School Teaches Boys Are Better Than Girls At Math

It has been considered the case for a long time now that boys are better than girls at the sciences and math; the girls being superior at the humanities.  Although there is no reason why girls would be worse at math, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that teachers instill into girls the idea that they are not good at math. This then causes anxiety and a subsequent decrease in performance.

Women are therefore being discouraged from beginning a science or mathematics course in university because of a very wrong stereotype they hold because it was taught to them in school. In fact, girls generally outperform boys in tests. The average end-of-high-school exam scores are higher for girls than boys, but teachers hold the idea that girls shouldn’t try at maths or get involved in the sciences because, according to them, females are biologically inferior to males in this area.

It is a very wrong, damaging stereotype that girls are not as good as boys at the sciences and math. Stereotyping is more serious than you might think. In a study that had Asian girls complete a series of math questions, it was found that, when it was brought to mind the stereotype that girls are not as good at maths as boys, they performed worse than when it was brought to mind the stereotype that Asians were good at math. Stereotypes are serious. And wrong, harmful stereotypes are being propagated by our education system.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-stereotyping-yourself-contributes-to-success

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=little-girls-are-made-of-sugar-and-2010-01-25

Mentally Drained

Teenagers. Annoying nuisances aren’t they?  Always vandalising public property and not caring about anything apart from “rad” parties or maintaining ridiculous-looking hair. Well, I know I can’t stand them, and apparently, they can’t stand themselves too – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-468866/Why-children-today-unhappy.html. Just about everything about teenagers is deteriorating: their health, their intellect, their behaviour. Obesity is at its worst. And I don’t need to mention how much stupidity is rampant. College students spend ten hours a week partying while only eight hours studying. Many of them get drunk very frequently (and teenage drinking has been shown to cause irreversible brain damage).

And school isn’t helping them at all. School is said to develop children, to help them and improve them. So that they can manage civilised life a lot easier. But how is this being accomplished when an astonishingly high number of them want to kill themselves. Young people spend such an extraordinarily high amount of time in school, and yet they can’t take care of them. Why do we have school shootings? Why didn’t their schools offer assistance to these disturbed individuals? They should have identified these psychopaths and consequently helped them, and we probably wouldn’t have had the death toll that we do today.

Many, if not all, schools entirely avoid the whole tissue of young people’s health.

To sum up, there is a very small amount of teenagers that would choose to read a book. There is also a very little amount teenagers that would choose to go for a run. There is very little time before the world ends because the people running it are to mentally incompetent to think rationally. Well, more incompetent.

Sleeping

The tired, sleepy student. It’s an image ingrained into many minds as we envisage the typical classroom.

Young people, who need more sleep than any other age group apart from infants, are not getting enough sleep. The more scientific research is conducted on the matter, the more we realise how vital it is to the health and especially the cognitive function of young people. But they are not getting it. This is because of the early starts (it’s early by their standards) of school. The most active period of most young people is during the night. If all young people went to bed earlier, there wouldn’t be a problem. But how on Earth can you humanely enforce earlier bedtimes. You can’t. So school needs to adjust to their sleeping patterns to ensure their health and well-being.

Some people are morning people. Most people definitely aren’t. Everyone has their own natural circadian rhythm and school needs to make sure it is not jeopardising the health of young people. Especially since it’s such a crucial stage in their development.

The sleepy student is not the good student. Their performance on anything mental and even physical is greatly crippled by school’s logic that young people aren’t risk takers with their health and will seek an earlier bedtime to accommodate their school schedule. The structure of school is negatively impacting young people’s development.

Looking at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one would see that physiological needs have to be satisfied before anything else. So if your genes predispose you for a sleeping pattern that consists of sleeping in the early morning, and if you don’t satisfy this urge, your mind is going to be thinking about this particular urge and not about self-actualisation.

Classical Conditioning

What is classical conditioning?

I love conditioning, so many things about the world made sense when I learned about it. Classical conditioning is a type of learning which is exhibited in humans as well as animals. This is when we associate something with something else. An effective way of explaining this would be Pavlov’s famous experiment. In this experiment, Ivan Pavlov conditioned a dog to secrete saliva when a tone was rung. He did this by playing a tone whenever the dog was exposed to food, and so eventually the dog associated the tone with the food (and therefore salivated). So when you have something that emits a response from you occuring simultaneously with something else; that something else will eventually get you emit the same response.

