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The professor lumps all off his students into one batch, with the only exceptions being due to serendipity. Sorta know-nothing of him. The article is more of a chance for him to pat himself on the back about his prestigious teaching career than anything else.
Every professor thinks that their field is "the important one," and that all students should have a solid knowledge of whatever they teach for a living -- for instance the Peloponnesian war. When those standards are not met it constitutes a "crisis."
Meanwhile the Biology prof is freaking out that we won't have any future doctors, because students didn't memorize the Krebs cycle in high school. And the CS prof is freaking out that students don't understand inheritance, and jesus, how is humanity ever going to write software again?
And even worse, they always blame it on the "Educational system" , which -- news flash -- they are a central part of.
If a student needs or wants to know the facts referenced in the article, there are many ways available of finding the information. I've successfully navigated nearly four decades of life without knowing how Socrates died or who fought in the Peloponnesian War. Shocking, I know.
I teach in an inner-city school, and for the past 30 years, I have regularly taught my students who Socrates was, how he died and for what reason, whom he taught (Plato), whom Plato taught (Aristotle), and whom Aristotle taught (Alexander the Great). I teach about Martin Luther and his 95 theses and Martin Luther King Jr.'s practice of civil disobedience as modeled by Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi. I also throw in binary numbers, factorials, and imaginary numbers from time to time, along with dialectical materialism, Orwell's 1984, and John Locke's tabula rasa. Most of this I learned from my high school government teacher, who inspired me to teach students as opposed to teaching a curriculum.
The author of this column is absolutely correct when he says that the system has changed from one of education and enlightenment to one bereft of the transmission of knowledge in favor of testing (testing, testing) isolated skills. No longer are students guided through classic literature in search of universal truths. Now, if they study literature at all, it is in search of the author's purpose, as testing in the ubiquitous Pearson texts and tests. The goal is now to teach a content-free curriculum and the result is content-free students going off to college not even knowing what they don't know.
As I learned from Socrates, the wise man knows he is a fool. The unexamined life is not worth living.
I teach in an inner-city school, and for the past 30 years, I have regularly taught my students who Socrates was, how he died and for what reason, whom he taught (Plato), whom Plato taught (Aristotle), and whom Aristotle taught (Alexander the Great). I teach about Martin Luther and his 95 theses and Martin Luther King Jr.'s practice of civil disobedience as modeled by Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi. I also throw in binary numbers, factorials, and imaginary numbers from time to time, along with dialectical materialism, Orwell's 1984, and John Locke's tabula rasa. Most of this I learned from my high school government teacher, who inspired me to teach students as opposed to teaching a curriculum.
The author of this column is absolutely correct when he says that the system has changed from one of education and enlightenment to one bereft of the transmission of knowledge in favor of testing (testing, testing) isolated skills. No longer are students guided through classic literature in search of universal truths. Now, if they study literature at all, it is in search of the author's purpose, as testing in the ubiquitous Pearson texts and tests. The goal is now to teach a content-free curriculum and the result is content-free students going off to college not even knowing what they don't know.
As I learned from Socrates, the wise man knows he is a fool. The unexamined life is not worth living.
Wish I could rep this one a thousand times over; the handful of teachers I recall from my high school days followed the same method.
But I have to ask one very hard question; one that is probably on the minds of your bureaucrat-overlords every day:
ARE YOU SUFFICIENTLY POLITICALLY CORRECT???
Regrettably, that consideration seems to be driving (and destroying) what's left of public education more than any other factor.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 03-07-2016 at 10:24 AM..
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Yeah!
