:: Adventures in Daily Living

8.12.2008

alas

and now Suzanne has something to say about school

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 much appreciated comments:

Family Nutritionist said...: 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.; September 20, 2008 at 12:35 AM
Suzanne said...: ARGH!!! One more reason why I home-school; September 20, 2008 at 12:35 AM

me! me! me!

Here I chatter about books, parenting, election 2008, recipes, teaching college writing, and the adventures of getting settled in with our two freshly (Fall 06) adopted school-age children from Russia. This blog is chapter two; chapter one is posted at Jamie & Suzanne go to Russia. I live in the City of Subdued Excitement, Cascadia, Land of the Free.

I am the wife of a man I call My Gift from a Generous God. I am mama to two lovely children, Dandy and Chickadee that became ours in September 2006 in a court-room in Siberia. I am the daughter of two people whom I love and admire. One of them, my dad, is a new (Dec 06) paraplegic.

In my previous life (B.C. - before children), I was a college English teacher, specializing in composition and ESL composition.

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credits

This blog started life as hackosphere's neo and has been heavily tweaked and widgetized by Suzanne :: I got all the coding for the peek-a-boo posts over at hackosphere :: All my pretty little icons came from famfamfam :: The coding for the rotating banners came from Vince Liu :: The very cool tabbed sidebar widgets are thanks to the very cool hoctro :: The fun "Feeling Lucky?" toy -- which is currently disabled -- came from phydeaux3 (fido 3?) :: The pretty label cloud also came from phydeaux3 :: The elegant and easy to install related posts widget came from Jackbook :: I got all the social bookmarking icons nicely packaged for me at the aptly named Social Bookmarking Script Generator :: The 3 column footer came from Technodia :: The pretty sliding photo galleries are from CSSplay :: The recent comments widget is from Hackosphere::