Final Paper.

K-12 Educational systems are meant to prepare students, to set them up to be prepared for college and acquiring a future. Schools are also supposed to teach students how to mentally prepare and study for tests as well as teach them time management for their classes so they can learn to comprehend what they are actually learning and enjoy it. Schools need to teach students how to use their time properly, train them to be successful in life. Students aren’t taught to think critically and independently, instead they are pushed along the line of the educational system and fed information that they seemingly forget immediately after being fed such information in class. Public schools are social frenzies to simply put it; they mainly help the students with simple socializing skills, learning to be social with peers. The unfortunate part about the education world now days is that they are ruling out the humanities proportion of educational learning and leaning more towards the math and sciences. Children need more of a challenge. The government has mandated standards that puts teachers in a kind of bind that they have such set standards for their teaching, it disables our children to think out of the box, because teachers have to teach to such set standards it limits the creativity and ability to think out of the box for the students, whose futures are at risk.

Schools recently are concerned about keeping the students in class and meeting the minimum requirements of the educational standards, it definitely doesn’t help when the students don’t have the drive to even get out of bed and go to school for the day. With nothing to interest them, especially if they don’t want to be there to begin with it’s hard for the teachers to grasp their attention in the classroom and to get them to actually do the work, students have the attitude that they don’t need this stuff in the real world, so why learn it? John Gatto writes about public schools and how it cripples our children states that we need to, “Wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds... Mandatory education serves children only incidentally "(Gatto) Students in the k-12 courses don’t feel the need to be there and are constantly bored. They don’t get taught to think critically and independently, they get lectured more on attendance of the student body, and meeting the minimum requirements through the state than actually being taught important information. Which results in students becoming less involved in their education. Schools put so much pressure on the students that it pushes them away, if the teacher is distracting them from the actual purpose of the class being taught and only focusing on disciplining the students for not showing up, it results in a negative manor.

Teachers can’t really teach their students to think out of the box, they have to teach more along the lines that need to be met in terms of the standardized testing. Which is really unfortunate because students don’t want to be taught to test, they want to learn interesting stuff, they don’t want to be pressured into taking tests that determine if you will graduate high school or not because what do you learn in high school, that you don’t learn in college all over again? It’s like you’re starting from the beginning all over again. Paulo Freire states in his Banking Concept of Education article that, "Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits, which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.”(Freire)  Receive, memorize, and repeat. That is what the students are doing in public school systems. That is what they have to look forward to from 9-12^th grades. Students want to learn interesting stuff that motivates them to go to college and be successful in life. The rough thing about that system of banking is that once students’ memorize and repeat the information, only the information that you are truly interested in, sticks- all the other information that they spent so long memorizing, just leaves their brains and vanishes like they never even learned anything.

Students get so fed up with high school and they way that everything works in that whole system that it impairs their views of going to college, they hear it is harder and won’t be as easy, they expect to have the same study patters and discipline not knowing that college is where all the magic happens bell hooks, another author of a critical thinking article and social activist writes, “By the time most students enter college classrooms, they have come to dread thinking. Those students who do not dread thinking often come to classes assuming that thinking will not be necessary, that all they will need to do is consume information and regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. In traditional higher education settings, students find themselves yet again in a world where independent thinking is not encouraged.”(hooks) bell writes in great detail about how the more valued classes are not essential to educational systems and how math and English take precedence over humanities classes which makes the more challenging, enthusing classes like humanities courses weaved out of the system, because science and math and technologies are more of the future and humanities classes don’t prepare you as well.

