Yeah, there is no way the kids can meaningfully participate in all those lessons if they are in constant distress.
It does however improve the "potential" for academic achievement on paper, because schools can advertise how many daily lessons their students take. Number go up and all...
This is absolutely not the case in France where discussing over a meal is a very strong cultural trait.
Schools are trying to dial down the noise in canteens but that's all. Having someone eating in silence would be a form of punition.
It is also interesting how heated the discussions over meals can become (for adults), where you discuss politics, religion, sex stuff and whatnot and people can get deeply engaged.
And then the meal ends and so does the discussion (or drama) ,as if it never happened. This is usually store disturbing/surprising to foreigners who are not used to such a separation.
To quote the Sex Pistols… schools are prisons. Armed guards, forced to be there by the state, forced to be with disruptive sometimes violent fellow inmates, require permission to do simple things like use the bathroom. Consequence free torture (bullying) of classmates. It is getting increasingly absurd.
There have been several school shootings where i read the details of what had happened to the perpetrator and hated to think yep that young person was behaving rationally when they lashed out violently because it was their only recourse in the situation they were forced to endure for years. People go on about gun control and mental heath but ignore the fact that there are a lot of children enduring conditions that would be called atrocities if they were prisoners of war.
And it’s all at the hands of foolish people who are trying to have the “best interests” of children in mind.
Five year olds forced to eat in silence for only fifteen minutes sounds like an absurd over the top young adult dystopian novel.
To be fair, the cover of the single actually does say “Sex Pistols”, the former Sex Pistols producer was sued successfully for being misleading. I was successfully mislead. There’s your weird music lore for the day.
It was a con alright, and you fell for The Great Swindle .. :)
TBH I wasn't sure if you were aware and were knowingly going with the I can't believe it's not butter of UK punk.
The oddest thing about your comment, though, was the armed guards and school shootings references following a UK band callout - The Dunblane massacre aside (which was an adult shooter back in 1996) neither feature much in UK or Commonwealth schools, for the most part they're US phenomena, if not in uniqueness then certainly in ubiquitousness and frequency.
Man if this happened to me as a kid, I'd fucking learn sign language or start blinking in morse code. What jerks! They are asking for a class of rebels.
You'd have to know those existed. These children are quite young, and might not have heard of Morse code (and hand signing slows eating down nearly as much as speaking).
My class learned to sign letters in like 3rd grade. The usual suspects very blatantly signed, letter by letter, to each other across desk aisles and still got caught. We never did make it to words.
This is the kind of stuff that would've gotten me suspended or even expelled had it been implemented when I was a student because I would've purposely disobeyed it in a flamboyant and impossible to ignore way and gotten others to do so with me. I knew as a kid that even if my parents didn't care about school policies (which they often didn't), somebody else's would and would contest them.
With modern measures of "safety" students are subjected to more and more restrictions, and it seems they're becoming more passive as a consequence. That may actually be the intended result. But it seems to be harming students more and more as they seem less inclined to oppose obviously stupid policies and decisions. Later in life that passivity towards authority will harm them as others take advantage of or even abuse them in a professional setting.
As someone with misophonia[0] this would be an unbearable and unsettling punishment. Hearing other people eating is like being stuck in an elevator after lunch, when someone drops their guts. But, even quiet chatter or tv is enough to mask the sound.
To say nothing of the boredom of 15 minutes of a silence.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
> Misophonia (or selective sound sensitivity syndrome, sound-rage) is a disorder of decreased tolerance to specific sounds or their associated stimuli, or cues. These cues, known as "triggers", are experienced as unpleasant or distressing and tend to evoke strong negative emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses that are not seen in most other people.
When did kindergarten stop being fun? Students (and humans in general) naturally enjoy learning things and only start to hate it when it is forced upon them. ;-(
Instead of making kindergarten more "serious" like upper grades, we should be making upper grades more like kindergarten: fun, creative, autonomous, multimodal, physically active, socially engaging, etc.
I feel old reading that article. I guess it was all the "when I was a kid..." thoughts that popped into my head. I believe social skills are pretty important to learn in elementary school. "When I was a kid", recess and lunch were one of the best times where we could get to know and learn from each other. And it applied to classwork and playing games and hobbies.
