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Friday, August 17, 2018

K-12: Creating the 'Ideal' School

Believe it or not, there was once a time when the ideal purpose was to teach lots of stuff. Any serious stuff. The diameter of the Earth. What's the Amazon? Why do people still talk about Alexander the Great?

This might sound like an apocryphal story, but people had textbooks full of information, teachers discussed this information, and students learned it for life.

Facts and knowledge were assumed to have an intrinsic value. You ought to know this stuff. There was a second benefit in discussing lots of facts. Your brain becomes more facile at juggling, comparing, and analyzing various kinds of new information. This facility was once upon a time the very essence of education.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau took things in a new direction, with his emphasis on emotion and feelings in education. John Dewey and his gang started an emphasis on ideology and politics. Point is, lots of educational theorists became more absorbed in theory than in education itself.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The memorization of so called facts and the indoctrination into myth histories , beliefs and time lines that only support the status quo of the myth makers and temple guard never prepares anyone to be free in thought or belief alike. It makes us fractional slaves and sets us against one another. Critical thinking is empirical and logical. Not emotional and bias to news fake or otherwise and the like of Alex Jones or your cranky grandmother

Anonymous said...

A local ESVA school system has removed English from the curriculum...no joke.

Anonymous said...

I've heard that they teach a new way to calculate math problems now. What was wrong with the old way that we learned years ago?

Anonymous said...

Now math is about rounding, so 6+2=10, not 8. Eight is wrong. Pretty sure you can’t be an engineer or rocket scientist with that math. Dumbing down. How many can count money, measure, read/write cursive now?