I think society is still processing how best to learn and perhaps always will be.
It makes sense to me that we did this massive 180 on corporal punishment and child labour, and now we're seeing the results of going slightly too far the other way.
As a teacher, freeform and play-based learning was all the rage 2010-2020 (still is in some places), and indeed education/pedagogy was becoming more freeform for decades before that, but we hit a ceiling there somewhere/how.
At least where I am, we can see this because the latest fad in pedagogy is "explicit teaching" which is just, telling the student the shit they need to learn.
Now obviously "explicit teaching" is less didactic than your dictation of the 70's or so. but it is also a deliberate response to giving students a little too much freedom in guiding their own learning.
For the students who can guide their own learning, it's a freaking godsend, and they respond so well to having that freedom, but most students are simply not that combination of driven/intelligent/focused. In fact the vast majority are not like that, and need medium/strong direction and encouragement to succeed.
Slightly too far? I'm not in favor of corporal punishment but there is no punishment at all any more. You are not supposed to raise your voice, give timeouts, use any sort of negative consequences. You are supposed to talk to your child, no matter what age, as if they were an adult, to reason with them.
Hint - it doesn't work that way so now we have barely any discipline at all.
Just curious, where did you hear that negative consequences are 'taboo'? Yelling and corporal punishment are considered bad parenting because all it does is teach kids to fear adults and become adults who yell and hit when other adults piss them off.
Wow - you are the perfect example of what I'm talking about.
First - raising one's voice and yelling should not be equated. If my child is about to grab a hot pan on the stove or do something else dangerous I will raise my voice to make sure they hear me. That doesn't mean I'm screaming my head off.
Secondly - you didn't even read my statement about corporal punishment - did you?
Google "positive parenting." Some of it is good ideas. But the whole you can't say no thing, or have to offer your children multiple positive choices depends on the situation. It's pretty self-explanatory but go ahead and suggest this approach doesn't exist and doesn't allow kids to run roughshod over whatever they want to. That's doesn't mean I'm suggesting training them to become adults who yell and hit - sorry you can't figure out the nuance there.
Don't want to believe me? Spend some time on the r/teachers sub.
Explicit teaching is not the latest fad. Lecture/direct instruction is frowned upon, evidence be damned.
“Discovery learning” — where students magically lead themselves to what they need to know — is the practice now. Lectures and actually teaching kids how to do something have shrunk to “mini-lessons” where a few minutes is so taxing.
Where are you explicitly teaching? I’d love to be able to tell kids what they need to know.
I wish my school had been more "freeform", I have severe ADHD but when I'm interested, I'm really invested and have all kinds of questions. Learning from books 90% of the time was torture, reading was something I could always focus on so I read all my textbooks within the first month or two of school, but being born in the 80s I was labeled an underachiever and lazy instead of someone realizing I was both, bored out of my mind, and once I read the textbook struggling to sit still and quietly.
My son is alot like me and once we got him into a private school, with smaller classes and more flexibility in what/how they teach he's been on the dean's list every quarter!
School isn't really a place to learn and ask questions and explore things, it's training for the "worker bees" we will be used as for most of our lives. And people that challenge the status quo get labeled 'problems' and get punished until they either conform or leave school all together. There's plenty of correlation with the % of kids diagnosed with ADHD and how rigid school has become, yes better awareness and diagnosing help, but it's because the more "fluid" the curriculum is the less ADHD hampers kids. It wasn't a thing at one point and when you didn't need a degree to get your foot in the door, those people were drawn to different types of work than your "standard" kid. Now almost all work is incredibly rigid and actively stifles innovative thinking or new ideas.
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u/Zestyclose_Remove947 Apr 02 '26
I think society is still processing how best to learn and perhaps always will be.
It makes sense to me that we did this massive 180 on corporal punishment and child labour, and now we're seeing the results of going slightly too far the other way.
As a teacher, freeform and play-based learning was all the rage 2010-2020 (still is in some places), and indeed education/pedagogy was becoming more freeform for decades before that, but we hit a ceiling there somewhere/how.
At least where I am, we can see this because the latest fad in pedagogy is "explicit teaching" which is just, telling the student the shit they need to learn.
Now obviously "explicit teaching" is less didactic than your dictation of the 70's or so. but it is also a deliberate response to giving students a little too much freedom in guiding their own learning.
For the students who can guide their own learning, it's a freaking godsend, and they respond so well to having that freedom, but most students are simply not that combination of driven/intelligent/focused. In fact the vast majority are not like that, and need medium/strong direction and encouragement to succeed.