K-12 Education settles for Empty Curriculum

I taught myself for Senior High School.  It was easy to do.  I just brought a copy of the syllabus -- a slim volume that listed what we had to learn.  So I learnt it and passed the final exam that was all you had to do in those days. I cannot see how I would be able to do that nowadays.  It's all just waffle

Throughout most of the past century, the big shift in education has always been away from traditional academic subjects and toward faux-subjects and PC attitudes.

Circa 1800, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Academy offered: Reading, Handwriting, Writing, Bookkeeping, Arithmetic, Drawing, Rhetoric, Logic, Oratory, Morality, Natural Philosophy, History, Geometry, Algebra, Surveying, Navigation, Astronomy, Geography, Natural History, Mechanics, Gardening, English, Spanish, Latin, French, Greek, German.

In 1937 a New York City report card still listed all these subjects: Reading, Memory, Grammar, Composition, Spelling, Word Study, Penmanship, Arithmetic, Nature-Science, Geography, History-Civics, Drawing, Sewing, Cooking-Shop, Music, Physical Training, Habits (which include Honor, Speech, Cleanliness).

Note that these are subjects where you learn facts, dates, places, knowledge, information, pick any terms you want. All that is scoffed at now. Traditional subjects are déclassé, trivial, not to be bothered with in the modern public school. Now welcome: an empty suit curriculum.

Even if a school claims to teach arithmetic, for one example, it does so in a Common Core approach that virtually guarantees children don’t know how to do arithmetic.

So what will the students do all day? They will learn a variety of “skills” and “competencies” that were hardly thought of 50 years ago.

According to the website called ThoughtfulLearning, “21st century skills are a set of abilities that students need to develop in order to succeed in the information age.” These skills include Learning Skills (Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaborating, and Communicating); Literacy Skills (Information Literacy, Media Literacy, and Technology Literacy); and finally Life Skills (Flexibility, Initiative, Social Skills; Productivity; Leadership).

A large school district in Virginia recently announced “Compass to 2020, the Strategic Framework.” Buzzwords include: “critical concepts”; “globally competitive skills”;  “Responding to Students Needs (RSN) model”; “effective and innovative teaching practices that maximize rigor and meaningful engagement for all students”; “create inquiry-based and experiential-learning opportunities”; “personalized learning opportunities”; “social-emotional learning strategies”; and “interest-based, flexible, student-directed learning opportunities.”  

We don’t hear much about what facts the children will actually learn. And how do you test all this stuff? Collaborating and communicating? The feeling is that the school system prefers to discuss all these generalized methodologies rather than saying children will know the states in the union or how to do long division.

Professor Charles Fadel, for his Curriculum Redesign initiative, created a PDF presentation that said we need: “Character:  Adaptability—deeper learning; Resilience; Persistence; Ethics, etc.; Skills: Creativity/Innovation; Critical thinking; Communication; Collaboration, etc.”

Resilience and persistence? I suspect the Boy Scouts would teach all these things more effectively than our schools. Or send the kids out for a week of Wilderness Training.

Fadel wants to “Reassess Knowledge for relevance.” He wants to “harness interdisciplinarity.” These were buzzwords 40 years ago.  It seems to be difficult to come up with new and different wisps. But our so-called educators keep trying.

Visit Wikipedia and look at Life Skills, a fad from the last decade or two: “Life skills can vary from financial literacy, through substance-abuse prevention, to therapeutic techniques to deal with disabilities such as autism.” Here are some more: Coping, Defense mechanisms, Emotional intelligence, Emotional literacy, Emotional self-regulation; Empathy, Moral development, People skills, Psychological resilience, Social emotional learning, Social intelligence, Soft skills, Study skills, and Theory of multiple intelligences.

Soft skills? Yes, that’s the perfect word for all of this. It sounds a lot like satire.

Meanwhile, across the country, professors of education now agree that teachers shouldn't teach. Professors from Harvard University pontificate: teachers must be facilitators. In short, the schools won’t be teaching knowledge. They’ll be teaching “resilience" or whatever. Oh, really?