 Students in this era turn down the critical thinking process and are more comfortable with passive learning where they don’t have to worry about thinking critically, they don’t want to be involved in classroom participation or to engage in classroom activities. They mainly just want to get in, and get out. We have been taught to sit and listen to the teacher and never to question anything for fear of being wrong. Teachers are so set into teaching along these standardized tests that they forget the meaning of school which is to teach students to think critically and independently, these teachers are all in drill mode to “teach to the test” that it narrows the curriculum for all students needing to learn important stuff. Standardized testing even if It has been done since the 1800’s has ruined education for this era it has declined vastly within the years due to the strict standards of the government. Mike Rose writes in his article Resolutions on Education, “To stop making the standardized test score the gold-standard of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. In what other profession do we use a single metric to judge goodness? Imagine judging competence of a cardiologist by the average of her patients’ cardiograms. “(Rose) basically stating that teachers reputations and their ability to teach shouldn’t be based on the test scores of the students but their knowledge of what they are teaching and how successful the class is as a whole when the year is over.

A school empathy day would be a great idea to include in schooling where all the students practice their empathy by perhaps moving around the lunch room to break up the social cliques and practice their empathy skills conversing with other students, Barry Boyce writes in an article about “A Real Education”, “the Program on Empathy Awareness and Compassion in Education (PEACE), which focuses on ways to promote pro-social behavior.. The teacher training program that Jennings directs as part of the initiative recently received a second major grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study the effects of mindfulness and related practices with classroom teachers”(Boyce) learning mindfulness in schools is a very important part of a students life, they need to learn mindfulness in order to be successful with other people in terms of whether or not you have meetings with a social group of peers or coworkers, but definitely when you make it to college.

Putting everything into perspective, students need more of a challenge, they need to be able to think critically and independently. And with the standardized teaching it makes it very hard for the teachers to practice any other kind of teaching that allows the students to be able to think outside the box. Mindfulness and empathy need to be taught. Students are unmotivated to move on after high school. Changes need to be made in order for students to succeed now days or the educational results will only keep declining year after year. By making these changes it wouldn’t necessarily change every problem that pertains to the school systems, yet it would get us a few steps into making a positive change on students attitudes towards learning proper information for their futures.

Works cited

Gatto, John. "Against School - John Taylor Gatto." Against School - John Taylor Gatto. Wes Jones, Sept. 2003. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.

Freire, Paulo. "Philosophy of Education -- Chapter 2: Pedagogy of the Oppressed." Philosophy of Education -- Chapter 2: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum Books, 1993, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Hooks, Bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York [etc.: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Rose, Mike. "Resolutions Someone Should Make for 2011." The Answer Sheet -. WASHINGTON POST, 5 Jan. 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2013

Boyce, Barry. "About a Poem: GenineLentine on Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart”." Shambhala Sun. The Mindful Society, May 2012. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.

paper 3 rough draft

 K-12 Educational systems are meant to prepare you for your future and set you up to be prepared for college and acquiring your future. Schools are supposed to teach you how to mentally prepare and study time management for your classes so you can comprehend what you are actually learning, teach you how to use your time properly, train you to do well in life. Most schools don’t teach us these things now days, half of the time the things we are learning we never even use when we get into the real big time work world.  We aren’t taught to think critically and independently, we are pushed along the line of the educational system and fed information that we seemingly forget immediately after being fed this information. I feel that public schools now days are there mainly for the social aspects and they teach you more to be social with your peers, they are ruling out the humanities proportion of educational learning and leaning more towards the math and sciences. Degrees that were once accepted to get into health care such as a Masters degree to become a Physical Therapist now requires you to have your Doctorate degree in order to become a Physical Therapist, it’s crazy how things work out like that. I feel that is a great way to do it but in order to accomplish such things you have to be well educated from the start which all revolves around K-12 systems, children need more of a challenge. The government has mandated standards that puts teachers in kind of a bind in that they have such set standards for schooling that it disables our children to think out of the box, because teachers have to teach to such set standards it limits the creativity and ability to think out of the box for students.

