At least on the emotional level, contemporary American education sides with the obstacles. It begins by treating children as psychologically fragile beings who will fail to learn — and worse, fail to develop as "whole persons" — if not constantly praised. The self-esteem movement may have its merits, but preparing students for arduous intellectual ascents aren't among them. What the movement most commonly yields is a surfeit of college freshmen who "feel good" about themselves for no discernible reason and who grossly overrate their meager attainments.
Read the rest at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
2 comments:
Sounds kind of like what was going on in education in the 50's, before Kennedy's lunar landing promise started a push for more academic rigor in the schools. You can see references to this in popular culture, as in some of the comments on education from the father in Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel".____Reading was taught in first grade in 1970/71, which surprised my mother, who thought it ought to have been taught in kindergarten. My kids did learn to read in kindergarten. And, interestingly, my childs' charter school has just improved the elementary science curriculum by introducing the notion of the scientific method -- how science is done, which, strangely, is not in any of the textbooks.
ARGH!!! One more reason why I home-school
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