[lbo-talk] Class dismissed....

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jan 12 18:49:16 PST 2006



> On 1/12/06, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > My kid is in the middle of second grade. She's got a ton of
> homework every
> > night and it's sometimes difficult to get through all of it. It's
> > frustrating because when you want to stick with something for
> another 15
> > minutes or half-hour, a long time for a seven year old, you have
> to shift
> > to something else to get it all done. Her mom and I went to a
> > parent/teacher conference in the fall all ready to ask what
> gives. It
> > became quickly apparent that the teacher didn't like having to
> move so fast
> > either, but she has to because of these tests.
>
> the homework craze (imposed on our kids) goes beyond No Child Left
> Behind. It's part of the yuppie status anxiety that prevails these
> days. If we can force the kids to learn calculus in 2nd grade, the
> reasoning goes, we can avoid the downward social spiral...
> --
> Jim Devine

Or they feel intensifying international competition. It was bad enough competing with kids in Japan and the "Asian Tigers." Worse to have to compete with kids in China and India -- after all, China and India have far larger populations than Japan and the "Asian Tigers"! Hundreds of millions of whiz kids in Asia, and some of them, legatees of the accursed British Empire, spell better than American kids!

But what American kids are being forced to do now still doesn't seem to me to be in the same league as what Asian kids have been obliged to do. When I was growing up in Japan, there was a quiz in every class period and major exams every year, with no letup till I left college entrance exams behind (or so I remember -- probably my memory exaggerates, but only a little!). And I went to very ordinary public schools in a smallish, very provincial, working-class town (with the population of about 30,000), many of my classmates' fathers working in the same steel factory where my father worked or a Takeda pharmaceutical factory, which was (and probably still is) the other major source of employment in that town. Imagine what kids in elite schools must have been and must be still doing in Japan.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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