John Gatto has made some amazing points when he states that, “School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, and theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.”- John Gatto "Against school: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why"  Students do need to be taught to be leaders and adventurers as well as thinking critically and independently, that’s why college is so great for students now days, the teachers don’t care if you show up to class- you need to grow up and show up in order to maintain your education, they don’t take roster because they don’t care if you show up or not, it only reflects badly on your part, not theirs. They are there to teach and you need to be there in order to learn. College gets you to figure out your own study patterns and think critically as well as figuring out your time management in order to do well in the class and in life, the material isn’t bottle fed to you by the teachers you actually need to read the material to do well. I feel as if k-12 education needs to be the same way. In order to succeed you must do the work.  He also states that, “We must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day."- John Gatto "Against school: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why"

Teachers can’t really teach their students to think out of the box, they have to teach more along the lines that need to be met in terms of standardized testing. Paulo Freire states in his Banking Concept of Education article that, "Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits, which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.”  Most all of the authors read for this paper have a similar concept for public educational systems now days. bell hooks, another author of a critical thinking article writes, “By the time most students enter college classrooms, they have come to dread thinking. Those students who do not dread thinking often come to classes assuming that thinking will not be necessary, that all they will need to do is consume information and regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. In traditional higher education settings, students find themselves yet again in a world where independent thinking is not encouraged. Fortunately, there are some classrooms in which individual professors aim to educate as the practice of freedom. In these settings, thinking,, and most especially critical thinking, is what matters.”- bell hooks Teaching Critical Thinking; Practical Wisdom

Now that I think of it, the only class that I ever had that required us to think critically was creative writing, in college you see a lot more of critical thinking but we are mainly discussing k-12 education. Students in this era turn down the critical thinking process and are more comfortable with passive learning where they don’t have to worry about thinking critically, they don’t want to be involved in classroom participation or to engage in classroom activities. They mainly just want to get in, and get out. We have been taught to sit and listen to the teacher and never to question anything for fear of being wrong. “Keeping an open mind is an essential requirement of critical thinking. The most exciting aspect of critical thinking in the classroom is that it calls for initiative from everyone, actively inviting all students to think passionately and to share ideas in a passionate, open manner. When everyone in the classroom, teacher and students, recognizes that they are responsible for creating a learning community together, learning is at its most meaningful and useful. In such a community of learning there is no failure. Everyone is participating and sharing whatever resource is needed at a given moment in time to ensure that we leave the classroom knowing that critical thinking empowers us.”-bell hooks  Teaching Critical Thinking; Practical Wisdom

six quotes

"Against school: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why"- John Gatto


    "Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answered have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it."- John Gatto "Against school: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why"


    "School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can." - John Gatto "Against school: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why"


    "First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day" - John Gatto "Against school: How Public Education Cripples our Kids, and Why"

“The Banking Concept of Education”- Paulo Freire,"

  "Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits"- Paulo Freire

     "Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men persue in the world, with the world, and with each other."- Paulo Freire

"Gift of Grit, Curiosity help kids succeed"- Jerry Large

    "A big part of building character is overcoming failure. Too much adversity is bad, but so is too little, which doesn't allow a child to build grit." -Jerry Large

group project #2

De Polo Apartamento Lease Agreement:

As a part of our renewed lease agreement it is now mandatory for all occupants to raise a chicken within their living space in order to ensure food security, steady companionship, and reliable apartment security.

This is in response to multiple occupants mooching the landlords for food, calling the landlords in the midst of the night to discuss life’s mysteries, and subtle cuddles, as well as multiple accusations towards landlords of stealing occupants’ property when they cannot identify the robber.

You may object to this rule because of possible chicken droppings, another life dependent on yours, and noise pollution.

However we can assure you… You can train a chicken to use a potty pad, they cost less than other pets and we will give you complementary sound canceling earmuffs.

If you fail to sign this new lease agreement by 1/1/14 consequence will be eviction

Merry Christmas

De Polo Apartamento Owner

Sir Riccardo Dellaranta IIIXV

Landlords Signature:                                               Occupants Signature:

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