I sometimes wonder if this is only due to how kids are taught at school, but also how kids are stimulated at home.
There’s a lot of alarming things going on in education, not just this. Anecdotally, I was in a meeting for a group project for a course of the master in education last week (the pimped version of the teaching degree). One of my fellow students who – from what I could tell – would make a great teacher said he had no real intention to teach high school, he most likely would go into private tutoring full time since it was way more lucrative.
And I mean, I get it… Demand for private tutoring has gone up because there’s a bunch of teachers who have to teach subjects they are not familiar with. Or just pupils who don’t have a teacher for subject X for multiple weeks or even months because there are no substitutes. The quality of the private tutoring pupils also has gone up which makes it even more enjoyable. In the past you typically had to do with psychology bachelors who failed statistics exams 4 times and now *really really* need to pass but have no fucking clue and their parents expect to just throw money at it to solve it. Now, you get prepared students with involved parents who want to fix some holes that the public education created. Honestly, I expect certain villa districts to just start home educating their kids in groups with a small team of private tutors in the near future.
We’re at an alarming downwards trend with regards to education in general, and at this point we would probably need to throw crazy amounts of money at it to make it halt, let alone turn it around.
“Leerlingen slagen er bijvoorbeeld wel in om digitale informatie op te zoeken, maar doen het minder goed als het gaat om het selecteren van het correcte zoekresultaat”
Volgens mij is dit vooral te wijten aan de geëvolueerde werking van zoekmachines en het internet in het algemeen. Als je Google gebruikt, zijn de eerste resultaten meestal advertenties en zoekt het ook niet meer specifiek naar de zoekterm maar naar “aanbevolen” of “gerelateerde” sites.
Dit is natuurlijk allemaal te vermijden of op te lossen, maar het huidige onderwijssysteem is al traag met bijwerken van lespakketten dus dit zal waarschijnlijk ook een tijd duren.
“Allez, hoe kan dat nu? Hij zit bijna elke dag op zijn tablet!”
The parents (and corona) are at fault, but nobody wants to say it.
We were the best generation (those born in the later 1980s and 1990s) for ICT development because we grew up using computers. Post-millennials rarely use computers in their free time, they use the smartphone for everything.
EDIT: Yes, and for some of those born in the 1970s as well. We hear you, early adopter Gen-Xers.
Was dit niet een te verwachten resultaat na 2 jaar corona? En ook doordat men kinderen, die in het eerste jaar van corona eigenlijk niet klaar waren voor het volgende jaar, toch hebben doorgelaten?
Now now, if I ask 20 people to draw a rectangle, I will assure you none of those rectangles is a square.
In theory, squares might be rectangles, but in practice you are never going to have a square drawn unless you specify “draw a square.”
These results do not tell anything.
Students have been going through 2 years of dramatic covid restrictions and lock-down. For sure they will score the worst in a long time.
The education system is failing and needs to be adressed.
But recent events are exceptional and shouldn’t be used to assess it.
It’s only one more thing to fix.
So experts have an informed opinion about (part of) the problem. Which isn’t all that surprising when the numbers go down, as that probably is a result of what you recently did.
> Volgens Mieke Goos, onderzoekster aan de KU Leuven die meewerkte aan de peilingstoetsen, is er naast corona nog een andere verklaring voor de minder goede resultaten. Volgens haar wordt er te veel gedifferentieerd. “Begeleiding op niveau is leuk, maar het jammere is dat we soms de kern van de zaak vergeten. De goede wiskundedidactiek vraagt om samen met leerlingen vanuit een wiskundig probleem die denkstappen te zetten. En die denktijd samen is de laatste vijf jaar naar de achtergrond verdrongen.”
And Weyts conclusion is that we need even more – personally tailored and “flemish” – bureaucracy so we might one day figure out what’s going on.
> Weyts wil nu de “Vlaamse Toetsen” uitrollen om zo de leerwinst van élke leerling in kaart brengen te brengen. “Als we weten waar welke problemen zitten, kunnen we veel beter en veel sneller ingrijpen
You just can’t make this shit up.
Komaan Weyts! Onderwijs is (uw) Vlaamse bevoegdheid. Wat we zelf doen, doen we beter?
