Education professors have damaged
generations of K-12 teachers and administrators at the Minneapolis Public
Schools and in locally centralized school districts throughout the United
States with notions rooted in the need for the education professor to survive
at universities at which other professors know so much more
Consider these terms from the education
professor’s lexicon, followed by my own comments:
Culturally Biased Curriculum
This is the notion that the key problem
with curriculum as conventionally presented in K-12 classrooms has a bias
toward the West, mainly Europe and the United States.
Culturally Biased Tests
This term refers to the cultural bias that education
professors and their acolytes in the education establishment assert makes
standardized tests unfair to students of color and to other populations who are
unfamiliar with vocabulary and references that originate in the culture of European
Americans who dominate in constructing the tests.
Drill and Kill
“Drill and kill” is the moniker assigned by
education professors and others in the education establishment to rote methods
of learning and to the memorization of factual material, considered by those
who use the term to destroy creativity and promote a distaste for school-based
learning.
Exhibitions
This refers to presentations made by
students, following group projects or from portfolios from which students
select items to present to teachers, to other evaluators, or to an audience of
parents and other interested observers.
Factory-Model Schools
This is a derogatory term applied by
education professors and other “progressive” educators to the traditional high
school, held to be a fossil from an industrial age when the function of schools
was to train students as if working in lockstep on an assembly line in a
factory on the floor of which a foreman did the bidding of those higher in the
bureaucratic hierarchy.
Facts are inferior to understanding
Education professors assert that factual
knowledge is unimportant, except as sought by the student herself or
himself; what is more important is a
deep conceptual understanding of the concepts to which the facts are pertinent.
Facts are soon outdated.
Education professors hold that in this
fast-changing world of technology, discreet facts are soon outdated, so that
learning how to learn is more important that systematic acquisition of defined
knowledge sets.
Hands-On Learning
In the view of education professors and the
“progressive” educators that they train, real-world experience with tactile
objects is preferable to book learning.
Holistic Learning
This term refers to learning as natural engagement
with the totality of one’s environment, featuring interconnection rather than
segmention into artificially designated subject areas.
Learning by Doing
Similar to hands-on learning, this term
stresses the importance of learning through activity, in the real world or in
application, rather than memorization, of concepts and information.
My Comments >>>>>
Culturally Biased Curriculum
The real problem in K-12 education is the
absence of any systematically presented curriculum, especially at K-5, which if
properly constructed would reflect the human cultural inheritance across all
cultures of the world.
Culturally Biased Tests
Great attention has been paid over the
course of that last twenty years by those who construct standardized tests to
present examples from a variety of cultural contexts that resonate with
students of diverse cultures; especially
with regard to mathematics, though, there is not much cultural bias embedded in
the four basic operations, fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios,
proportions; and concepts from algebra,
geometry, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus.
Drill and Kill
Athletes and musicians practice certain motions,
learned from the best practitioners, to the point of automaticity, all the
better preparing them for individualistic creative expression as their
knowledge and skill level increases; K-12
students should do the same.
Exhibitions
These are adjunct ways of demonstrating
what a student knows; objective tests
and standardized assessments more accurately and fairly indicate what a
student knows across a broad and deep range of knowledge.
Factory-Model Schools
Conventional schools provide classroom
settings conducive to efficient learning;
when conducted by a master teacher, lectures and classroom discussions
abet the accumulation of a multiplicity of knowledge and skill sets in an
engaging and intellectually challenging learning environment.
Facts are inferior to understanding
Factual knowledge is a necessary
prerequisite for deep contemplation and full understanding.
Facts are soon outdated.
The preponderance of facts accumulated over
centuries of experience by scientists, mathematicians, historians, and other
scholars are permanent fixtures in the intellectual architecture of the major academic
disciplines; mastery of time-tested
facts and concepts is necessary to evaluate information in contemporary
contexts and to engage in processes that produce new knowledge sets.
Hands-On Learning
Reading books or cybernetic print sources and listening to lectures are the most efficient
ways to accumulate vast stores of factual knowledge; hands-on learning is an engaging way to apply
and experiment with what one has learned from lectures and reading.
Holistic Learning
Mastery of knowledge and skill sets in the discreet
academic disciplines abets holistic learning.
Learning by Doing
Learning by doing is not as efficient as
learning from hard copy and cybernetic print sources or from lectures, but
learning, practicing, and experimenting through activity is a powerful adjunct
to the more efficient means of accumulating vast stores of knowledge.
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