To earn his freedom, 15-year-old Cayden Gillespie had to complete three school assignments a day. But school had gone virtual for Cayden and other incarcerated young people in Florida. And sometimes, he didn’t understand it.
One day last summer, he kept failing an online pre-algebra test. There were too many words to read. He didn’t know how to find the value of x. And there were no math teachers to show him.
“I couldn’t figure it out, and it kept failing me,” Cayden says. He asked the adult supervising the classroom for help. “She didn’t understand either.”
Struggling to educate its more than 1,000 students in long-term confinement, Florida embarked last year on a risky experiment. Despite strong evidence that online learning failed many students during the pandemic, Florida juvenile justice leaders adopted the approach for 10- to 21-year-olds sentenced to residential commitment centers for offenses including theft, assault and drug abuse.
And the dystopia has become a little more dystopian.
The story reminds me of dystopian/scifi stories where someone is imprisoned and presented with problems that they have to solve to earn their freedom/food/… . The first problem is understanding the instructions, because they’re presented in a way that the prisoner doesn’t understand + there’s no outside help to help the prisoner understand.
Even in Florida, it ought to be possible to hire an adult supervisor who understands pre-algebra – and any other topic that might reasonably appear on a GED assessment.
If they get out of detention the facility loses money. Of course they’ll make it as hard as possible to leave.
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It’s not a effective system if it fails in this way. Let’s say 30% of people can’t learn this way. 100 people per time period are entering the system, at the end you have 30 people left, now a new set of 100 join the 30, total of 130. The original 30 still can’t understand but now there is an additional 30 at the end of the next time period, total 60 left. After 3 time periods you have almost doubled the initial amount of people. And have an effective rate of 50%, which very quickly will get lower and lower.
It’s not a question about how many people get it, but how many people you leave behind. It often takes a surprisingly low percentage in populations for things to go or at least look bad
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But the article isn’t about the average person, these are kids and young adults who for what ever reason are in detention centres. It’s basic rehabilitation, and most countries get it completely wrong as they try to do it as cheaply as possible. I think the only country that gets this remotely right is Norway, everyone else is punishment first.
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So what you are saying is that when someone fails you should effectively write them off as a lost cause? Is it not the problem of the system that people can try and then fail. If the system worked then everyone that tried should succeed? So the good people that but the system in place have now tried and failed to educate/rehabilitate, much like the people they are educating/rehabilitating
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We do read what you write, you’re just wrong. Or maybe lacking compassion. Or just don’t understand that everyone is different and that education systems generally suck.
When I was a kid, I had two classmates who had accommodations due to their learning disabilities. Nobody thought, hey, they should “be moved to the institutions that will force them to study”, because they didn’t not want to study. They just needed help. Did the rest of us feel threatened or jealous of them? No. We either didn’t care or were happy they got at least a bit of help in this cookie-cutter system.
On the flip side, I was surrounded by straight A students in HS, but 99% of them forgot the material once they were graded on it and ultimately retained the same level of knowledge (sometimes less!) than me who was a B/B- student. And then people like that go on to be shitty doctors, because all they do is learn by heart with little to no understanding of the material, and the educational system rewards that.
The more I read your comment, the more insane it sounds.
When trying to find out something ask the question: but why? 5 times. You need to try and get to an underlying cause, or in the worst cause you end up going around in circular logic. I was slowly trying to get you there, maybe badly 😐 In general most governmental problems come from underfunding, the Peter principle (people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”) or just plane corruption.
Everyone is human and makes mistakes, it how we deal with those mistakes, and how others treat us about those mistakes we make.
*Also I may be completely wrong about everything
