Tag Archives: education

Focus

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Shailini Jandial George, Suffolk University Law School Professor of Legal Writing, posits the following scenario, which she says is growing ever more common in law classrooms:

[Lara Law Student] arrives to her first-year torts class, flips open her laptop, and rests her iPhone on her desk.  Her professor starts his lecture, while she checks her email.  She visits Facebook to check out “must see” photos flagged by a friend.  When the professor turns to the subject of negligence, Lara Law Student remembers that her mom is getting sued and emails her for an update.  She’s then distracted by a text from a friend inquiring about her lunch plans…and so on.

I think George underestimates the deficiency; such behavior is growing more common in all classrooms.  Regardless, she has a solution:

“Instead of conveying all the class information via reading, lecture, and discussion, which can overtax the verbal channel in working memory,” educations should use more pictures….

[L]aw students can greatly benefit from using visuals to remember rules, apply rules to slightly modified hypothetical situations, and apply rules to completely novel situations in exam situations.

Imagine teaching our social compact documents—our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution—and their underlying principles from pictures (how many drawings did Locke use in his Second Treatise?).  Imagine teaching the British constitution—which is much more document intensive than our own—from pictures.

“Conveying…information via reading, lecture, and discussion” does not at all overtax the “verbal channel in working memory;” each of those media already are rife with visual aids (Locke notwithstanding).  What overtaxes “verbal channels” is lack of practice and lack of focus (both of which STEM-ers as well as lawyers need in spades), and that lack results from all of those distractions which George illustrates in her scenario.

Maybe another education reform would be to enclose classrooms inside Faraday cages.

Meddling with Science Education

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Now the educators are politicizing the “science” to be taught our children.  Newly released national science standard “proposals” will include the pseudo-science of manmade climate change as a “core concept.”

The new standards claim

Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming)

without any regard for the lack of actual science, or even data, to support that thesis.

On the other hand, some of the objections to this politicization miss the point and, if these objections are the ones that successfully defeat the nonsense, they’ll create their own problems.  There is, for instance, the worry that

the very presence of climate change instruction in classrooms will create controversy.

So what?  That actually would be beneficial.  A proper handling of the controversy (of any controversy, come to that) would constitute an excellent mechanism for teaching critical thinking, to say nothing of the opportunity to teach the social aspects of dealing with controversial matters.

Early Education

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If the regular public schools aren’t working…does it make sense to layer on another defective education level, except earlier in life?

…

In December, [President Barack] Obama’s own Health and Human Services Department released an evaluation of Head Start, the 47-year-old program for low-income toddlers, and concluded that any cognitive gains disappeared by the third grade.  HHS had sat on the legally mandated study for more than a year.

Part of the reason for the failure of preschool programs, though, is that, after passing out of these programs, the kids go into the same failing school systems as their non-preschool peers.

Progressives and the teachers unions (not necessarily the teachers themselves), though, universally oppose such successful alternatives as charter schools and voucher programs—they reject the competition that would force improvement on the public schools while providing an immediately improved environment for the children.

Such improvements would, for instance, include compensating teachers for their performance—the quality of the students passing out of their classes—rather than simply for being on the job for the requisite length of time.  In the end, this impacts teachers unions more than it does the teachers themselves; see for instance the New York City resistance to such an evaluation régime—it’s union leadership and their pocket politicians on the city council, not the teachers, that are objecting.

Is there evidence that any preschool success could be potentiated by charter/voucher programs rather than allowed to peter out as happens in existing public schools?  Not yet.  Progressive blockage remains too successful for these alternatives to be widespread and the needed research conducted.

Education, in the end, is a local prerogative, a local obligation, with standards set by and to meet local needs, even if “local” is much broader than it used to be.  This is how our educational system was designed.

The failure of the Federal programs with which the Feds have been interfering in our educational system (potentiated by union intransigence) is another reason for keeping the matter local, with the central government butting out.

Education and American Culture

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Dr Keith Ablow, writing for Fox News, has some thoughts on the impact of our educational system on American culture.

A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.

And

On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.”  They can delete unflattering comments.  They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem.  They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves….

Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.

Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters.

On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.

And

…in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades,…psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.

In short,

These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century….

Sitting apposite these remarks are some thoughts from Thomas Sowell, writing for National Review.

Many years ago, as a young man, I read a very interesting book about the rise of the Communists to power in China. In the last chapter, the author tried to explain why and how this had happened.

Among the factors he cited were the country’s educators.

In the US,

Schools were once thought of as places where a society’s knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation.  But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education—one that has spread through American schools and even influenced education in countries overseas.

John Dewey saw the role of the teacher not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change—someone strategically placed with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.

A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions.  The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America—and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.

And

This misuse of schools to undermine one’s own society is not something confined to the United States or even to our own time.  It is common in Western countries for educators, the media, and the intelligentsia in general to single out Western civilization for special condemnation for sins that have been common to the human race, in all parts of the world, for thousands of years.