Cut the bureaucracy for teachers, have them focus on teaching again. And give the kids free meals (especially those from low income families), no one studies well on an empty stomach. 240 billion government expenses and we can’t even run a half decent education department.
As someone who supervises a bunch of 14-15yo’s trying to research and write a small written “paper”, I can confirm students don’t know how to use computers or look up quality information.
Being dumb is the new cool
My old roommate taught at one of the private EU schools here in Brussels and I overheard the head of teaching in a phone call say he “wanted to turn the school into the Ryanair of schools and pump out diplomas” .. whilst charging 30k euro a year haha.. terrible.
We need to fuck with teachers a whole lot more!
I’ve listened to the radio going into work for over 20 years and only ever heard more and more bullshit being heaped on teachers. It never fucking ends. No full time, 4 schools to make enough hours, a never-ending, ever-increasing amount of paperwork. Add to that students who don’t feel they need to do any work, entitled parents and after a while a career as a teacher doesn’t sound so hot anymore.
One of my colleagues quit teaching because she ‘didn’t go into teaching to tell kids to shut up 200 times a day’.
If you make it so that the job becomes harder and less enjoyable every year, in the end people WILL catch on and just not bother anymore. Then the test scores tank but hey, what are you going to do, right?
Most people who are good at teaching have been chased out of the system, what’s left is mainly bean counters and bureaucrats.
Maybe stop besparen on Education. Alsook the way teacher contracts work should be reevaluated. Many people “look down” on teachers and the job in general.
my dughter school will close next year. there is no budget to maintain it.
it is the third time it happens in my children’s scolarity.
math skills going down year after year I expected, but ICT is a bit of a surprise for me
I remember when introduced the M-decreet and suddenly there was no budget anymore for helping autistic, adhd and add cases. All funding was rerouted towards kids that should have been in schools with special assistance, but couldn’t thanks to the Flemish government.
Then I went to college and Ben Weyts started introducing all kinds of stupid rules to make getting a bachelor’s or master’s harder.
You reap what you sow, Crevits and Weyts.
Sorry but I’m going to rant about our school system for a second, i graduated in BSO and I’m about the graduated college right now.
First of all i ended up there because I’m horrible at math and languages due to learning disability’s and just not being made for school (at least as a teen)
In our last year most of us started to realize how far we were behind on pretty much everyone else on math and languages. We begged to get math again and relearn the basics of dutch (yes that’s how bad it was), they told us no and I ended up having 2h of dutch a week that existed out of watching or reading something and then answering questions about it.
Don’t get me wrong I get it, there are definitely people who are just unable to learn these things but still, having zero practice sets you back far in life.
I had to relearn everything from scratch on my own time just to be able to keep up in college.
As a teacher the thing that worry me is that every article talk about teachers, schools, students but never about one of the main problem.
Parents.
We here to teach, not to educate children. More and more children come at our school without being able to be clean some 6-7 years old don’t even know how to use a handkerchief correctly, they directly turn to a lie in any situation even when they are not scolded, they don’t know how to interact with other children or adults, don’t know how to tie their shoelaces and so on. A lot of small details we notice more and more.
A larger and larger part of parents totally abandon their children and let them fend for themselves. When we ask to know 4 formulas for any evaluation they are not known, homework are not done. I literally need to hunt parents for days to see them and talk about their children, they are always innocent and put the blame solely on their children, they have no time to spend with their children, checking homework is always impossible for XXX reasons.
Schools, teachers need to do better. But we cannot do everything and one crucial actor is missing more and more.
It’s really not that hard to solve. Students who fail the standards should not be retained. This everyone must pass at all costs is draining our education system’s quality down.
The problem is that most students don’t want to study anymore and when they do, it has to be fun.
The system needs to be revised. In 20 years I see a resurgence of elite private schools because normal ones can’t deliver quality anymore.
Who knew that if we made teaching the shittiest job possible, our education system would suffer?
I know how to fix it, make the job even worse!
Fucking with our educational system is literally screwing over the future, it’s sad to see they keep putting some of the most incompetent ministers in charge of it
27 comments
Verrassend. Not
Well, 12 year olds are pretty stupid after all
I sometimes wonder if this is only due to how kids are taught at school, but also how kids are stimulated at home.