It’s an historical fact: our public schools have waged war against academic content for a long time. All the jargon discussed so far is simply the latest marketing slogans in a never-ending campaign to make sure that children don’t learn what seven-times-eight is or why George Washington is important. This dilution of content sprang naturally from Dewey’s “progressive” education, which was always intended to lead to a socialist America.

In 1950’s there was the a fad called “Life Adjustment Education.” A professor of curriculum wrote an article in 1954 that began:

"How can secondary-school teaching be enriched and enlivened so as to provide effective education and development for all American young people? How can interest and real effort toward learning be aroused and maintained among pupils who won’t study unless they clearly see a reason for study? What does the secondary school program have do with the development of sound citizenship, with character education, with moral and spiritual values? How can every youngster in school receive individualized, personalized, and sustained guidance and attention? How can school learning be related to the practical down-to-earth concerns for growing boys and girls as they approach adult responsibilities?”

You can plainly see they’re recycling all the same rigmarole today. Here’s the Nihilism Two-Step: You denigrate anything substantial that the schools are still teaching. You announce that henceforth we will focus on cutting edge attitudes and adjustments.

The bottom line on all of this “adjustment” is that children learn less.  These elite educators fear a fact the way women were traditionally understood to fear a mouse. Oh my God, what is that thing there? Don’t let it in the classroom!

Look back at the subjects that Benjamin Franklin’s Academy taught. Maybe we wouldn’t want big doses of all those topics, but it’s easy to imagine that most people would think this an exciting education: History, Gardening,  Oratory, Drawing, Astronomy, Natural History. This is real education, i.e., what your brain wants to take home and keep.

Instead, we see a Zero Curriculum taking shape. Like Pepsi Zero it will have no calories in it. But the ads will tell you that it’s the perfect beverage.

What we all want is education that’s like a sumptuous buffet, a memorable smorgasbord. Lots of lush facts and fascinating information. If these pretenders up at the Harvard Graduate School of Education would stop fooling around, they would focus on teaching children what children need to know and want to know.

Bruce Deitrick Price explains educational theories and methods on his site Improve-Education.org

Throughout most of the past century, the big shift in education has always been away from traditional academic subjects and toward faux-subjects and PC attitudes.

Circa 1800, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Academy offered: Reading, Handwriting, Writing, Bookkeeping, Arithmetic, Drawing, Rhetoric, Logic, Oratory, Morality, Natural Philosophy, History, Geometry, Algebra, Surveying, Navigation, Astronomy, Geography, Natural History, Mechanics, Gardening, English, Spanish, Latin, French, Greek, German.

In 1937 a New York City report card still listed all these subjects: Reading, Memory, Grammar, Composition, Spelling, Word Study, Penmanship, Arithmetic, Nature-Science, Geography, History-Civics, Drawing, Sewing, Cooking-Shop, Music, Physical Training, Habits (which include Honor, Speech, Cleanliness).

Note that these are subjects where you learn facts, dates, places, knowledge, information, pick any terms you want. All that is scoffed at now. Traditional subjects are déclassé, trivial, not to be bothered with in the modern public school. Now welcome: an empty suit curriculum.

Even if a school claims to teach arithmetic, for one example, it does so in a Common Core approach that virtually guarantees children don’t know how to do arithmetic.

So what will the students do all day? They will learn a variety of “skills” and “competencies” that were hardly thought of 50 years ago.

According to the website called ThoughtfulLearning, “21st century skills are a set of abilities that students need to develop in order to succeed in the information age.” These skills include Learning Skills (Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Collaborating, and Communicating); Literacy Skills (Information Literacy, Media Literacy, and Technology Literacy); and finally Life Skills (Flexibility, Initiative, Social Skills; Productivity; Leadership).

A large school district in Virginia recently announced “Compass to 2020, the Strategic Framework.” Buzzwords include: “critical concepts”; “globally competitive skills”;  “Responding to Students Needs (RSN) model”; “effective and innovative teaching practices that maximize rigor and meaningful engagement for all students”; “create inquiry-based and experiential-learning opportunities”; “personalized learning opportunities”; “social-emotional learning strategies”; and “interest-based, flexible, student-directed learning opportunities.”  