Thus,

Even in the face of mortal dangers, political correctness forbids us to use words like “terrorist” when the approved euphemism is “militant.”  Milder terms such as “illegal alien” likewise cannot pass the political-correctness test, so it must be replaced by another euphemism, “undocumented worker.”

Some think that we must tiptoe around in our own country, lest some foreigners living here or visiting here be offended by the sight of an American flag or a Christmas tree in some institutions.

With this potential outcome:

American schools today are similarly undermining American society as one unworthy of defending, either domestically or internationally.  If there were nuclear attacks on American cities, how long would it take for us to surrender, even if we had nuclear superiority—but were not as willing to die as our enemies were?

Think that last is apocalyptic?  Recall Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), Senators Barack Obama (D, IL) and Dennis Kucinich (D, OH), then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), et al., all begging for surrender at the point of victory as the 2007 surge in the Iraq war was announced.

These problems, and their outcomes, are not unrelated.

Increasingly, we parents aren’t doing our jobs of participating in, and ensuring the quality of, our children’s education.  But at this late remove, we parents need to do more.  We need to take outright control of our education systems—K-12 and college/university—back from the administrators and “educators” who have so strong a disdain for American greatness, who elide the things our nation—the people of our nation—have accomplished.

Indeed, our accomplishments, our greatness, are easily measured, by those who actually attend to our history, not only domestically in terms of individual liberty, responsibility, and prosperity achieved, but also globally in the treasure—both in terms of our fisc and our blood—we’ve spent so that other peoples also can have an opportunity to achieve their own individual liberty, responsibility, and prosperity.  And in the individual liberty, responsibility, and prosperity actually achieved by those we’ve helped.

These, and a justifiable pride—measured in those actual accomplishments in the real world—in ourselves and our nation must be restored to our education.  Our national security—our national survival—requires it.

But there’s another factor that underlies all of this, and our national security—our national survival—depends on this, too.  We parents must retake control over the environment in which our children exist as children—our homes.  They spend a third of their lives exclusively in our homes and their (our) friends’ homes and yards and playgrounds even before they start school, and they spend the remaining two-thirds there outside school hours.

When was the last time we read with (not to) our kids, talked with (not at) our kids, goofed around with them—all without the TV, the game boxes, the laptops and smartphones with their overused and overhyped “social” media?  When was the last time all of you—kids and parents—sat at the table and ate dinner (or breakfast) at the same time?  And talked about the day’s events (yours and your kids’, as well as the news), or about anything at all?

YGTBSM, Again

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The Teachers College Record is pushing this with a straight face.

Resisting Compliance: Learning to Teach for Social Justice in a Neoliberal Context

by Bree Picower — 2011
Background/Context: This study examines education in the context of neoliberalism and how current educational policies such as high-stakes testing and mandated curriculum create schooling environments hostile to social justice education. Relying on education for liberation literature, teacher education for social justice scholarship, and work on critical pedagogy, this study explores how new teachers who teach from a social justice perspective navigate the challenges of their first year in teaching.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study asks, What strategies do new teachers use to stay true to their vision of teaching for social justice despite the challenges they face in their school environments?

Population/Participants/Subjects: During the course of the study, 4 of the 6 participants were full-time classroom teachers. The 2 other participants were still taking education classes while student- and assistant teaching. All worked in a variety of urban elementary schools.

Intervention/Program/Practice: The participants were all members of a social justice critical inquiry project (CIP) group that met at the university from which they graduated.

Research Design: This was a qualitative study that used design-based research.

Data Collection and Analysis: Data were collected from three sources: transcripts from audio and videotaped CIP sessions, ethnographic interviews with participants, and participants’ written reflections. Data were analyzed using grounded theory method.

Findings/Results: The teachers developed four strategies for teaching for social justice. First, by participating in a critical inquiry project, the teachers supported each other by building a safe haven that protected their vision. Second, the participants camouflaged their critical pedagogy by integrating it with the mandated curriculum, which allowed them to teach from a social justice perspective without rousing the concerns of their administration. The third strategy was to develop their students as agents of change. Finally, in a few instances, the teachers went public with their work by rejecting or speaking against policies that they felt were not in the best interests of their students.

Conclusions/Recommendations: Although these four strategies allowed participants to successfully create critical classrooms, they did not impact the larger neoliberal forces that maintain unjust schooling experiences. This has implications for teacher education, and the author suggests recommendations for schools of education.

The article itself is behind TCR‘s pay wall, should you wish to wade through it.  For my money, it wasn’t worth it.   The sample size says a lot about the laziness of the “scholarship” involved.  One of the strategies—”the participants camouflaged their critical pedagogy by integrating it with the mandated curriculum, which allowed them to teach from a social justice perspective without rousing the concerns of their administration”—says all there is to say about the level of integrity of this “scholarship.”

Their logo includes the slogan “The Voice of Scholarship in Education.”  Yet they haven’t a clue of what scholarship consists.  Are we really teaching our teachers this one-sidedness?

 

h/t National Review Online‘s “Phi Beta Cons“