America's education system is a dismal failure in comparison the rest of the first world. It's relatively apparent after spending just a few minutes in an American school. But don't expect it to get any better any time soon.
Politicians have been using the subject of education to win votes for as long as I can remember. The idiotic No Child Left Behind agenda is the most recent federal retardation of our children. There's probably been even stupider agendas flying around in individual states. But is formal education as whole really all that important to the actual education of a child?
The most important thing a child could ever learn is how to read, and critically. The fact of the matter is, if you teach a child to read and think critically, there's no limit to their education. Of course, they must be interested in the material to learn it well, but if they can think critically, it is major step in the right direction.
I'm obviously simplifying the situation and it is much more complex than I let on. For one poor areas need as much public education funding as any other. The funding of libraries is also essential towards education. With a good book and the desire to learn, there's a lot a child can do.
2 comments:
What do you think about the Montessori method?
I think a marriage of the Montessori method and the Socratic method would be ideal for teaching children critical thinking and inductive reasoning. Utilizing the Montessori method, the child would choose whatever topic he's interested in and start investigating it. Now that you have already established a topic that the child is interested in you can probe him/her with socratic dialogue as a method of teaching with some certainty that he won't become bored out of his mind.
I'm just unsure that a kid would ever learn certain skills such as calculus in this way. I just don't imagine "Hey teacher can I learn about calculus today?!?"
I've heard of the Montessori method before, but I never knew the name of it. A combination of Socratic and Montessori method does seem like a prudent approach to teaching a child many subjects. A child's learning process is quite complex and I don't think it can be fully utilized with rigid teaching practices.
In America, we seem to be teaching our children more and more towards passing some standardized test rather than actually learning the material. I'm going back to college right now to finish my degree in physics (I graduated with a computer engineering degree a while back) and I've noticed how so many undergraduate students out of high school do not have a good grasp on how to think critically. They were force fed most of their knowledge throughout their schooling instead of letting them figure things out for themselves.
As for learning more complex material, such as calculus, I think it would just take more guidance from a teacher. Maybe I'm just too much of a nerd, but I wanted to learn calculus in high school. If I wasn't taking stupid classes such as AP Literature, which took a lot of work themselves, I would have been much more able to learn calculus on my own.
All I really know is that America is falling behind in education standards and I think we could be better than we are.
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