How is this relevant?

This is relevant because it explains the apparent “[strangulation] [of] the holy curiosity of inquiry” (Einstein). Children that attend school obtain a vast quantity of experiences that are negative. During these negative experiences, (such as bullying) children then subconsciously associate school and all that school supposedly stands for as a chore – a chore which they are eager to discontinue.  Society tells us learning is hard, painful undesirable work and labour. What do you expect when students don’t take their studies seriously?

Humans should be educated so we can make the best decisions for us and the rest of the world. How can we be educated when school causes people to develop an incredible distaste for learning and education? School instills into children a hatred of learning. How many times have you heard something along the lines of this: “Oh no! Math. I hate it and I can’t do it”.

Your Age Does Not Reflect Your I.Q.

A predominate feature of the education system is that holds the idea that all people of identical ages have an identical capacity and eagerness to learn. Classes are created according to a person ability and not their skills. Which is very bad for people who struggle with work and also very bad for people who find work easy. It is very rare for, say a seven-year-old, to have an identical mental skill set and intelligence to another seven-year-old. Classes need to be structured according to your ability.

The problem is that within a class where there are contrasting intelligences, the material being “explored” is all the same. Therefore a more intelligent person has to deal with work that is not challenging because some other person is not smart enough to comprehend the harder work. This is particularily noticeable in the early years of schooling, but it does not fade into non-existence in the later years, and this should not be acceptable.

But the smart children will just be put up a year, wouldn’t they? That’s not a good idea. Especially what with the supposedly valuable social skills the would be lost. Somehow you learn social skills by doing crap with people your age. But how is a thirteen year old going to cope being in a class that contains fourteen year olds, or a six year old in a class of seven year olds? Chances are that child will not fit in and therefore not get these social skills. Also, it’s wrong to assume that the smart students’ needs will be met if they are just put up one year. Perhaps, they are not that smart and work from a year ahead will be too much, but if they stay in their prescribed year level, they would have to deal with work they are too smart for. It’s also difficult to define what is considered “smart” too. One student may be at a particular level at mathematics, while being at a completely different level in history. The current education system cannot cater for everyone.

School should learn that being seven years old does not mean you have an I.Q. equivalent to every other seven year old.

Bullying

Bullying in school is common, and the victims of bullying are often left with horrible problems. Despite the efforts of schools in trying to prevent bullying, it always exists in some form. If you’re a teacher and you’re thinking ‘Gosh, there’s not bullying at my school, get your shit together’, well wipe that ugly smile of your face and face the facts. No matter what the policy the school supposedly maintains, there is going to be bullying. Even if it’s little things like exclusion from games or the occassional tease, but these things don’t seem that little to the child that feels like he’s been ferociously fucked. The way school is currently designed doesn’t prevent bullying and the consequent negative psychological impacts that result. It’s horrible there are children that have to suffer and endure the terror of other miscreant children because school can’t effectively manage them.

Exams

Truly a stressful period in ones life. Where your aptitude is supposedly measured and your future is decided. Society has constructed a method that will attempt to measure a person’s sagacity in the hope that from the results, they can place the person in a suitable occupation.

The basic procedure of exams as I understand is that a particular student walks into a building with other students, sits down and then begins completing their paper. What I find wrong with exams is that there are many psychological factors that can interfere with the result. Many factors such as stress, family problems, etc, can severely interfere with a person’s future. This is serious. A person’s future should not be determined by some test. Even if the examinations were accurate determinators of a person’s aptitude, there are so many variables that can negatively impact that result, it can easily be the case that an intelligent, polite very hardworking person can be held down by society because of some score they received.

I think I can safely say that exams are stressful – very stressful. I mean, it’s basically a ‘if you fail, you’re screwed’ type of situation. Just knowing how much weight society places on the examinations greatly impacts the results. School should be about constant self-improvement in all aspects of a person. By the end of which, an accurate assessment of your abilities should be made to help you decide what you are meant to do. Not some stupid exams during one week of a person’s life. They don’t give clues into your ability to succeed in life.

By the way, emotional intelligence is supposedly a better indicator for how successful you’ll be.

Clarification

School is without a doubt something that is a serious problem to society and needs to be dealt with urgently.