It seems to me that taking kids away from socialization in school is just going to lead them to even more social media where they'll probably not learn the best social skills. But it could just be my weariness of social media make feel this way.
Haha, this seems like something out of a parody. School ranking are kinda nessesary, but are also the biggest victim of Goodheart's law.
If you want to teach more stuff, then how about you just make the day longer? This decision seems less like something that was done for the children, and more for having another checkbox filled while keeping the kids easy to process.
I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will be worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything. Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the children.
I am native from a non-English speaking country. Went to a bilingual school, picked English with A-levels and the works.
Picked French at 15, but really got serious in my early 20s. It has allowed me to re-read a lot of my favourites (Dumas, Verne, Flaubert) in their original language. Also a lot of what I consider cornerstone of modern society in their original versions (Zola, Le Bon).
Had to pick up Portuguese on the job at 25, my previous experience learning languages made it fairly easy to do.
I discovered new songs, movies, plays, and authors with each new language.
Now I speak 4 languages, and I want to get to a fifth in the next decade (some Chinese, Arabic or German).At least to me it has opened my professional and intellectual viewport. It has made me better at abstraction, and while travelling across wide parts of the world, I never feel too disconnected (Americas, large parts of Europe, Africa and Oceania feel very accesible to me.)
I can see how if English is your native tongue the value of learning other languages might seem marginal, but for the rest of the world being at least bilingual is a necessity.
I come from Poland, and before I reached 18 years old I spent about 12 years learning English + full 10 years learning German. I'm completely fluent in English, and I don't remember anything from German, maybe few words here and there. It was 100% waste of my time and I wish I didn't do it.
And I also think the only reason English "stuck" is because it's so damn ubiquitous everywhere, and as a kid and teenager I wanted to be on the internet, to watch foreign films, play foreign games and talk to people abroad - all in English.
So I actually agree with both of you - learning a second language(English) is essential, but if it's a language you don't have much exposure to outside of school, it's a waste of time.
Do you still speak Polish? I've tried and failed a few times trying to learn, have some ancestors from the area.
Now not directed at you, the age ranges in your post did make me do some research. Apparently being a "native speaker" is not so well defined. Learned in childhood yes, but what's the age cutoff? Saw some references to before 5. Any thoughts on this? Seeing as you've lost the German with similar exposure.
Just curious, ignorant single language American here.
And I'm not sure - our son is 3 and speaks both English and Polish without any trouble. I myself only started learning English and German at 6 and 8 respectively, which I do think is too late to be trully and completely bilingual - like I'm fluent in English and after years of living in the UK I don't think I have much of an accent left, but I don't think I can ever be as good as someone who learnt English from birth.
I went to a high school that specialised in foreign languages. During my time there I did 6 years of French and German, and 1 year each of Japanese and Spanish. And I can speak none of those. Maybe in German I can just about order a coffee. It's not that I forgot, I just didn't learn anything.
As an adult I have lived in a lot of different countries, including over 12 years in non-English speaking countries. I've been living in my current country for over 5 years, and I speak barely enough to get by in a shop.
Other than my ability to learn languages being non-existent, the issue here is everyone speaks English very well, so it's easy to fall back to it. The other day I went and asked for something in a shop, tried really hard, and the cashier just responded to me in English. In my work everyone speaks English too.
On the other hand, from the time she started speaking, my daughter was fluently able to speak English and her native language. She would come and ask me for something in English, and if I said no, she'd go ask my wife in her language :D
Whenever I pick her up from kindergarden the other kids talk to me in English - they say they learnt by watching YouTube. My colleagues all have similar stories, that they learnt English by watching American TV shows.
I'm guessing what happens is that for a lot of non-native English speakers there is a big advantage to learning English, and once you learn that, your brain figures out how to learn other languages.
But for native English speakers we don't have that, so learning any kind of foreign language is hard. This is probably why countries like Spain or China have low-levels of English speakers (and those that can speak often don't speak well and/or have strong accents), because there isn't much advantage for them to learn it.
> but for the rest of the world being at least bilingual is a necessity.
Sure but the post you’re replying to is stating that he didn’t retain anything from years of foreign language classes in school. Most people learn fluency in additional languages outside of a classroom setting.
> I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will be worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything. Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the children.
