Rrhain, sorry for the delay in acknowledging your reply.
First I should say that I really don’t have much contact with any educators (a few partners of friends I might see a couple times a year or people I talk to in parties. So by no means do I think I have much of any clue as to what is really going on in public schools these days.
quote:
That would depend upon what you mean by "teaching to the test." If it means such as what happens in the Academic Decathlon where the Literature section is based upon a particular book, then that is a problem if all you are testing is whether or not they have read it by asking plot questions.
This is pure assumption on my part. I also live in California and my understanding is that in K-12 some funding and other school pressures are directly tied to passing state and/or district tests. At least that is what I get from the news and talk shows. ;-)
Now my education I always considered a bit on the odd side. Most of my K-12 education took place in the 1970’s. Had I graduated on time it would have been 1980, instead I took and passed the CHSPE (California High School Proficiency Examination) in 1978. Farted around in a few Junior College for 4-5 years, before getting an AA in humanities, before going on to a State University for a BA (Communications). Much of my early education was somewhat unusual (thought perhaps not so for that time), with forced bussing, various experimental education programs (a long series of teachers who were young and very much products of the 1960’s), modular education, self-paced learning. When it worked, it worked very well, but it also left me with a few rather large gaps in my early education.
In fairness, even then it seemed and seems to me that most teaching was to the test, but the test was the teacher’s more than the states, or so it seemed to me.
It is interesting to me that you brought up your library class, as my own library class is something I’ve often cited to people whenever I get into a discussion about learning. I remember at the time a little light going on when I realized teacher was teaching more of a skill or tool than yet another class of memorizing facts. In my mind the type of learning wasn’t of the same type I got in many other classes. It is that type that I would have liked to see more of in my other subjects.
I can see two main approaches used to convince people of an idea. One I think of as the scientific/logical method, the other I think of as the persuasive argument method. The persuasive argument is the method I link in my mind to lawyers, police, governments, organizations, religions, used-car salesmen, etc. The scientific/logical method would be more along the lines as used in the forum guidelines.
I realize that much of what is taught in schools is critical thinking in the sense that teachers are often ask students to analyze what is being taught. I suspect, at least it seemed to be the case in my own experience, that this is focused on more in science and math classes then other classes. I can’t imagine your students get away with simply making assertions. ;-)
I do think the curriculum could be further improved with a greater focus on critical thinking and logic to be applied to all subjects and not a subset. I see the value of tools like ”logic’ as a way to quickly flag incoming information as possibly problematic. Again, I’m not pointing fingers at teachers, I am asking if in a world where so much of the information we are asked to process is presented as persuasive arguments if our citizens are leaving school with the needed tools to properly evaluate those arguments? It seems to me that the general answer is no.
™ Version 4.2
