As soon as I saw this, I immediately thought of the quote from THAT DUDE, Thomas Sowell, who said, The problem isnt that Johnny cant read. The problem isnt even that Johnny cant think. The problem is that Johnny doesnt know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling. Our education system has long since stopped training children on HOW TO THINK!! We now have a system that spends more money than ever before, but our kids are DUMBER THAN EVER BEFORE!! It is my observation that my generation (GEN-X), as well as the GEN-Y, and the MILLENNIAL GENERATION are filled with folks who were never trained on HOW TO THINK, but were instead TOLD WHAT TO THINK!! Worse than that, we/they were TOLD that our/their FEELINGS equated to REAL THINKING, and therefore our/their FEELINGS have a high value, simply because we FEEL the way we FEEL...despite how wrong-headed our/their THINKING actually is. As Allan Bloom said in his 1987 book, it truly is The Closing of the American Mind. And I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this cant be by accident. So I have to ask myself, Who is benefiting from this? As the saying goes, FOLLOW THE MONEY!! ~ Unhyphenated America theatlantic/education/archive/2015/01/the-wisdom-deficit-in-schools/384713/ The Wisdom Deficit in Schools New education standards emphasize technical reading skills over an appreciation for literature and the deeper values it can instill. When I was in high school, I chose to major in English in college because I wanted to be wiser. That’s the word I used. If I ended up making lots of money or writing a book, great; but really, I liked the prospect of being exposed to great thoughts and deep advice, and the opportunity to apply them to my own life in my own clumsy way. I wanted to live more thoughtfully and purposefully. (Also, I hoped literature would help me understand girls.) Now I’m a veteran English teacher, reflecting on what’s slowly changed at the typical American public high school—and the word wisdom keeps haunting me. I don’t teach it as much anymore, and I wonder who is. As a new teacher at San Luis Obispo High School in California more than a decade ago, I asked my principal about his expectations for my students’ Advanced Placement scores. He said, Just make sure the kids are ready for the next part of their lives. They’re going to be on their own soon, and forever. Prepare them for that. Literature can help. His idea of how to prepare kids for their futures was significantly different, in both meaning and tone, from how teachers are now being informed by the Common Core State Standards—the controversial math and English benchmarks that have been adopted in most states—and the writers and thought leaders who shape the assessments matched to those standards. It all amounts to an alphabet soup of bureaucratic expectations and what can feel like soul-less instruction. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium—referred to in education circles simply as SBAC—is the association that writes a Common Core-aligned assessment used in 25 states, including mine. The consortium has established four of what it calls major claims; the first purports that students are college and career ready if they can read closely and analytically to comprehend a range of complex literary and informational text.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 23:41:19 +0000
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