"What is the best way to raise standards and to ensure that students are well educated? Forget about more money and smaller classes. Why not, as Newsweek has argued, close the schools of education? Those schools, instead of giving beginning teachers a mastery of their subject matter, especially in areas such as primary literacy and numeracy, are more concerned with inculcating politically correct values. As Monash-based teacher educator Georgina Tsolidis notes in her summary of teacher training in Australia, education is redefined as a political process whereby students have to be empowered to challenge the status quo.
What's ignored is that high standards and higher order skills depend on rote learning and mastering the basics. Also ignored is that in the real world there are right and wrong answers and that generic skills such as problem solving are subject-specific."
[Kevin Donnelly is director of Education Strategies and author of Why Our Schools are Failing.]
No comments:
Post a Comment