Myself and I believe all of my cousins took Spanish classes in school. I've hardly used it since then and my Spanish is terrible. However, theirs is much better. I think it largely depends on what type of career you are involved in and whether frequent interaction with regular people is involved. Most of us in the software world only interact with others in professional environments who speak English well.
Also, while I essentially never had a use for the 2 years of spanish I took in high school, it really made my english writing better. Learning spanish made me learn more about the structure of sentences (how to talk about direct/indirect objects, etc.) and learn more latin roots that I never would have consciously been exposed to, which is very useful to me now in the context of figuring out what people are saying when hearing/reading other european languages. It made my grades in english classes go up since my writing was more formally correct and comprehensible. The knowledge transfer felt the same as it does when applying skills learned in the context of one programming language to another programming language.
Man, taking Spanish in high school blew my mind. I'm a native English speaker with excellent grammar (I missed one question on the reading and writing section of the SAT), but it's all subconscious. I just go with what sounds right when I read aloud in my head, and it's almost always correct. When we started learning about conjugating verbs in Spanish class I was like, we do this in English? I had never thought about it before. I still haven't thought about it, I have no idea what tenses we have in English. But I can speak and write it just fine! Brains are pretty crazy.
Latin grammar feels quite artificial I would say... Maybe it is the nature of dead language that has been locked down. There are things to understand in conventions, but for understanding English Latin is probably not right tool.
Yeah, usage is important. Most people don't need Spanish. It makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs. You should spend your time on extracurriculars, or anything else.
Of course, if you're interested in a foreign language, for any reason, I wouldn't discourage you from learning it. I just would not make it a required part of a curriculum.
Generally I think school is meant to give you the basic foundation and as you progress in life you develop specializations and dive deeper into things you care about. Maybe you don't use everything you learned in school and that's fine, but for the next person it may have exposed them to a subject they found enlightening.
Personally, I do think learning a language is best achieved through immersion rather than brief 45-60min classes. It's not ideal but it still works to a degree.
I think the language thing is because it’s part of the meme / romantic idea that learning a foreign language is something everyone should do. I think it’s more for the parents when shopping around for paid schools and to yeah tick a box on some gov list for state schools.
I also regret the time I spent learning Japanese and Italian. There’s limited time to get a lot across to kids. It needs to be thought out. Those hours were completely wasted for me (no side benefits, nothing).
I worry that our local Seattle high school doesn’t offer Chinese while that is what my 1st grader is studying now and needs to communicate with grandma. Yes, he could take Japanese or French, but it seems like a waste unless he plans to use them (well, he might have an advantage in Japanese since kanji is just another form of Chinese character). I was surprised, since my high school in a Seattle suburb offered Chinese in 1991…
Maybe this is good for English speaking Europeans or Canadians. Americans that go to public school aren't leaving the country in any real numbers. We're too poor and PTO starved.
Mandarin and Spanish are absolutely worth learning. Anyone who tells you differently is limiting themselves. There is a much larger economy that doesn't speak English.
International business is done in English. If you find yourself actually needing those languages just find someone that speaks them natively that can also speak English. Spending thousands of hours studying to speak at a child's level isn't useful.
Not sure if you're arguing against language classes in kindergarten or languages classes in school in general, but I personally had a really good experience with French classes for several years in junior high and high school and one year of Spanish in high school (both schools were public school, too). I don't remember as well as I did back then, of course, but I've by no means "forgotten everything", even though I've been out of high school for over 25 years.
Of all the things I learned up to the end of high school, the foreign languages and all the math are the things I value the most. I still remember French well enough that I could ask for help with various things if I needed to, and I can read it even better than that (well enough to get the gist and some of the detail of something I read, as long as it isn't really heavy with slang). I only had one year of Spanish, but that at least allows me to understand a lot of basic signage in the language and some other reading comprehension. I can watch shows and movies in French and understand some of the lines without the subtitles, and even understand how and in some cases why the subtitles don't match the literal translation.
So if your point was against language education in school in general, I very strongly disagree. I use my foreign language knowledge somewhat regularly, even though I live in the US and have never had a job that required or even used it. There were plenty of kids in my classes who picked it up faster and spoke and read/wrote it far better than me, so I don't think I'm particularly good with foreign languages. This leads me to suspect that you might just not be a languages kind of person, and that's why it's meant so little to you?