There’s a lot of alarming things going on in education, not just this. Anecdotally, I was in a meeting for a group project for a course of the master in education last week (the pimped version of the teaching degree). One of my fellow students who – from what I could tell – would make a great teacher said he had no real intention to teach high school, he most likely would go into private tutoring full time since it was way more lucrative.
And I mean, I get it… Demand for private tutoring has gone up because there’s a bunch of teachers who have to teach subjects they are not familiar with. Or just pupils who don’t have a teacher for subject X for multiple weeks or even months because there are no substitutes. The quality of the private tutoring pupils also has gone up which makes it even more enjoyable. In the past you typically had to do with psychology bachelors who failed statistics exams 4 times and now *really really* need to pass but have no fucking clue and their parents expect to just throw money at it to solve it. Now, you get prepared students with involved parents who want to fix some holes that the public education created. Honestly, I expect certain villa districts to just start home educating their kids in groups with a small team of private tutors in the near future.
We’re at an alarming downwards trend with regards to education in general, and at this point we would probably need to throw crazy amounts of money at it to make it halt, let alone turn it around.
“Leerlingen slagen er bijvoorbeeld wel in om digitale informatie op te zoeken, maar doen het minder goed als het gaat om het selecteren van het correcte zoekresultaat”
Volgens mij is dit vooral te wijten aan de geëvolueerde werking van zoekmachines en het internet in het algemeen. Als je Google gebruikt, zijn de eerste resultaten meestal advertenties en zoekt het ook niet meer specifiek naar de zoekterm maar naar “aanbevolen” of “gerelateerde” sites.
Dit is natuurlijk allemaal te vermijden of op te lossen, maar het huidige onderwijssysteem is al traag met bijwerken van lespakketten dus dit zal waarschijnlijk ook een tijd duren.
“Allez, hoe kan dat nu? Hij zit bijna elke dag op zijn tablet!”
The parents (and corona) are at fault, but nobody wants to say it.
We were the best generation (those born in the later 1980s and 1990s) for ICT development because we grew up using computers. Post-millennials rarely use computers in their free time, they use the smartphone for everything.
EDIT: Yes, and for some of those born in the 1970s as well. We hear you, early adopter Gen-Xers.
Was dit niet een te verwachten resultaat na 2 jaar corona? En ook doordat men kinderen, die in het eerste jaar van corona eigenlijk niet klaar waren voor het volgende jaar, toch hebben doorgelaten?
Now now, if I ask 20 people to draw a rectangle, I will assure you none of those rectangles is a square.
In theory, squares might be rectangles, but in practice you are never going to have a square drawn unless you specify “draw a square.”
These results do not tell anything.
Students have been going through 2 years of dramatic covid restrictions and lock-down. For sure they will score the worst in a long time.
The education system is failing and needs to be adressed.
But recent events are exceptional and shouldn’t be used to assess it.
It’s only one more thing to fix.
So experts have an informed opinion about (part of) the problem. Which isn’t all that surprising when the numbers go down, as that probably is a result of what you recently did.
> Volgens Mieke Goos, onderzoekster aan de KU Leuven die meewerkte aan de peilingstoetsen, is er naast corona nog een andere verklaring voor de minder goede resultaten. Volgens haar wordt er te veel gedifferentieerd. “Begeleiding op niveau is leuk, maar het jammere is dat we soms de kern van de zaak vergeten. De goede wiskundedidactiek vraagt om samen met leerlingen vanuit een wiskundig probleem die denkstappen te zetten. En die denktijd samen is de laatste vijf jaar naar de achtergrond verdrongen.”
And Weyts conclusion is that we need even more – personally tailored and “flemish” – bureaucracy so we might one day figure out what’s going on.
> Weyts wil nu de “Vlaamse Toetsen” uitrollen om zo de leerwinst van élke leerling in kaart brengen te brengen. “Als we weten waar welke problemen zitten, kunnen we veel beter en veel sneller ingrijpen
You just can’t make this shit up.
