REVIVE THINKING

An opinion piece in “THE WASHINGTON POST” last week summed up, very well, the ideas advocated in several of these previous BLOGs. The piece was entitled, “A New Agenda for School Reform,” by Diane Ravitch. I’m going to quote a couple of her more salient observations.

“I used to be a strong supporter of school accountability and choice. But in recent years, it became clear to me that these strategies were not working. The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program enacted in 2002 did not produce large gains in reading and math. The gains in math were larger before the law was implemented, and the most recent national tests showed that eighth-grade students have made no improvement in reading since 1998. By mandating a utopian goal of 100 percent proficiency, the law encouraged states to lower their standards and make false claims of progress. Worse, the law stigmatized schools that could not meet its unrealistic expectation.”

“. . . It is time to change course. To begin with, let’s agree that a good education encompasses far more than just basic skills. A good education involves learning history, geography, civics, the arts, science, literature and foreign language. Schools should be expected to teach these subjects even if students are not tested on them.”

I can almost hear Robert Maynard Hutchins cheering loudly. Hutchins, America’s greatest educator and President of the University of Chicago (1929-1945) always advocated a liberal education approach, primarily through a familiarity with THE GREAT BOOKS. He believed that students should become exposed to conflicting ideas in order to weigh and balance those ideas in their own minds. Through contact with great ideas, Hutchins believed that schools could concentrate on the stimulation of thinking, rather than exclusively on the memorization of the practical. He railed against the continuing practice of converting once-fine universities to, in effect, glorified trade schools.

As we’ve stated many times, memorization and testing do not measure learning and thinking. They merely measure short-term retention. And in this country those rote activities are rapidly eroding whatever future contributions to the advancement of society our youth could achieve!