One of my granddaughters is already being home schooled, and my other granddaughter is starting home schooling next year, both for the same reason – the public school classes just move too slowly for bright kids, and are forced to focus too much on No Child Left Behind test preparation, and crowd control, and trying (unsuccessfully) to “mainstream” special needs students, at the expense of meaningful education.
Middle school, grades 7-9, is a critical period in a child’s education, and to waste that critical educational window of opportunity because of poor schools is unforgivable.
I have agreed to mentor my Virginia granddaughter with her 8th grade science (mostly remotely, by web videoconference). So I have spent some time over the past few days looking at materials and curricula for this grade level. And I am appalled at what I find!
First of all, for the three or four states I have examined, the state standards that guide schools are uniformly meaningless, true bureaucratic products apparently produced by people who understand neither science nor the educational needs of middle school students. A mile wide and an inch deep – covering 50-60 unrelated topics and focused on cramming in science factoids and vocabulary (because they are easy to test), rather than teaching children how to reason, evaluate evidence, draw inferences, and other truly useful skills.
Then there are the mass market textbooks, produced on contract by multiple authors, many (most?) of whom are neither scientists nor middle school teachers, and then edited into a common style by an editor who often knows little or nothing about science, and dressed up with vacuous and irrelevant pictures and sidebars to make it “more interesting”. Some claim an impressive array of scientists as authors, but in a number of cases these scientists have had little to do with the work and have been surprised to find themselves listed as authors. Yes, it turns out this really is the way publishers produce most middle school science texts, and as a result they are riddled with errors and misconceptions and confusions, all dutifully recycled from one edition to the next, and one generation of student to the next.
And then there are the middle school science teachers, many of whom have never had even an undergraduate science class themselves, and who must rely on the textbook and curricula outlines to guide them through unfamiliar territory. No doubt they strive valiantly to teach their students, despite the bureaucratic morass that they have to work within, but the deck is stacked against them.
I have argued before that a nation’s future depends on how well it trains the next generation. Now that I have really looked at middle school science teaching, I fear for our nation. No wonder so many children lose interest in science by the time they reach high school. No wonder our graduate science programs are so heavily populated with foreigners. No wonder that a steadily increasing proportion of our good scientists and science entrepreneurs in places like Silicon Valley are foreign-born. No wonder the America public is so woefully ignorant of science and the scientific method, and so easily duped by religion-based claptrap like "creationism" and “young earth” beliefs.
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