> Seems weird that the author continued sending their kid to the school...
Unless you're rich, school choice in the US is often not a thing. It's not really practical to sell your house and move to another district over something like this, and uprooting your kid like that has its own downsides.
> Given the prestige of the school, I have to assume this person has some serious money.
I don't think that follows. It's quite possible they have the money to buy a house in a "good" school district, but not the disposable income for private elementary school (even assuming there's a private school available and it's equivalent or better).
It is interesting that this is being touted as having advantages given that it was just a punishment in the past. When I was in elementary school (early 2000s, small town United States, public school) we often had to eat lunch in silence to punish the student body for something.
This sounds pretty crazy. I know how "Kindergarten" is defined in the USA but still: academics for 5 yo? At that age my kid's teachers were trying to keep them from taking their clothes off if they weren't playing in the mud, and teaching them to queue.
I dunno about the US but here in Japan for pre-school there is "daycare" (保育園) and "kindergarten" (幼稚園), the former being just a place to put your kids when you're at work and they mostly play, and the latter focusing more on academics. But even my kids in "just" daycare do get the opportunity to learn to read and write (hiragana and ABCs) and basic maths (reading/writing numbers and adding up single-digits) to their level of interest
This was German (where „Kindergarten“) comes from, though that word means ~1 or so to 5. Then pre school („Vorschule“) from 5-6 and then, if you pass the test („Schulreife Prüfung“ — “ripe for school exam”) the following year you start grade 1, which is when school actually begins.
There are various neurological theories the teachers have told me why the brain isn’t ready for reading, maths, etc until you’re six and have passed the exam. Hence 5-6 is still playtime and naps with some training on how to behave.
In much of Asia, kindergarten is pre-schooling, but in the USA it corresponds to grade zero which is when formal public education starts. You are actually free to skip this grade in most states (you can start your kid in first grade), but most don’t.
In the US they're separate - kindergarten corresponds to grade zero, and preschool is a year before that. Preschool is the optional one, and kindergarten is required in the vast majority of states.
> Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, proponents of educating children at an early age began lobbying for more kindergarten classes. ''The movement was never to make kindergarten compulsory,” says Barbara Beatty, an associate professor of education at Wellesley College and the author of Preschool Education in America. “It was to mandate that districts offer kindergarten.”
> Now, more than 100 years’ later, state policies still vary on how--and even if--districts must offer kindergarten.
> But even as talk of the importance of high-quality preschool education reaches unprecedented levels, some states--Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania--do not require districts to establish kindergartens, according to an Education Week survey conducted for Quality Counts.
(In these states districts don’t have to offer kindergarten)
> Currently, 13 states--Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia--and the District of Columbia require children to attend kindergarten. In Rhode Island, Tennessee, and West Virginia, the law requires that youngsters attend kindergarten even though they do not have to start school until they are 6, the age at which children customarily enter 1st grade.
(Only 13 states mandate that your kids have to attend kindergarten)
Wow. At first I started reading the article thinking the goal was teaching kindergarteners to avoid getting distracted while eating. I just assumed after they finished eating then they could go out and chat or play. I most certainly did not expect the goal to be for scores to maintain high rankings, or for this to be the entirety of their lunch times.
This feels like... torture. We want to limit children's social media usage and cut off their in-person social interactions in school? How is this not horrifying to all the parents? Whatever happened to "think of the children"?
This is what they enforced during basic training. We had like 5min to shove 1000 calories into our mouth, and if someone in front of you got up before you were done, you had about 20 seconds to finish and get up before being yelled at to leave.
In Elementary school, my friends and I would come up with things to do at recess, talk about our weekends, and plan sleep overs. This is bonding time that is gotten no where else. (Assuming the kids are not dropped off an hour before school starts, or picked up after the parents get done working at 5pm)
Extend the day by 10 minutes and give the kids that extra time.
I'm confused how this is even legal. It's called lunch break, and this is being inflicted to kindergarteners?! I'm pretty confident this is a disaster from the social aspect, social services should close the school outright
Happy, healthy, motivated kids do better academically - as well as in everyone other way.
I thought this would be about somewhere like Britain's strictest school, but even there kids are encouraged to talk.: https://time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/
Silence is just horrific. It is like some form of punishment made daily normality.