kitchen table math, the sequel: blatant bias

Friday, March 23, 2007

blatant bias

How is this for bias in Educations Weeks Talkback section:
What do you think? Does the current approach to school reform favor the regurgitation of random facts over the development of critical and creative thinking?
Interesting terminology... 'regurgitation of random facts'... no prejudice here.

I suppose I could ask...

Does the current approach to education reform favor the the lowering of standards over the mastery of subject matter domain knowledge over ?

This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to take the education establishment seriously.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The comments are interesting, too.

I have wondered for quite a while if real teachers actually believed that "high order thinking skills" were more important than base/rote knowledge. It seems that some do.

-Mark R.

TurbineGuy said...

I was actually going to post on some of the comments, but it was too easy

Instructivist said...

"Does the current approach to education reform favor the mastery of content knowledge over the lowering of standards?"

Good question.

Not even lowering of standards. No standards.

I would reword that questions to read:

Does the current approach to education reform favor the mastery of content knowledge over a total and pathetic lack of proficiency?

The question posed by ed week is so biased it is comical. I would like to see a list of these supposedly "random facts" that are being regurgitated. Which facts and are they put through a randomizer before being attempted?

The comments contain a lot of vintage ed school ideology. I loved the one by one Ray:

"This is exactly why standards, no matter their intention, are so misguided. First of all, we're completely ignoring a student's individual interests and motivations;"

That's very funny. This guy should spend some time in a classroom with the disadantaged and find out where their interests lie. Hint: non-stop gabbing and dancing on tables for starters.