Narrowing minds
The headline story in this morning’s NY Times is about the massive trend of schools cutting back on and in some cases banning social sciences, the hard sciences, and the arts in order to achieve reading and math scores.
This is the next generation of employees, parents, community members, and leaders who will be able to read and count but not think analytically, creatively, or socially.
It’s an amazing lack of understanding of how much reading and math there can be in any rich area of whole-brain learning. Something to protest with innovation.
March 26th, 2006 11:38
And math and reading are two things that kids can teach themselves, when they aren’t packed into a room with 30 others and hassled for six hours a day by an underpaid teacher with great intentions and no freedom to foster learning.
March 26th, 2006 14:26
I read the article this morning as well. As I read, I wondered *what* it is that the students are reading in reading class. I mean, social studies and science texts are written in English! I don’t see why those topics cannot be incorporated somehow in a reading curriculum. I also worked last year for a start-up that contracted with public schools to provide after-school assistance (using the no child left behind funding). What I learned is that children respond to attention, praise, consistency, high expectations (especially for behavior), and concrete rewards. I also had only 10 students for two hours and could give each more assistance. They all improved by the end of the semester (for most, Spanish was their first language). And they all had science and history homework as well as math and reading. We do a disservice to children when their exposure to knowledge is strangled.
March 26th, 2006 23:26
Yes, Chris to the innate creativity of children. What if we unleashed them instead of constraining them through control?
As for your suggestion, Kat, there is absolutely no reason why math and reading can’t be integrated into any real-life learning process from cooking to construction.