In many of our classrooms these days emphasis is put on feelings and the self. An actual curriculum, listing things students ought to know, is viewed as cramping the human spirit. Students are taught to be suspicious of authority and the notion that teachers might be expected to know more than the children they teach, so the word "teacher" is in decline. The fad word is now "facilitator," part guide and part bystander watching the self-educating child.
The traditional school hostility to achievement currently hides behind the word "equity" -- bright students must be tamped down so slower learners will not feel bad about themselves. Smuggled in along with equality is the notion that performance and learning shouldn't really count -- some children are elevated at the expense of others. The result is that the brighter students get little help and more time and money are spent on low achievers. If the same time and money were spent on brighter students the benefits would be far greater in the long run.
Grades and marks are bad, too, because they characterize and divide children. We now give "fuzzy" reports to parents telling them little about how their child is performing at school. Basically what most parents would like to know is "How is my child's academic ability in relation to the rest of the class?" But reports will never give parents this information. Hell no! Parents might compare reports and work out that one child is brighter than another. They will probably work this out later when one child goes on to tertiary education and the other becomes a shelf stacker at the local supermarket, but it will be too late to do much about it then. What will happen to self esteem now?
Testing is frowned upon, as is any sort of academic competition, which may harm the self esteem of lower achieving students. Yet sporting competition is seen as healthy and strongly encouraged in school. Failure to win and self esteem don’t seem to matter here. In fact sport uses every technique the classroom psych-educators say is harmful and non-productive, such as authority, discipline, ability grouping ("A" team, "B" Team, "No" Team), expectations, scores, time demands, individual accountability, responsibility, punishment, etc. How can coaches make all these destructive techniques work and many classroom educators cannot?
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Failure can actually be a strong motivator.
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Many teachers now believe that instilling self-esteem should be a paramount
goal of child rearing and education. If students work in classrooms where posters
proclaim WE APPLAUD OURSELVES!
and complete sentences like "I am special because
...." they will be inoculated against drug use, bad grades and just about
everything else short of the common cold. Or so the story goes. Educators have
soaked up the message trying to make their students feel good about themselves
no matter how badly they perform. If children can't be corrected for wrong answers
because it damages their self-esteem, the only results will be incompetent students
who feel good about their ignorance! Teachers eliminate the possibility of wrong
answers, giving only positive feedback so that everyone can win-all in the name
of enhancing their students' self-esteem. Testing is seen as bad because it
compares children to each other. In other words, the best tool to see if learning
has taken place is not used.
Many teachers today are so focused on the role of positive self-esteem as a necessary pre-condition for learning that their educational model becomes therapeutic. When self-esteem becomes the be-all and end-all of education, teachers are no longer in a position to insist on performance. Discipline is rejected as dangerous to children's self-esteem.
But, if teaching self-esteem is done the wrong way, you can raise a generation of kids who cannot tolerate frustration. The idea that you can solve problems simply by telling kids they're great is so seductive that no one wants to admit it doesn't do any good. Giving kids something they can truly feel proud of is hard work for everyone. Then true self esteem will come through genuine achievement.
There is plenty of curriculum to promote positive self-esteem; what we need is curriculum to promote positive self-control.
When a child whose self-concept has been artificially inflated - in other words, not as a result of individual effort and bona fide success, but rather as a result of (a) having been led to believe by adults that he is more capable than he actually is and (b) not having been held completely accountable for misbehavior - reaches the teen years and begins having real-world experiences that contradict that egoism, his self-image becomes threatened. The two likely responses to such threat are withdrawal or a striking out at the perceived source(s) of the contradiction; in other words, depression or violence. Whether the one or the other is probably a matter of a number of factors - social, biological, familial, cultural and situational.
