The same people who claim education is indoctrination are the same people who want to home school and / or defund public education. School offers a diversity of points of view and liberal arts along with social science offer viewpoints that challenge conformity. But but this is America and education must create workers not thinkers, athletics not philosophers. Every time I return to online discussions I feel like Yogi Berra, deja vu all over....
'William Deresiewicz's 'Excellent Sheep:
The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life'
The Liberal Arts vs. Neoliberalism | Commonweal Magazine
'Key & Peele
Imagines What It’d Be Like if We Obsessed Over Teachers the Way We Do Athletes'
Key & Peele Imagines What It’d Be Like if We Obsessed Over Teachers the Way We Do Athletes
"Thirty years ago, 10 percent of California’s general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons. Today nearly 11 percent goes to prisons and 8 percent to higher education." Friedman/Mandelbaum in 'That Used To Be Us'
'The U.S. Is Letting Poor Kids Fall Further and Further Behind in Reading'
The U.S. Is Letting Poor Kids Fall Further and Further Behind in Reading
"The Nordic countries maintain their dynamism despite high taxation in several ways. Most important, they spend lavishly on research and development and higher education. All of them, but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D, the highest ratio in the world today. On average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations." Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology
"Consider how effectively America's future citizens are trained not to judge for themselves about anything. From the first grade to the twelfth, from one coast to the other, instruction in America's classrooms is almost entirely dogmatic. Answers are "right" and answers are "wrong," but mostly answers are short. "At all levels, [teacher-made] tests called almost exclusively for short answers and recall of information," reports Goodlad. In more than 1,000 classrooms visited by his researchers, "only rarely" was there "evidence to suggest instruction likely to go much beyond mere possession of information to a level of understanding its implications." Goodlad goes on to note that "the intellectual terrain is laid out by the teacher. The paths for walking through it are largely predetermined by the teacher." The give-and-take of genuine discussion is conspicuously absent. "Not even 1%" of instructional time, he found, was devoted to discussions that "required some kind of open response involving reasoning or perhaps an opinion from students.... The extraordinary degree of student passivity stands out."
Why Johnny Can't Think
PoliticalChic's Review of "Waiting for Superman"
Education Then and Now
Education Then and Now
Conservatives Battle Liberals In The Classroom
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