Komaan Weyts! Onderwijs is (uw) Vlaamse bevoegdheid. Wat we zelf doen, doen we beter?
Cut the bureaucracy for teachers, have them focus on teaching again. And give the kids free meals (especially those from low income families), no one studies well on an empty stomach. 240 billion government expenses and we can’t even run a half decent education department.
As someone who supervises a bunch of 14-15yo’s trying to research and write a small written “paper”, I can confirm students don’t know how to use computers or look up quality information.
Being dumb is the new cool
My old roommate taught at one of the private EU schools here in Brussels and I overheard the head of teaching in a phone call say he “wanted to turn the school into the Ryanair of schools and pump out diplomas” .. whilst charging 30k euro a year haha.. terrible.
We need to fuck with teachers a whole lot more!
I’ve listened to the radio going into work for over 20 years and only ever heard more and more bullshit being heaped on teachers. It never fucking ends. No full time, 4 schools to make enough hours, a never-ending, ever-increasing amount of paperwork. Add to that students who don’t feel they need to do any work, entitled parents and after a while a career as a teacher doesn’t sound so hot anymore.
One of my colleagues quit teaching because she ‘didn’t go into teaching to tell kids to shut up 200 times a day’.
If you make it so that the job becomes harder and less enjoyable every year, in the end people WILL catch on and just not bother anymore. Then the test scores tank but hey, what are you going to do, right?
Most people who are good at teaching have been chased out of the system, what’s left is mainly bean counters and bureaucrats.
Maybe stop besparen on Education. Alsook the way teacher contracts work should be reevaluated. Many people “look down” on teachers and the job in general.
my dughter school will close next year. there is no budget to maintain it.
it is the third time it happens in my children’s scolarity.
math skills going down year after year I expected, but ICT is a bit of a surprise for me
I remember when introduced the M-decreet and suddenly there was no budget anymore for helping autistic, adhd and add cases. All funding was rerouted towards kids that should have been in schools with special assistance, but couldn’t thanks to the Flemish government.
Then I went to college and Ben Weyts started introducing all kinds of stupid rules to make getting a bachelor’s or master’s harder.
You reap what you sow, Crevits and Weyts.
Sorry but I’m going to rant about our school system for a second, i graduated in BSO and I’m about the graduated college right now.
First of all i ended up there because I’m horrible at math and languages due to learning disability’s and just not being made for school (at least as a teen)
In our last year most of us started to realize how far we were behind on pretty much everyone else on math and languages. We begged to get math again and relearn the basics of dutch (yes that’s how bad it was), they told us no and I ended up having 2h of dutch a week that existed out of watching or reading something and then answering questions about it.
Don’t get me wrong I get it, there are definitely people who are just unable to learn these things but still, having zero practice sets you back far in life.
I had to relearn everything from scratch on my own time just to be able to keep up in college.
As a teacher the thing that worry me is that every article talk about teachers, schools, students but never about one of the main problem.
Parents.
We here to teach, not to educate children. More and more children come at our school without being able to be clean some 6-7 years old don’t even know how to use a handkerchief correctly, they directly turn to a lie in any situation even when they are not scolded, they don’t know how to interact with other children or adults, don’t know how to tie their shoelaces and so on. A lot of small details we notice more and more.
A larger and larger part of parents totally abandon their children and let them fend for themselves. When we ask to know 4 formulas for any evaluation they are not known, homework are not done. I literally need to hunt parents for days to see them and talk about their children, they are always innocent and put the blame solely on their children, they have no time to spend with their children, checking homework is always impossible for XXX reasons.
Schools, teachers need to do better. But we cannot do everything and one crucial actor is missing more and more.
It’s really not that hard to solve. Students who fail the standards should not be retained. This everyone must pass at all costs is draining our education system’s quality down.
The problem is that most students don’t want to study anymore and when they do, it has to be fun.
The system needs to be revised. In 20 years I see a resurgence of elite private schools because normal ones can’t deliver quality anymore.
Who knew that if we made teaching the shittiest job possible, our education system would suffer?
I know how to fix it, make the job even worse!
Fucking with our educational system is literally screwing over the future, it’s sad to see they keep putting some of the most incompetent ministers in charge of it