Unfortunately, many of today's educators paint traditional education as the arch-enemy of "humane" modern education. Even everyday classroom language unfairly pits the two alternatives against one another. Here are some typical descriptions used by progressives to compare old and new methods:
Traditional vs. Modern
Merely verbal vs. Hands-on
Premature vs. Developmentally appropriate
Fragmented vs. Integrated
Boring vs. Interesting
Lockstep vs. Individualized
Parents presented with such choices for their children's education would be unlikely to prefer traditional, merely verbal, premature, fragmented, boring, and lockstep instruction to instruction that is modern, hands-on, developmentally appropriate, integrated, interesting, and individualized. But of course this is a loaded and misleading contrast. Let's look at those simple polarities one at a time.
The emphasis that permeated the traditional school was recitation, memorization, recall, testing, grades, promotion, and failure. And for this kind of education it was necessary that children primarily listen, sit quiet and attentive in seats, try to fix in their minds what the teacher told them, commit to memory the lessons assigned to them.
This argument ignores the fact that traditional knowledge-based schooling is
currently employed with great success in most other advanced nations. It fails
to note that challenging subject matter--the core of traditional education--can
be taught in a lively, demanding way.
If parents were told straightforwardly that the so-called "untraditional" or
"modern" mode of education now dominant in our schools has coincided with the
decline of academic competencies among our students, they might be less enthusiastic
about the experiment.
The progressive educators say that there has not been a decline in academic standards. Firstly, how can they make this claim when they have no concrete evidence as they do not give tests, and object strongly to any suggestion of a test being administered (for example, the Victorian LAP Tests in the 1990's). And secondly, if comparing today’s standards to those of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s then they are probably right in saying that standards have not declined. Standards took a big dive in the 70’s and have stayed there ever since. But the progressivists do not want to look at standards in the 50’s and 60’s which would blow their argument to pieces.
The idea that students will learn better if they see, feel, and touch the subjects they are studying has such obvious merit that it would be amazing if traditional education did not make use of multi-sensory methods of teaching. And indeed, if one studies the history of educational methods, one finds that every traditionalist theorist advocates hands-on methods where they lead to good results. The hidden progressivist agenda on this issue lies in the disparagement of verbal learning. An essential aspect of understanding in human beings is the ability to speak or write about what one has assimilated. Disparaging verbal learning is especially harmful to children who come to school with restricted vocabularies because of family disadvantages.
A fear of "premature" instruction has led to the removal of significant knowledge from grade-school curricula. Once again, the primary victims of this impoverishment of education are disadvantaged children. Advantaged children gain much of the withheld knowledge at home. If "premature" instruction is such a grave risk, why do young children of comparable ages in other lands absorb such knowledge with great benefit and no ill effects? The label "developmentally appropriate" is generally applied without any empirical basis--simply on the basis of a "gut reaction" by progressive educators.
Both traditionalists and progressives prefer instruction which shows how things fit together and at the same time helps secure what is being learned by reinforcing it in a variety of contexts. The pseudo-polarization over "fragmented" teaching has been exploited ever since the teens of this century to disparage the direct teaching of subject matters such as mathematics, spelling, and biology in classes that are specifically devoted to those topics. The whole outdated concept of subject matters is to be replaced by "thematic" or "project-oriented" instruction. The result has been not integration at all but the failure of students to learn the most basic elements of the different subject matters.
This opposition is used to withhold academic subject matters from children
in the early grades on the grounds that true education proceeds from the child's
own experience rather than externally "imposed" concepts. Because it is true
that children learn best when new knowledge builds upon what they already know,
progressives insist that early schooling should be limited to subjects that
have direct relevance to the child's life, such as "My Neighbourhood", "Rights
and Responsibilities", and similar "relevant" topics.
Yet every person with enough schooling to read these words knows that subject
matters by themselves do not repel or attract interest. An effective teacher
can make the most distant subject interesting, and an ineffective one can make
any subject dull. The presumption that the affairs of one's own community are
more interesting than those of faraway times or places is contradicted in every
classroom that studies dinosaurs and fairy tales. Progressives' warnings about
classic subject matter being "boring" or "irrelevant" simply conceal an anti-intellectual,
anti-academic bias.
