Thinking about schools this morning, and what we might be able to do without having people scream about "indoctrination!" to make schooling better.

The most obvious thing for me is outside the classroom; end the connection between property taxes and local school funding. /

The problem with that is simple - if education is supposed to lift people out of poverty, then the people most in need of good education are those living in poverty.

Poverty tends to be geographically lumped. Poor folks live near other poor folks.

And use the same schools. /

So, under our current system, the poorest kids from the poorest neighborhoods in the greatest need of a good education,

Are the ones with the least funded schools.

That is a wrong and bad idea. /

So wrong, and so bad, I swear. Very badwrong. /

After that, though... I think there needs to be a change in the way we teach things, to create a more functional society.

So let's look at this topic by topic.

I'll start with History, which is my favorite subject, and one we really don't do right. /

So much of our class time in History is spent memorizing names and dates, and I (with a degree in history) remember almost none of them.

The skill that has most served me from my degree isn't memorization, but research. Interrogation. How to think critically about sources. /

Given my druthers, that's the thrust of history classes - learning how to read a thing in different ways and for different things.

There's also a certain amount of "grounding" work that needs to be done; I don't know how to teach what happened without "patriots" getting angry. /

But that's a problem we already have, so no fucking change there, I guess.

After that, I'd want the classes to be reading different people's accounts of an event where we KNOW the truth, and ask about the arguments they're making.

Teach kids it's all narratives, not sureties. /

After that, math:

Teach math as a language.

Like, right from the beginning. Teach it as a natural language (it is), with a grammar and a syntax.

Elementary school kids can code. Teach them to. Start there. That gives them not only the theoretical grounding, but also makes /

sure they have enough math skills to balance a checkbook, understand interest, do simple geometry, and the half dozen other uses for math in your day-to-day.

Most high school kids don't need to know how matricies work, for instance, but we ALL need to know probability. /

Rolling straight from that into the next bit:

Life skills.

There's a question of "what part of this is the school's job, and what part is the parent's?" but we need something basic.

Here's how a credit score works. Here's why this this and that are scams. Here's ten recipes. /

The biggest problem with Home Ec was that it was the "girls" class, but fuck, everyone needs to know how to not poison themselves by mixing amonia and bleach.

So let's just take the things that everyone living in our society /needs/ to know. Teach that. Make it mandatory. /

English I'm mostly okay with, truth be told. You get a pass. /

Science -

Again, the history problem. Don't teach the kids to memorize fifty things for a test in a month that they'll most likely forget.

Teach them science. And have them /do/ science. /

I don't mean "let's dissect a frog!"

I mean actual experiments.

We've got a reproducibility problem in the sciences, in part because there's not as much funding in verifying results - so why not turn every high school science class into a lab? /

There's plenty that you can test with the timeframes and tools available to even the poorest school districts - set up a pipeline where experiments get reproduced by public schools all over the country.

And where the kids are actively participating in adding to human knowledge./

And - Nome, you sneaky leftist! - by having the kids get different results, you can ask them what might have made their results different.

You can get them questioning authority (the initial study) and thinking critically about both their own actions/environments and others'. /

We get both millions of new data points, and a more critical, more engaged populace.

Win goddamn win.

Make sure to destroy or blow up some stuff to keep everyone engaged. The Mythbusters approach. /

Arts, music, drama:

Actually goddamn fund it. /

Moving away from homework would be good. Moving away from early start times would be good. So much of the school day is lost in administration and organization time; twenty minutes of actual learning in an hour long class is pretty good, all things considered. /

I wish we could reliably send kids home and have them, say, watch X video (a pre-recorded lesson) and then have them do the actual work in class with the teacher present, instead of having the teacher try to lecture and just hope the kids got it while they're working at home. /

In keeping with that:

Nationwide high-speed internet as a public utility.

In my ideal world, each kid gets issued a damn near indestructible tablet/notebook with free broadband. /

More class outside of classrooms. Smaller classrooms. More teachers, with better pay and benefits for them. Higher standards for becoming a teacher, too.

That's the dream, though. Every public school a palace. /

I'm open to more - what should change? I may have just had really good english teachers.

...one was former NYT editorial staff who used to play with alignment to spell dirty words with the first letter of each line, so that's probably the case. https://twitter.com/gm_palmer/status/1324417422951141377

I went to a public high school in rural NC, and while we didn't have shit for dick in terms of $$, we DID have in-school job skills training.

We had kids leaving school as apprentice welders, carpenters, plumbers, electricians.

This was a good thing. It should be available. /

In keeping with Life Skills, Job Skills is something we all need, APPARENTLY, AS LONG AS WE'RE GONNA DO THIS CAPITALISM THING.

So given that - here's a schedule, here's how time off works, here's how to understand benefits packages.

Here are your rights, as a worker. /

(Here's some labor history, to show how bad it can be. Here are the people trying to take away your rights as a worker. here's the problem with deregulation.) /

More remote learning. More support for homeschooled kids.

More environments for learning. Hell, even just "class outside" is a great thing.

End "academically gifted" or "gifted and talented" as a different class where the smart kids go away. /

Put maintenance and upkeep of the school into the hands of the students - ALL STUDENTS.

I (briefly) taught English in Japan, and the *kindergarteners* I was working with were cleaning bathrooms and policing trash.

Teach them this is their space. Communal ownership, support. /

This could veer wildly into "unpaid labor," so keep an eye on that, but -

The idea that "we're in this together and responsible to each other" is an important one, that this country is lacking.

We need to reinforce it. /

In the simplest terms: You don't want to fuck up the bathroom if you know that you'll have to clean it when someone else fucks it up.

What else...

Oh. Give kids the lecture slides/notes, as a matter of basic accessibility. /

This, by the way, is what my English teachers already did, hence my giving them a pass.

Absolutely. Cosign. https://twitter.com/gm_palmer/status/1324420648177963014

Here's a simple one -

Reverse the way we grade.

Instead of having an imaginary perfect score, which you're only ever falling away from,

Instead, your grades build up. They're achievement based. Desire for success, not fear of failure. /

Here's a great video about how to apply what we know from games (which kids love to spend time in) to schools (which they do not).

I cosign pretty much all of it.

When I say more support for homeschool, part of what I'm imagining is a way to counteract this.

Actual curricula, that kids at home can access, to state and federal standards. Instead of making a test they can game, you make a lesson. https://twitter.com/jolenestarshine/status/1324423349360099328