far worse than being totally lost and without the needed knowledge and skills at all.
Exit exams and the like haven't helped. Instead of ensuring students are learning needed skills, we have teachers instead instructing students how to pass the tests. Students aren't expected to retain anything once they've passed. And when large numbers of students fail the tests, we don't try to improve the classroom teaching, we lower the standards on the test. In severe cases, as in the rural villages here in Alaska, we even have teachers helping students cheat on the tests to ensure sufficient levels of students pass.

Next, we have information retention. Take, as comparison, European textbooks versus American equivalents. The former are much smaller than the latter. Why? Well, first we have in this country math textbooks asking about the role of zoos in modern society and other examples of discursions into feel-good PC nonsense. Second, and much larger, is repitition. Open just about any public school level math book in this country and at least the first few chapters are dedicated to review of previous years' material. The same is true in science. In Europe, however, textbooks have only the new material.
Why the difference? It is because here, we don't expect people to actually learn and retain the material. Instead, we only expect people to remember it long enough to pass the tests and complete the class. I remember pointing out to the teacher in fourth grade during a science lesson (botany; the sole content of our science courses until fifth grade was plants and human anatomy. Fifth grade added “aerodynamics,” which reduced to making paper airplanes.) that we'd already introduced chlorophyll the year before; the rest of the class hadn't retained it at all, and these were the highly gifted students. In high school Advanced Chemistry class, I once got into an arguement with some of my fellow classmates after we wasted an hour having to re-teach them the definition of pH from the prerequisite chemistry class. Their defense was basically “you can't actually expect us te remember this stuff after we've finished the class?!” In most of the rest of the world, they can and do. Why can't we?