Re: Williams College named Forbes America's Top College
You can't blame it all on the teachers, parents need to be more involved and make education a priority. This starts at day #1. If your child enters Kindergarden ahead of the pack then they have a better chance of staying ahead. If they're behind at Grade 9, it's harder to make it up. For the most part we are easy going parents but not with her education. We expected good grades, checked homework, reviewed exams, talked to teachers, etc. It was painfull at times but it paid off. She graduated top her class and is heading to a good college.
I don't think most parents have no regard for education. The problem is that most parents (and many teachers) don't seem to understand how to properly motivate the individual child. While your children seem to have responded well to a high level of management (although without a double-blind experiment we cannot know whether or not the management led to better results), every child has a different currency. Spending the time to understand where a child is developmentally (in all aspects) allows an adult (parent or teacher) to better engage the child, getting the most (not all children are Harvard material) out of the child.
With the parents, so many have no idea of how children learn, having only vague memories of how they got through childhood and usually misapplying those ideas. We don't teach basic psychology much less developmental psychology to expectant mothers/fathers. Lamaise classes seem to be about the total education that happens during the preparation for a child. And surprise! The baby doesn't come with instructions.
With teachers, there is some education in psychology required, but while most Americans think that teachers spend too little time on the hard academics in the day, actually they probably spend too much time trying to cram the material down unwilling children's throats. Some do achieve in this model (despite it) just taking their lumps, but few develop the true desire to learn in the "prep for the test" mentality that has taken over education.
And great test scores seem to be the target of those selling the insecurity of our children falling behind. Great test scores don't measure the true practical reasoning and problem solving that a highly productive society needs to advance. They are a measure of a well-trained labor force that often lacks the creativity and self-motivation to take the big risks that move a society forward.
The truly elite colleges in this country (like Williams) specialize in finding students who aren't the test-taking automotons that the public schools are trying to create. Yes, they do score well on tests, but the elite schools (at least in the US) focus on the achievements outside of the classroom to measure the motivation and creativity of the applicant. The top schools turn away lots of 1500+ SAT scores every year who don't demonstrate that intellectual curiosity necessary to achieve independently at the highest level.
So I suggest the best strategy for raising a successful child is to focus on rewarding and feeding curiosity, taking a lesser look at measuring direct results (they are a natural byproduct of the learning that comes from curiosity). A watched pot doesn't boil any faster, so the fixation of what tonight's homework score looks like is not really doing more than monitoring the water temperature.
Hockey parents tend to take this approach when it comes to the sport - rewarding effort (trial and error) and hopefully not watching the scoreboard and stat sheet too much. Now if they could take that approach to interesting learning activities...
