Rol says that, while he agrees "wholeheartedly with Marty that the
educational issue is raised especially by the changing nature of work, I do
not for a minute agree that just because we have always failed poor kids
that it is still ok to do so."
In my view, we're not just failing poor kids. We're failing all
kids. And my "we're" includes both domestic and foreign educational
systems. Schooling is primarily about the curriculum, and our curricula:
- Fail to disclose the systemic nature of human experience,
- Fail to relate to students' immediate experience in ways they
understand, can explain, and consider important,
- Fail to constantly involve students in a full range of thought
processes,
- Fail to provide students with criteria for determining the
relative importance of various kinds of knowledge,
- Fail to put students in direct contact with reality (emphasizing
instead verbal, paper, electronic, and other mediated, "secondhand" versions),
- Fail to encompass all knowledge (including vast areas arguably
more important than those chosen for study),
- Fail to help students build single, logically integrated
conceptual structures for organizing and relating everything they know,
- Fail to adapt to change,
- Fail to disclose that the ability to create new knowledge is more
important than the mental storing of existing knowledge.
- Fail to articulate an overarching goal that students know,
understand, and accept, and clearly relate all instructional activity to
that goal.
We're failing. In my view however, some of the educational systems
of other nations that we often admire--systems more successful in teaching
basic skills than ours--are, at a deeper level, failing even more than are
we. All suffer from lack of vision, from a fundamental underrating of
student potential. We're trying to teach students to crawl when they have
the ability to fly.
--Marion
<mbrady@digital.net> http://ddi.digital.net/~mbrady
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>