busy"Pushed Out" describes, and supports with ominous statistics, how "zero-tolerance" policies not only fail to make schools safe but drastically increase discipline problems and decrease academic performance. The policies are provably worse than useless.
"What Can This Student Teach You About the Classroom?" features some advice from a student about how to make a classroom work, i.e. the teacher needs to engage with the students. I'm greatly impressed that she's actually getting some attention to this bit of wisdom.
Basically, young people are biologically designed to learn. But if they don't feel safe and heard, they'll withdraw or become disruptive. If the system strangles them, they will struggle to claw their way loose. Because even a wadded-up kid is made of SillyPutty, and they will absorb whatever is around them. So if adults treat kids as if they are stupid, lazy, worthless, undisciplined, and/or criminal ... that's how most of them will turn out.
October 20 2009, 19:47:04 UTC 11 years ago
All of them involve setting up unrealistic sets of rules trying to prevent anything bad from ever happening, each particular regulation aimed at solving one particular 'social problem', and ignoring all the rest of the effects it may have. If anyone speaks up against the regulation, pointing out the side effects that regulation might have, they're shouted down as heartless.
For instance, if anyone spoke up immediately against the 'zero tolerance' rules in schools, especially after Columbine, they would be accused of not caring if children died. It doesn't matter what effect it will have on the learning environment, it doesn't matter that none of these zero tolerance rules would ever have prevented Columbine - all that matters is that people feel like they're taking a stand against some single issue of the day.
And all the while, it takes power away from the very people that are supposed to have the power to make a difference. The principals, the teachers, their power is reduced, even while their responsibility is increased. They're told they are supposed to take the role of parents, that if the parents don't engage the students, the teachers are supposed to - to teach the students morality, ethics, and social responsibility - all while their ability to actually run and engage their own classroom instead of just be a mindless cog passing along encoded information methodically to their students is removed.
*sigh*
October 20 2009, 22:38:10 UTC 11 years ago
That's an appeal to emotion, which is a logical fallacy and illustrative of the kind of sloppy thinking that created this tangle of red tape in the first place. Counter with facts: zero-tolerance policies do not improve academic performance, they diminish it. They do not improve behavior, they worsen it. Therefore, they fail and should be replaced with something that actually produces positive results.
Re: *sigh*
October 21 2009, 10:58:18 UTC 11 years ago
Re: *sigh*
October 21 2009, 19:05:28 UTC 11 years ago
It gets the attention of a few people. But really, once people have decided to let emotion rule, they're just doing whatever they want. It doesn't matter if what they're doing is producing the opposite effect. You have to circle around and hit them from behind somehow. One thing that really worries me about the world today is that fundies aren't just attacking evolution anymore: they're attacking science and logic. They want the world to be ruled by emotion and faith.
Last time that happened, it was 400 years before anyone in Europe had running water again. The Dark Ages really sucked. I'd like to not go there again.
Re: *sigh*
October 21 2009, 22:53:16 UTC 11 years ago
Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of zealots on both side of the political spectrum which are very anti-science. It's just one half of them trumpet the word while failing the concept. As the saying goes, "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." The same goes for science as for philosophy. We are in an age of great science, but also great shoddiness in science.
The more the science cheerleaders tolerate shoddiness in science, the less value the fundie crowd puts on science... and the less value the fundie crowd puts on science, the more shoddiness the science cheerleaders are happy to accept. It's a vicious cycle where you cannot really blame any one side over the other.
As far as the dark ages go ... I'm not sure how you can link that at all to faith or science... except for the fact that the people of the Roman empire thought that they were too advanced, civilized, and scientific to ever be able to be brought down by the crude, backwards barbarians surrounding them. This helped contribute to the centralization of power, instead of the self-determination of provinces that marked the successful early centuries of the Roman Empire, which contributed to the corruption of power. It also contributed to the degradation of the military.
Quite the opposite to what you seem to suggest, it was in the Roman Catholic Church that the documents, tomes, and scrolls of scientific endeavor continued to persist throughout the dark ages, and it was the church's devotion to sciences which helped draw man out of the dark ages. The scientists, for ages, were often financed by the church, if not directly part of the church, and because of the church's inviolate nature, they could protect all the valuable knowledge that would otherwise have been consumed in the constant political fighting that dominated the era.