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Blog: FCAR
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Folly to offer students a drink from
fire hose
By Marion Brady
*September 20, 2005
A longtime Sentinel reader says I'm "a mass of contradictions and hypocrisy,"
and "too critical of education." He wants me to skip all other education reform
ideas and support what he believes is the "only weapon available" to parents to
save their children from today's sorry schools.
That weapon, he says, is vouchers.
Like most everyone else, I'm blind to my own contradictions and hypocrisy.
However, I freely admit to being critical. I'd rather call what I write
"commentary," but the difference between commentary and criticism is probably in
the eye of the reader.
Yes, I criticize the education establishment. It's called "tough love." I think
I have a right -- no, an obligation -- to say what I think is wrong with my
profession and try to make it right.
So, how about vouchers as the cure for what ails education?
How about aspirin as the cure for cancer? It might in some cases help a little,
but it isn't up to the challenge. The same goes for the problem-solving
abilities of vouchers. I'm not opposed to school choice. And I can understand
the enthusiasm for them of parents who're sending their kids to schools they
think are lousy. However, if every kid in an "F" school moved to an "A"-rated
school, it wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference where it really counts --
in what goes on in their heads.
That's because both "F" and "A" schools, and all those in between, are parts of
an educational system that has yet to understand and deal with a major cause
(maybe THE major cause) of poor academic performance: TMRI.
Too Much Random Information.
When every school in the country bases instruction on the same mistaken
teaching-learning theory (that if you throw enough facts at kids some of them
are bound to stick), the benefits of moving kids from one school to another are
too insignificant to be worth the trouble and expense.
A bit of personal history may help explain where I'm coming from.
Back in 1965, while teaching interdisciplinary social science at Florida State
University, I had what seemed to me to be an epiphany. The course I inherited
from another teacher was a complicated, confusing hodgepodge of information -- a
few weeks each of economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology.
Part way through my second attempt to teach it, I discovered that if I
introduced students to "General Systems Theory" as it applied to things called
"human societies," it turned what seemed to be four separate subjects into a
single, much easier-to-understand study.
The more I experimented, particularly with students in the K-12 school that used
to be on Florida State's campus, the clearer it became that not just those four
subjects, but all school subjects, were parts of a single body of knowledge.
Seeing them as such gave kids a powerful, permanently useful mental organizer
allowing them to follow through on assignments using reason and creativity
rather than mere memory.
That was 40 years ago. In the years since, in articles, columns, books,
workshops and presentations to school boards, conferences, civic groups and
business organizations, I've reminded readers and hearers how little most adults
remember of all they supposedly "learned" in school. I've asked them to think of
traditional schooling as much like offering kids a drink from a fire hose. (For
example, eighth-grade mathematics textbooks in high-performing Japan cover about
10 major topics. U.S. textbooks usually throw more than 30 at kids.)
Too Much Random Information
We're wasting time and money on a curriculum that wastes kids' intellect. We
need a national effort to rethink what's taught and why, based not on the vague
demands of business and industry but on the way the brain works. To make kids
smarter quicker, they need to be taught how to select, prioritize, organize and
integrate information.
Educators tell me I'm probably right, but keep right on throwing the kitchen
sink at kids. Legislators in Washington and state capitals answer my direct
questions about the wisdom of their "reforms" with thank-you-for-contacting-me
form letters. Media types echo the politicians' line and blame teachers and
kids. The "silver bullet" people can't see past their love affairs with merit
pay, union busting, competition, privatization, charters, vouchers or some other
miracle cure.
So I criticize them all. It doesn't change anything, but it makes me feel
better.
*First published in the Orlando Sentinel. Posted here by permission of the
author.
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