We don’t hear much about what facts the children will actually learn. And how do you test all this stuff? Collaborating and communicating? The feeling is that the school system prefers to discuss all these generalized methodologies rather than saying children will know the states in the union or how to do long division.

Professor Charles Fadel, for his Curriculum Redesign initiative, created a PDF presentation that said we need: “Character:  Adaptability—deeper learning; Resilience; Persistence; Ethics, etc.; Skills: Creativity/Innovation; Critical thinking; Communication; Collaboration, etc.”

Resilience and persistence? I suspect the Boy Scouts would teach all these things more effectively than our schools. Or send the kids out for a week of Wilderness Training.

Fadel wants to “Reassess Knowledge for relevance.” He wants to “harness interdisciplinarity.” These were buzzwords 40 years ago.  It seems to be difficult to come up with new and different wisps. But our so-called educators keep trying.

Visit Wikipedia and look at Life Skills, a fad from the last decade or two: “Life skills can vary from financial literacy, through substance-abuse prevention, to therapeutic techniques to deal with disabilities such as autism.” Here are some more: Coping, Defense mechanisms, Emotional intelligence, Emotional literacy, Emotional self-regulation; Empathy, Moral development, People skills, Psychological resilience, Social emotional learning, Social intelligence, Soft skills, Study skills, and Theory of multiple intelligences.

Soft skills? Yes, that’s the perfect word for all of this. It sounds a lot like satire.

Meanwhile, across the country, professors of education now agree that teachers shouldn't teach. Professors from Harvard University pontificate: teachers must be facilitators. In short, the schools won’t be teaching knowledge. They’ll be teaching “resilience" or whatever. Oh, really?

It’s an historical fact: our public schools have waged war against academic content for a long time. All the jargon discussed so far is simply the latest marketing slogans in a never-ending campaign to make sure that children don’t learn what seven-times-eight is or why George Washington is important. This dilution of content sprang naturally from Dewey’s “progressive” education, which was always intended to lead to a socialist America.

In 1950’s there was the a fad called “Life Adjustment Education.” A professor of curriculum wrote an article in 1954 that began:

"How can secondary-school teaching be enriched and enlivened so as to provide effective education and development for all American young people? How can interest and real effort toward learning be aroused and maintained among pupils who won’t study unless they clearly see a reason for study? What does the secondary school program have do with the development of sound citizenship, with character education, with moral and spiritual values? How can every youngster in school receive individualized, personalized, and sustained guidance and attention? How can school learning be related to the practical down-to-earth concerns for growing boys and girls as they approach adult responsibilities?”

You can plainly see they’re recycling all the same rigmarole today. Here’s the Nihilism Two-Step: You denigrate anything substantial that the schools are still teaching. You announce that henceforth we will focus on cutting edge attitudes and adjustments.

The bottom line on all of this “adjustment” is that children learn less.  These elite educators fear a fact the way women were traditionally understood to fear a mouse. Oh my God, what is that thing there? Don’t let it in the classroom!

Look back at the subjects that Benjamin Franklin’s Academy taught. Maybe we wouldn’t want big doses of all those topics, but it’s easy to imagine that most people would think this an exciting education: History, Gardening,  Oratory, Drawing, Astronomy, Natural History. This is real education, i.e., what your brain wants to take home and keep.

Instead, we see a Zero Curriculum taking shape. Like Pepsi Zero it will have no calories in it. But the ads will tell you that it’s the perfect beverage.

What we all want is education that’s like a sumptuous buffet, a memorable smorgasbord. Lots of lush facts and fascinating information. If these pretenders up at the Harvard Graduate School of Education would stop fooling around, they would focus on teaching children what children need to know and want to know.

SOURCE






Free Community College Is a Government Handout for Rich, Middle Class

When it comes to President Obama’s proposal of free community college for all Americans, middle-class Americans should just say no.

Last week, the Obama administration announced the plan, which would make any college student who goes to community college part-time and maintains a 2.5 GPA eligible for a free ride for two years.

But this isn’t about offering a helping hand to struggling Americans who would have no other way to attend college. Low-income students already can use Pell Grants to pay for community college.

