No one is denying that students experiment with sex and drugs.
Rather, the observation is that these things happen mostly outside of school, so avoiding schools isn't an effective way of avoiding this things.
The link between school and these activities is, IMO, largely specious. Or at the very least completely unsubstantiated by evidence.
Or are you seriously suggesting that kids are binge drinking and lighting up in between history and chemistry?
Basically, vivek's argument is that by not sending your kids to school you avoid all of these behaviors. But these behaviors are far more common outside of school that within school.
Home schooling doesn't replace effective parenting, and sending your kdis to a school doesn't preclude effective parenting.
Finally, I think it's worth asking so what?! to a lot of your statistics. Particularly the "drank some alcohol" and "smoked pot in the last 30 days" statistics. These things aren't a priori bad, and drinking at that age isn't even illegal in a lot of developed countries (and even in some places in the US, under adult supervision).
I do think however, as the article pointed out, there’s something a bit unsettling about concern for their kids’ futures causing parents to medicate perfectly normal/healthy children with drugs that have unknown long-term consequences.
To be sure, this is a general structural problem inherent in a school system which uses “high-stakes” standardized tests and attempts to rank people on an absolute scale. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot we can do to dismantle the whole school testing apparatus in the immediate future.
Which isn’t to say that (e.g. religious fundamentalist) parents don’t do plenty else to screw up their kids, under social pressure, or that widespread use of “neuro-enhancing” drugs by teens would be the worst thing that could ever happen to the society.
"- You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics."
Your comparison doesn't make any sense. There are other factors, notably cultural, involved. For example, the praise of individualism in the US (which may encourage reckless behavior), and the limited social security net (poverty increases the risk of substance abuse).
When you control for other factors, the pattern I described emerge. See:
Of course children have to be protected. That's the whole point of education, gradually removing barriers while you teach them (or let them learn) how to get along by themselves. Whether or not the society should have a word on the topic is open for debate. I'm for, to some extent, as you probably guessed.
Fully agree. I went through a few school systems, from a wealthy public school to a less fortunate city public school.
Each have their own problems, but common amongst them were parents that were either mentally absent, or physically absent.
In these cases, kids either ended up doing drugs and racing cars on windy roads, sometimes crashing into trees while high. Or getting into gangs or violence and having a record before 18.
I think public schools foster an environment of sex, bullying, drugs and weapons by getting large groups of children together and offering very little supervision. I don't think those kinds of environments could exist outside of modern schools.
Yes giving kids alone time is fine, but leaving a large group of kids together under the supervision of very few adults and repeating this 5 days a week for several years is going to have some effect.
Maybe the dopamine addictions that many of these kids experience are the reason they’re bored with school. Maybe they’re a contributing reason that remote learning was ineffective.
When I was a kid, going to school was the social medium. Even the kids who skipped class physically came to school to meet up. Now that we’ve removed that incentive for attendance, no wonder kids don’t show up.
However, I find it very hard to believe that any school in the world can attribute most of it's student unruliness to children trying to get kicked out so that their mothers cannot be prostitutes.
But that’s sort of the point I’m making- schools can’t fix drug-addicted parents and that’s probably going to make much more of a difference in a child’s educational attainment than how good their teacher is at teaching math. Unless schools are going to do more than just teach academic subjects. They will basically have to function as reliable, disciplining parents.
> The article leaves out the cases where the parents at home are maybe disfunctional in parenting and school is maybe really the better place for the children.
Not really. TFA does say that for some (or most?) parents, school is a babysitting service. The author says, despite that, school isn't a terribly good place for a child to be growing up either.
Is your argument that these things don't matter, or is your argument that the experience outside school is failing to lrovide sufficient reinforcement?
Paying attention is something that some students frequently have doing because their home life is so terrible and "teaching it" is already a problem. Students in many underserved communities come to school having trouble sleeping or eating, and this destroys performance in school. Most teachers overwhelmed with behavioral problems while trying to teach completely nonsensical curriculums established by non-educators simply punish these students with in school suspension or detention which further ostracizes these students that are oftentimes already picked on by peers.
Blaming schools entirely for root causes sometimes stemming from students coming from bad home lives is nonsensical just as much as it is to remove blame from students for their individual performance. Our most often cited statistics simply don't do a good job of decoupling social factors of aggregate academic achievement from the variables schools themselves do control.
> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead.
I'm sure the tone of the article was meant to be light-hearted + silly + joke-y overall but this is actually interesting to me... Why is that the default? Why do some (most) parents need to actively invest time/resources to make sure their kids do not end up pregnant, in jail, or dead instead of the default being "those are non-issues".
What about the students who aren't smoking weed and spraying graffiti? Why should they be grouped with students who need more than an education and fed a curriculum geared towards the lowest common denominators (students who aren't even prepared to function in a school environment)?
Arbitrary tolerance will fail for the same reason zero tolerance fails. Schools are being asked not just to educate but to parent. In many places they are falling short with the former so why do people believe they can do the latter?
School administrators need to be honest with themselves and with the people they answer to. If parents raise children who lack the basic skills required to function in civil society the burden can't and shouldn't fall on schools.
Once you restrict your stats to those that stay in school and don't do drugs, I'd think it is hard to correct for other causes. Like the presence of involved parents.
Rather, the observation is that these things happen mostly outside of school, so avoiding schools isn't an effective way of avoiding this things.
The link between school and these activities is, IMO, largely specious. Or at the very least completely unsubstantiated by evidence.
Or are you seriously suggesting that kids are binge drinking and lighting up in between history and chemistry?
Basically, vivek's argument is that by not sending your kids to school you avoid all of these behaviors. But these behaviors are far more common outside of school that within school.
Home schooling doesn't replace effective parenting, and sending your kdis to a school doesn't preclude effective parenting.
Finally, I think it's worth asking so what?! to a lot of your statistics. Particularly the "drank some alcohol" and "smoked pot in the last 30 days" statistics. These things aren't a priori bad, and drinking at that age isn't even illegal in a lot of developed countries (and even in some places in the US, under adult supervision).
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