Our school district is holding a public “focus group” on March 1st in order to answer three questions:
- What is working in education in NB?
- What is not working in education in NB?
- What, if any, suggestions do you have for the DEC?
I have attended many such focus groups, including the recent one held by NextNB, and I am becoming cynical about the process of asking for public input and promptly ignoring it. I also have my doubts whether any input at the district level is going to have an effect on the system, as everything is controlled by the Minister of Education – curriculum, budgets, standards, etc.
I tend to agree with Peter Drucker’s points on public education – that schools tend to focus on weaknesses instead of strengths. I also believe that our schools focus too much on content dissemination and not enough on meta-skills like learning how to learn or information literacy. I’m not sure how to address these criticisms without some serious structural changes, and these will not happen at the district level.
Public consultation exercises strike me as something akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic – a bit futile. I know that the facilitators of this meeting are well-intentioned, but I don’t think that this session will have any impact on learning in our schools. Am I too jaded?
As a start, I have bookmarked a list of Public Education links to some interesting commentaries on the subject.
Any advice?
Shocked ;-)
Hi Harold,
as you might know, we have a bunch of problems in Germany: The budget, the pension system and last but not least school system. IMO we are able to reform everything except the latter. It’s solid as a rock and nobody will change it. So I decided to bite the bullet and to wait until my daughters will have finished school, looking forward to coming out of the frying pan into the fire at university. ;-)
Yours
Stephan
http://www.weblog.drlist.de
Out of the fireStephan:
Yes, it can be a bit depressing to see that the system does not work and that attempts to change it seem futile. Robert Paterson’s last post has given me some hope though:
http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2005/02/going_home_our_.html
By the way, I looked at your blog, but my German is rather limited. I’ll have to get out my Langenscheidts ;-)
;-)
Thank you Harold for look at my blog. I understand, German is a exotic language …
Hope the Langenscheidt will help. BTW: I’M planning a English blog together with an American colleague of mine who lives here in Germany. For me the adventure is to risky, but with her support, it will work. Stay tuned.
CU
Stephan
Hi from Lithuania, happy to browse against you, Harold and Stephan.
While we are Hyde-Park-cornering here, the institutional bureaucracy keeps strengthening its positions under the shield of NGOs and PRs.
Let’s pay some consideration to Vera F.Birkenbihl’s “Stichwort:Schule: trotz Schule lernen”, Ivan Illich’s and Amorey Gethin’s writings on school.
Valdas Banaitis