Comments on: Biases in Curricula Design

By: Peter Boothe

Peter Boothe — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:24:05 +0000

I haven't, but I have seen _How Children Learn_ on my mom's bookshelf, and I have read some stuff by his co-conspirator John Taylor Gatto. Also, for whatever reason I have been thinking about youth rights recently.

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:07:58 +0000

Peter, have you read John Holt's _How Children Fail_ ?

By: Peter Boothe

Peter Boothe — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 06:06:54 +0000

The mindset, I'll bet, is inherited from those who taught them. Changing educational culture is a multi-generational effort, but I am pretty sure that the bad emphasis is only getting worse over time, thanks to things like NCLB which decree that anything which cannot be tested must be ignored.

By: Paul Bunson

Paul Bunson — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:22:58 +0000

I find it particularly ironic at a community college where we have a large percentage of students who didn't make it in the traditional setting and then we have them take remedial math once again emphasizing the rote learning that killed them the first time.

But I'm not always convinced that testing is driving this. I find that for many profs, it is not even in their mindset to promote anything but what you describe. And they see the testing simply as verification that they are doing a good job.

Many of them are also under the impression that they are teaching critical thinking because their subject is very logical. And are blind to the fact that the students are amazingly efficient at avoiding actual thinking.

By: Biases in Curricula Design | Impromptus | Conceptguy

Biases in Curricula Design | Impromptus | Conceptguy — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:30:30 +0000

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