Sep 16 2010

What’s really wrong with student motivation?

Category: child marriageharmonicminer @ 8:00 am

Jay Matthew’s discusses the views of his friend, Robert J. Samuelson, in Why 17-year-olds’ scores have stalled since the ’70s

I learned much from him during <our student years>, as I have continued to do during our long friendship. He enlightens me even on topics in my specialty, such as his latest column in the Post, “The failure of school reform.

He starts with a stark summary of how little progress American teenagers have made in the last four decades of aggressive efforts to improve public schools.

Well, yeah.  Old news.

He recounts explanations for this that fail to withstand scrutiny. The problem can’t be high student-teacher ratios because those have dropped. It can’t be minimal preschool preparation because a larger portion of children are getting that early start. Teacher pay has also improved to the point where two people married to each other and each making the average teacher salary of $53,230 “would belong in the richest 20 percent of households,” Samuelson says.

Instead, he concludes, “the larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail.”

Speaking as a university professor who thinks of himself as a teacher, I can certainly attest to the necessity of high student motivation.  Nothing replaces it.  Nothing at all.  But poor student motivation is itself an effect of other things, not a fundamental cause of low achievement.  It’s a necessary step along the way to failure, but focusing on it is like saying you starved because you didn’t eat….  it doesn’t explain why you didn’t eat or didn’t have food.

It is hard to deny his view that in the last 40 years as “adolescent culture has strengthened, the authority of teachers and schools has eroded.” The old my-way-or-the-highway ethos of school discipline that ruled even nice suburban high schools like mine in the 1960s is long gone. Even the schools with the toughest discipline policies these days are run by educators who do everything they can to keep students in school

….. I think Samuelson could also refer to his frequent columns on how immigration has inflated our poverty rates, and suggest that same influx may be depressing average test scores.

Samuelson says policymakers should reconsider before they blame teachers for not doing a better job. Against the realities of low student motivation, Samuelson says, “school ‘reform’ rhetoric is blissfully evasive.” One of the most recent examples of overblown rhetoric, he says, is U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s call for “a great teacher” in every classroom.

…… Samuelson’s recapitulation: “If we don’t recognize that motivation is a problem,” he told me, “we won’t address it.”

Sure, student motivation is critical.  But what creates motivation in students?  A few things are obvious.

**  High expectations at home.   Children learn an enormous amount about what constitutes “success” in the first few years of life, before anyone can possibly blame the failure of the schools.

**  The student’s belief that the student can live up to those high expectations.  If you don’t think you can do it, you won’t try.

Less obvious, apparently, is that student success can’t be faked.  It’s pointless, and ultimately defeating, to give praise for trivial or no achievement. So:

**  The student has to experience real success, and that success has to be recognized by some reward or praise, even if small.  This has to happen over and over, in many small steps along the way.

Only motivation that flows from high expectations, hope for success, and real achievement, honestly recognized, has any chance of growing into the kind of drive that leads to consistent, repeated effort.

But let’s be clear.  Telling students how wonderful and brilliant they are, in the absence of good behavior and actual achievement, is a prescription for failure.  It is bound to be a self-fulfilling prophecy to tell students that they can’t achieve to a reasonable level because someone is discriminating against them (a message minority students get over and over from all sides, all too often).  Telling minority students that their sub-culture is “just as good” in the area of education and achievement as the dominant “American educated elite,” that traditional education is a “white thing,” is bound to damage them.   Giving them the message that they should be rewarded just as if they had achieved is disastrous.  Telling them that they are “auditory learners” is nearly the same thing as giving them permission not to learn to read skillfully.  And politically incorrect as it is to point out, having a married father in the home is probably a bigger predictor of educational success than any other single factor…  just as it is the single best predictor for staying out of jail as an adult.

Most of these values, understandings, and self-perceptions are caught at home (or they aren’t!) before school ever starts.  Expecting the schools to somehow fix things, by being brilliant and motivating, is not a successful strategy.  Sadly, our schools have gotten so politically correct, so fearful of telling the truth about what works, our education establishments so self-protecting and our politicians so thoroughly lobbied by the teachers unions, that there is little remaining hope by any half-honest observer that anything can be done to really deal with our problems without a radical restructuring of our entire approach.

Minority parents everywhere want school choice and vouchers, especially those parents who are invested in their children’s success in school.  Unfortunately, the failure of the system to adequately educate those minority parents (in the last generation of students) can be seen by the fact that those parents who want school choice for their own children continue to vote for political candidates who won’t give it to them, precisely because those politicians are so beholden to the teachers unions and public education lobby.   There is a word for doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results, and that word apparently describes these parents, who continue to vote for candidates who will maintain the educational status quo.

I am somebody” is not enough.


Jun 27 2008

Child Rape in Islam

Category: child marriage,Islamharmonicminer @ 10:09 am

Muhammad married a girl of six, and consummated the marriage when she was nine. I know, someone will say that standards were different then, and modern sensibilities do not apply. But this is still law in Islamic countries. (video at the link)

Clip Transcript

Following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi, a Saudi marriage officiant, which aired on LBC TV on June 19, 2008:

Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi: Marriage is actually two things: First we are talking about the marriage contract itself. This is one thing, while consummating the marriage, having sex with the wife for the first time, is another thing. There is no minimal age for entering marriage. You can have a marriage contract even with a one-year-old girl, not to mention a girl of nine, seven, or eight. This is merely a contract [indicating] consent. The guardian in such a case must be the father, because the father’s opinion is obligatory. Thus, the girl becomes a wife… But is the girl ready for sex or not? What is the appropriate age for having sex for the first time? This varies according to environment and traditions. In Yemen, girls are married off at nine, ten, eleven, eight, or thirteen, while in other countries, they are married off at 16. Some countries have legislated laws forbidding having sex before the girl is eighteen.

[…]

The Prophet Muhammad is the model we follow. He took ‘Aisha to be his wife when she was six, but he had sex with her only when she was nine.

Interviewer: When she was six…

Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi: He married her at the age of six, and he consummated the marriage, by having sex with her for the first time, when she was nine. We consider the Prophet Muhammad to be our model.

Interviewer: My question to you is whether the marriage of a 12-year-old boy with an 11-year-old girl is a logical marriage, which is permitted by Islamic law.

Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi: If the guardian is the father… There are two different types of guardianship. If the guardian is the father, and he marries his daughter off to a man of appropriate standing, the marriage is obviously valid.

[…]

People find themselves in all kinds of circumstances. Take, for example, a man who has two, three, or four daughters. He does not have any wives, but he needs to go on a trip. Isn’t it better to marry his daughter to a man, who will protect and sustain her, and when she reaches the proper age, he will have sex with her? Who says all men are ferocious wolves?


Ah… now I feel better about it, since he explained that not all men are ferocious wolves. In Islamic countries, child rapists DO get the death penalty… unless they are married to the child, of course, in which case multiple rape is a conjugal duty.

Ah, here is another lovely couple, from the UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007

She has the look of the mouse watching the snake, unable to escape from the cage in which she has been placed with the predator. From Spiegel Online:

There are people who will look at this image and be able to continue with business as usual — without disgust, nausea and rage. We are beholding the fiercest barbarism imaginable. But a carefree cultural relativism — which this age has donned as its outward manifestation of decadent indifference — allows many to simply look away. They turn away from the sight of an 11-year-old girl, who is about to be raped by the man sitting next to her.


Diversity is a wonderful thing. We should invite the happy couple to the USA, and give them the honeymoon suite at a nice five star hotel, just to help them get started right.

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