Traditional instruction is said to impose the same content on every student,
without taking into account the child's individual strengths, weaknesses, and
interests, whereas modern instruction is tailored to each child's individual
temperament. Unquestionably, one-on-one tutorials are the most effective mode
of teaching. How, then, can we explain the paradox that individuals learn more
and better in schools where greater emphasis is placed on whole-class instruction
than on individualized tutoring? How do we explain the research finding that
even students needing extra help make more progress when whole class instruction
is emphasized over individual tutorials? The answer lies in simple arithmetic.
It is impossible to provide effective one-on-one tutorials to 25 students at
a time. When one student is being coached individually, 24 others are being
left to their own devices, usually in silent seatwork. When, on the other hand,
knowledge is effectively given to the entire group simultaneously, more students
are learning much more of the time. The occasional individual help they receive
is all the more effective. By contrast, classrooms that march under the banner
of individual attention are often characterized by individual neglect.
Is there an available alternative to today's failed progressive education? Yes.
That alternative is knowledge-based education.
Content used to be a contender in education and still is in most fields of endeavour.
For many years, textbooks guided the content students learned. Teachers used
similar texts, and learning proceeded in a logical manner. Many teachers have
stopped using texts, in part because some textbook writing seems to have been
handed over to people who used to write manuals on how to boil an egg in 127
easy steps.
Process, on the other hand, is in its salad days. Education reform has required
teachers to continue their education and to update what has been espoused by
teacher training institutions for years - more process.
Teachers are taking more courses than ever on such topics as cooperative learning
(a group of students working together and learning from one another), thematic
instruction (learning in math, history, language, and science comes from a single
theme such as dinosaurs), portfolio assessment (don't use grades, keep a portfolio
like an artist does), multiple intelligences (the theory that students have
different talents), hands-on learning (it's not real unless you can touch it
or make it - a big hit in health class), and critical thinking skills (the notion
that you can plug in a thinking process to solve myriad problems). These are
but a few.
You don't see many courses in specific disciplines. This is because such courses
would violate some of the educational Commandments. Thou shalt not teach facts.
Thou shalt not drill. Thou shalt integrate disciplines.
If you want to become a stockbroker, a lawyer, a commercial truck driver, a
ship's captain, or an engineer, you study a specific content. You gain a great
volume of knowledge and then process it. After the learning, you can analyze,
synthesize, and make judgments and evaluations. You also have a better chance
of passing the test.
Educational theory rests on quicksand. It assumes that problems can be solved
using strategies, techniques, and thinking processes without having solid background
in a given area. If your car is running poorly, do you want a mechanic who has
critical thinking skills, or do you want one who has knowledge and thinking
skills? The same could be said about your heart surgeon, lawyer, or plumber.
Good thinking usually comes from good information.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING
It helps to understand what a democratic classroom is.
In a democratic classroom you have a small "socialistic society" where everyone is equal, including the teacher, who is simply seen by students as a member of the classroom and acts as a "facilitator", perhaps even a "mate", who the students call by first name. The teacher is not an authority figure in a democratic classroom. The concept of social equality is of primary emphasis. Academic education is secondary and is, to some teachers, a byproduct of the primary goal - social development of the child. Social change becomes the primary objective of progressive education(i.e. what the child is, what he can do, and how he relates to his world are much more important than what he knows. The child’s attitude, behaviour, values, and beliefs take priority over traditional academics.
Marks or grades violate the goal of equality. Marks are "bad" because they stratify the class into levels of achievement. Multi-age grouping helps to eliminate another type of social inequality - grade levels.
Peer tutoring is classroom social theory put into practice, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. This group responsibility, in effect, lowers the high achievers to raise the low achievers.
Academic competition is seen as destructive to social equality and the proper development of the children.