"Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.
"Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.
"In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren’t smart enough."
Charles Murray is the W H Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 May 2008, on page 35 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
And those reformer/critics never seem to discuss the motivation of the child--they take the position that if the student is not motivated to learn, it is the school's or the teacher's fault for not motivating him/her. That, based on my experience, is nonsense.
posted by Frank at 9:46 PM
"My talk is about the lecture system in the same way that those books were about religion. Perhaps I should have paraphrased Bertrand Russell by calling my talk "The Fallacy of Lecturing," or "Why I Am an Unbeliever in the Lecture System. . . . Meanwhile, back at the classroom, the lecture is drawing to a close. Just as the bell rings, the lecturer, if he's a really smooth operator, comes to the end of a sentence, a paragraph, a nice neat unit. He lays down his last piece of chalk — he knows exactly how many pieces the lecture will take — picks up his precious lecture notes, and goes out. The students, tired but happy, rise up and follow after him. Their heads are empty, but their notebooks are full. Their necks are a little tired; it's been like a sort of vertical tennis match: board, notebook, board, notebook. But other than that, everything is all right. Any student will tell you, "I never had any trouble with the course until the first examination."
From: Proceedings of the Chicago Conferences on Liberal Education, Number 1, Undergraduate Education in Chemistry and Physics (edited by Marian R. Rice). The College Center for Curricular Thought: The University of Chicago, (October 18-19, 1986).Even when the lecture is fresh, that is not the way most students learn most material. They need to be doing something--engaged in the activity. That's more difficult in history than, say, expository writing or organic chemistry, but it not THAT much more difficult.
posted by Frank at 3:26 PM
