So, you support the model used in countries like Mexico?
What I support is simply:
1. Traditional techniques and curriculuae
2. Careful and accurate measurement of results
3. Accountability.
To facilitate the above, I would allow freedom from most regulatlion and autonomy by schoools. Any and all school aid would be tied to the child, not given to the school, so that schools would have to encourage parents to choose that school.
All results to be published, that means how a teachers' classes do, and how the school stacks up.
That is the free market model.
Now, if a school chooses to use progressive education, and measurement gauges show it to be efficacious, so be it.
There is no one size fits all model for success, except for the hand-in-glove fit of the free market and America.
You are, you know, arguing for progressive education. Otherwise, you still continue to misdefine the terminology. Student-centered education is progressive education, whether through government or private industry. I think you do not realize that progressive education can be either liberal or conservative in process. Oh, my.
Ah, now I see the problem: you have no understanding of the difference between the views of Progressive education, and true education. I suggest that you get the game of Clue, and play it a few times.
But, even in your ignorance, I still like you. So here is a primer:
1. Paulo Freire represents the essence of Progressive thought:
"Freire never intends “pedagogy” to refer to any method of classroom instruction based on analysis and research, or to any means of producing higher academic achievement for students. [H]e relies on Marx’s standard formulation that “the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat [and] this dictatorship only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” In one footnote, however, Freire does mention a society that has actually realized the “permanent liberation” he seeks: it “appears to be the fundamental aspect of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.”
Pedagogy of the Oppressor by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2009
2. Traditional education insists on a body of knowledge, as opposed to Progressive:
"The pedagogical point of Freire’s thesis : its opposition to taxing students with any actual academic content, which Freire derides as “official knowledge” that serves to rationalize inequality within capitalist society."http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_freirian-pedagogy.html
3. Teacher's have the knowledge, and should be able to impart same. Not to Progressives:
"Pedagogy of the Oppressed resonated with progressive educators, already committed to a “child-centered” rather than a “teacher-directed” approach to classroom instruction. Freire’s rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools’ most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.”
Pedagogy of the Oppressor by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2009
4. E.D.Hirsch's traditional approach:
"Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students—indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills. …expanded the argument in a 1983 article, titled “Cultural Literacy,” in The American Scholar."
E. D. HirschÂ’s Curriculum for Democracy by Sol Stern, City Journal Autumn 2009
5. Now, get this: traditional learning is knowledge-based, not 'process-based.' The progressives believe that 'an agile mind can always look it up.'
"[Hirsch] launched the Core Knowledge Foundation, which sought to create a knowledge-based curriculum for the nation’s elementary schools. A wide range of scholars assisted him in specifying the knowledge that children in grades K–8 needed to become proficient readers. For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects....[But] . [T]eachers and principals had trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College, a bastion of so-called progressive education, and militantly defended the progressive-ed doctrine that facts were pedagogically unimportant. "http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch.html
6. "Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines." Ibid.
7. And, in summary, in case you are a slow learner:
"Progressive education rejects the subject matter, methods and purposes of
“traditional or classical education.” The fundamental purpose of “traditional or classical
education” was to transmit the culture to the younger generation... Among progressives the emphasis is on “process,” and there is disparagement
of “mere facts.” Suffice it to say that Hirsch has shown with devastating clarity that
reading, which could be called the most basic “skill,” cannot be done with understanding
unless the reader has the background knowledge expected by writers...There is an antipathy to testing, ranking and competition among progressives."
http://www.macalester.edu/~reedy/Samos07-ULTIssima-3[1].pdf
But if you are a curious fellow, here is the raison d’être of the Progressive:
'In Woodrow Wilson’s speech as president of Princeton: “Our problem is not merely to help students to adjust to themselves to world life…[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.' (Michael McGerr, “A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920,” p. 111
This is the basis of progressivism, and the reason for John Dewey's instigation of kindergarten, and of modern progressivess 'Head Start,' and early education.
Progressive ed is left wing, fraudulent, and a detriment to our children and our society.
Now there will be a short quiz: fold your paper, number one to five, no erasing, no crossing out.
Are you ready?