So the proposal would primarily benefit middle-class and affluent students. That’s a problem. Why is the federal government — already deep in debt — subsidizing education for students who personally or through their families can afford it?

Yes, it would be good if more Americans went to college. But because something is good doesn’t mean the government should intervene. As shown by test scores of the public school system and the Head Start preschool program, government spending and management don’t correlate with success.

Furthermore, a college education is a good investment for those who complete college. Students who, along with their families, pay for their own education will reap the benefits as they generally make more than their non-college-educated peers. They also tend to value more the things they’ve earned and not simply been given.

As a teen, I heard about the importance of saving for college — and I did, setting aside money earned from babysitting and taking orders at Burger King. When I was tempted to skip a class later in college, I’d usually think about how much my education was costing — and go.

No, I couldn’t cover most of the costs of my college education. But receiving a gift from your parents is different from receiving a government handout. I knew the amount had come out of decades of hard work. I was grateful — and I felt accountable.

A recent photo from the Humans of New York blog showed a woman in a worker’s uniform, standing in Grand Central. “After I finish my shift at the bakery, I start my shift at Starbucks. I work 95 hours per week at three different jobs,” she told the photographer. “One of my sons graduated from Yale, and I have two more children in college. And when they finish, I want to go to college, too.”

You can bet her children won’t forget her sacrifice. But if her kids were just given a government gift, would they appreciate their education as much?

Government does some things well. But making a college education an entitlement for the middle class and rich isn’t one of them.

SOURCE






UK: Poland is leading the way for England's schools, Education Secretary says

The Coalition's school reforms have been inspired by Poland, the Education Secretary has said after new figures suggested that immigrant children are outperforming poor British pupils.

Nicky Morgan disclosed that the renewed focus on core academic subjects for all children has been influenced by the approach in Poland, which has jumped up international rankings in the past decade.

Her comments came as new figures published by the OECD suggest that immigrant children are outperforming the most disadvantaged pupils at mathematics.

The figures show that immigrant children are less likely to be among the poorest performing pupils than those from the most deprived backgrounds.

A separate report published last year suggested that cities with large numbers of immigrant children produce better GCSE results than the rest of the country because pupils work harder.

Highlighting the Coalition's reforms in a speech in London yesterday, Mrs Morgan said: "As exam results in England soared ever higher, our international performance was stagnating, with other countries overtaking us in rankings like the PISA survey.

"We knew we needed to make urgent changes and looked to the world’s leading education systems for inspiration. We saw that they shared some key features: high levels of autonomy, accountability and aspiration as well as a strong focus on teacher quality.

"We saw that the results of countries like Germany and Poland had improved massively following moves to ensure that all their pupils studied core academic subjects, regardless of whether they went on to an academic or vocational path."

Poland has overhauled its education system over the past decade and gone from being below average in the OECD group of economies to being among the top 10 nations for reading and science, and top 15 for maths. Pupils attain higher scores on international tests than Britain in both reading and maths.

Under the reforms in Poland, pupils spend more time studying core subjects and vocational study has been delayed until they are 16.

The Coalition echoed the changes in new national curriculum announced last year which has a greater focus on core subjects and more exacting standards.

One education source said: "Polish parents who come to the UK say they cannot believe how easy the national curriculum is compared to what they are used to."

According to the OECD, the performance of Britain's schools failed to improve significantly between 2000 and 2012.

The report found that overall UK is ranked just 26th out of 63 nations for its performance in maths as it lags behind countries in the Far East.

Andreas Schleicer, the OECD director of education and skills, said: "The UK has pretty much been flat in terms of learning outcomes at least until 2012, despite a very significant increase in spending.

"Spending on reducing class sizes is not a very promising way to invest on better outcomes. The best education systems have put their money squarely on the quality of teaching. "

He said that the UK should be doing much more to check what difference education reforms make to children's lives.

Around the world, trillions of dollars are spent on education policies, but just one in 10 are actually evaluated, according to new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The OECD's research also warns that the UK has some policies such as grouping pupils by ability in class, and giving families choice over schools, that could "hinder equity" – meaning they may not help to create an equal school system for all pupils.

SOURCE