Comments Posted By Oecolampadius
Displaying 21 To 23 Of 23 Comments
STILL AT RISK: THE SHOCKING IGNORANCE OF OUR YOUNG
tHePeOPle offers us a conspiratorial model of the history of our educational system. I'd like to ask a few questions about that conspiratorial model:
1. Who were the conspirators?
2. How did this cabal manage to impose their evil design upon the many different school systems of the United States?
3. How have they managed to foil the system of elected school board members?
4. Why have they failed to achieve uniformity of school systems across the country?I'd also like to point out the embarrassing fact that there are a lot of misspellings scattered through the comments. I'm not going to nitpick so far as to point out any particular misspellings. There are also some inappropriately used words and I think there were also several grammatical errors. And let's not forget the anti-intellectual comment on global warming by Neocon News.
I don't mean to denigrate any individual here or the group as a whole. My point is a variation on "Physician, heal thyself". Respect for learning is something each and every one of us advances or retards by our own actions.
Comment Posted By Oecolampadius On 27.02.2008 @ 11:43
Let's acknowledge one of the killer problems with education: there's no reliable evaluation system. We all know a good teacher years after our contact with the teacher, but nobody can really tell how good any given teacher or educational program is until long after it has done its job. So how can any approach, market or government, yield good education? We do it by the seat of our pants. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's hit or miss.
Even worse is the fact that the educational achievement of any single student cannot readily be ascribed to any individual. Moreover, some schools have to work with poorly motivated students while others get highly motivated students. It's not fair to reward the latter schools when their students go on to educational successes.
It should be possible to come up with comparative ratings of schools based on some complex statistical methodology, but to make it work you have to insure that all the schools competing with each other have the same mix of students. In other words, you'd have to bus students all over creation to insure that every school gets a fair mix of students. If you did so, you could come up with statistical measures of each school's performance and even each teacher's performance -- but those measures wouldn't be available for perhaps a decade after a teacher starts working at a school.
Comment Posted By Oecolampadius On 26.02.2008 @ 21:03
I can't resist this reaction to one of your sentences:
"Me, I love to read while I'm listening to polka at the bowling alley."
I suggest that the loss of esteem for learning is part of an overall anti-rational trend in American culture. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is the rejection of scientific results for political reasons. Both left and right have sinned in this regard: the right for its response to evolution and global warming, the left for its reaction to GM foods, nuclear power, and evolutionary psychology.
The focal point of our efforts should be to rebuild respect for rationalism.
Comment Posted By Oecolampadius On 26.02.2008 @ 19:00
