thoughts on education

this title may be reused. i have many of them. but here's something i just read today, from How Computer Games Help Children Learn by David Williamson Shaffer:

Young people in the United States today are being prepared - in school and at home- for standardized jobs in a world that will, very soon, punish those who can't innovate. Our government and our schools have made a noble effort to leave no child behind: to ensure, through standardized testing, that all children make adequate yearly progress in basic reading and math skills. But we can't "skill and drill" our way to innovation. Standardized testing produces standardized skills. Our standars-driven cirriculim, especially in our urban schools, is not preparing children to be innovators at the highest technical levels that will pay off most in a high-tech, global economy.


Well some may feel the ideas are out of context, as this is an American writer referring to an American system, but keep in mind that our own educational system is based on that of the Americans.

Making this more relevant for me is the fact that the school where I used to teach modeled itself after the Americans and implemented whatever findings it could that were based on the Western models. I generally approve of new ideas, new theories, but in their implementation one must learn to localize. Need a good metaphor? Look at the tanks that fill up with sand and become dead weight in desert settings? that tank would have mowed people down and blown up buildings elsewhere, but in the desert it's just a big heap of metal if the sand gets into the machinery. So if we are to implement innovative ideas from elsewhere, then they should be implemented with a strong understanding of context.

i said this a lot. and i got in trouble for many things. ah well.

these ideas also caught my eye because my school of former employment was also wacky over standardized testing. test here, test there, table of specs, diagnostics, achievement tests, whatever whatever whatever, but then aside from not many students testing well, outside of the testing sphere there wasn't much that they could really accomplish in terms of thinking out of the box and solving real problems or understanding real contexts.

I believe that this world we live in, it's different. The world changes but people are the same. So we have to educate, we have to adapt, we have to learn with all these things in mind, with all the contexts that we occupy and must understand. And being given a list of what we ought to know on a very mechanical level, and answering tests that show students can perform those basic functions and that teachers can teach those basic functions just doesn't cut it. In the age of information we should be striving for more, we should be better.