First of all, a response to a possible question some of you may have. You may be thinking “Huh, well, you certainly bespeak intellectual supremacy and unyielding sex appeal, but wouldn’t it worse if there was no school?” I never suggested we should just completely Ctrl + Alt + Del school, leaving nothing, but instead it should be greatly redesigned. As for how it should be changed, don’t ask me. I can only give small pieces of advice from the things have learned from the science I have read. This is an issue for long discussion between psychologists and various other learned professionals.

You may also have the question, “But students do learn things in school, hence your opinion is false”. My response is that school is like searching for the word “futile” in Collins’ Concise Dictionary, by going through each and every page. Sure, you find out that “futile” means “having no effective result; unsuccessful”, but look at how many pages you’ve gone through! That would’ve taken ages, especially considering how large this dictionary is. People learn things yeah, but you are NOT educated and you are NOT intelligent if you have only learned a few words out of the thousands and thousands of words that reside in Collins Concise Dictionary. Basically, yeah, you do learn things, but not much considering most people spend a little less than two decades being schooled.

It is atrocious and despicable how school suffocates your desire for inquiry and leaves you with people that we commonly see today. Just look at the state the world is in. Observing the multitude of hordes that occupy school, who don’t want to learn means that school is not doing a good job, so alternatives need to be considered.

Ye can lead a man up to the university, but you can’t make him think - Finley Peter Dunne.

Quotes

Some quotes letting you know that I’m not the only person in the world who thinks the education system is futile. These people are the world’s intellectual elite and so their opinions should be seriously considered. Also, as I’ve mentioned on the About page, some people find education synonymous with school.

Albert Einstein: It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

Albert Einstein: It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Albert Einstein: Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.

Alexander Dumas: How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

Anatole France: The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Annie Sullivan: Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Aristotle: All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Bertrand Russell: I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Bill Beattie: The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think – rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.

Circero: The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

Confucious: Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Edith Hamilton: It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is to be educated.

Ethel Barrymore: You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.

Finley Peter Dunne: Ye can lead a man up to the university, but you can’t make him think.

Friedrich Nietzsche: In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

George Bernard Shaw: What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

George Santayana: A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Henry B. Adams: Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Henry Ward Beecher: There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.

Jim Rohn: Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

John Dewey: Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Lou Ann Walker: Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you don’t consider your students to be human beings.

Maria Mitchell: We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.

Mark Twain: I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Mark Twain: First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards.

Mark Twain: Many public-school children seem to know only two dates–1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.

Mark Twain: All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Mortimer Adler: In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Robert Fulghum: All I really need to know … I learned in kindergarten.

Robert Green Ingersoll: It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

Roger Lewin: Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

St. Francis Xavier: Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterward.

Will Durant: Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Sir William Haley: Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

Teaching

Teachers and teaching encompass a significant component of the education system. They are said to foster students’ development through various methods of instruction. Disappointingly, even the best of teachers are futile when it comes to education the masses of noisy, hyperactive students.

The good, intelligent students who constitute the minority of all students, first of all, don’t need teachers. They are simply too smart and hardworking to require another person at the front of the class regurgitating text from a textbook. They read the work. They do the work. And they study and revise the work. For these people, teachers offer no aid apart from holding them back because the work the government sets for them to do is to easy. They are forced to labour through simple linear equations when they could easily be differentiating, or are forced to learn and study the meaning of words like “bigot” when they are able to comfortably read works like ’1984′ and ‘War and Peace’. Their capacity for learning and growth is not complemented by their teachers.

Teachers also seem to be out-of-touch with how they should be teaching their classes. The man or woman standing in front of the class should effectively be transposing what is said in the textbook (or whatever is being “learned”) into the minds of the students. Many times, no, most times, this does not happen. Teaching consists of depositing on the black/whiteboard or converting into speech whatever is written in textbooks. Laziness, stupidity, lack of care … it could be any of theses things.

And then there are the students who just don’t care. The ones who simply do not wish to learn. Who have been conditioned to think of learning as a chore. No sophisticated teaching techniques is going to help them. No matter how much a teacher is said to be able to “inspire children”, they will not be able to help these people. Only you can decide whether it is you want to learn. And if you refuse, as many adolescents have, you will not likely fare well in life, even if you have the intelligence and aptitude for education. Such is the way of the cruel, vicious system of education we uphold today.

Teachers are not teaching if students only learn because it’s something they enjoy doing.

Teaching is futile – impracticable and inefficient. School is futile.