Schome Session 2 Outcomes

This page is for the results of Schome_Session_2.

Here is a short list of ideas people brought up, with comments by me (Decimus):

• Praising disruptive pupils for not being disruptive is an incentive to be disruptive normally
• Praising people for being well-behaved, but not relative to the usual, may work as an incentive to be good
• People misbehave if doing so turns a situation they see as useless into something they see as useful, or if they don't want to be there
• Teachers are too soft
• Need worse punishments and handed out less biasedly (I mean, seriously, I got a detention for getting annoyed at a teacher and someone else got one for bullying me for about a year and a half. *Far* too biased...)
• Interesting, engaging lessons may help the less intelligent people
• They're lucky because some children don't get education and we get it paid for, yet they don't care.
• Not everyone is good academically. Some are better at sports (incidentally, this links back to the last one, where I suggested you should have a bigger choice of what to do)
• Have sets based on how you learn and your intelligence
• Need positive advice (but none of this 'deferred success' stupidity)
• Everyone needs to know that everyone is good at something and bad at something else
• Whether something is a good or bad grade is subjective
• Society prioritises certain things (though not necessarily in the best order, for example footballers getting more pay than doctors, even though the latter are more important)
• Non-academic people should be treated as equals to academics (rather than the strange arrangement of a moderate bias away from them in school and a huge bias towards them in job terms)
• Class sizes seem to have an effect on it - smaller classes are less disruptive
• People try to undermine the system if they don't like it (put them in a different type of environment, where the stuff is aimed more at them?)
• Not all problems would be fixed, as there are other issues than discipline, but most can be dealt with
• Some people don't realise that their actions impact on their later life
• Not all 'behavioural problems' are problems with behaviour, but with the current system of trying to make everyone listen to one person - people who ask questions a lot (even if they're to try to learn more) are looked down upon, but asking them is actually a Good Thing.
• We need people in lots of different jobs for lots of reasons; for example, educational thinkers are needed to ensure education stays relevent and useful.
• Grouping people by mainly age is not a good idea; grouping them by ability (and loosely by age?) would be better
• Being forced to go to school, especially when you're a teenager, can be a cause of being disruptive
• Many teenagers are sheep and follow the biggest/most intimidating group
• We aren't allowed to take responsibilities we want to take, but are forced to take ones we don't want to
• People tend to get on better with people who have similar interests (which are normally very loosely dependent on academic level)
• People can afford to misbehave at school as it has, they think (remembering they don't care about the future) that being disruptive makes no difference to their wealth. (Same thing applies to people with so much money they don't need to work?)
• Less people misbehave in Schome because it's closer to the ideal learning environment and intelligent people are less likely to misbehave (maybe a reverse causal link? Misbehaving could make you less likely to learn stuff)
• People have different types of reasoning, eg. thinking 'what makes me better off in the short term?' versus 'what will increase my knowledge and make me better off in the long turn?', etc.