What can we as individual citizens do?

Finnian said...

What is the solution though? Perhaps a better way to serve people would be to share your thoughts on how to resolve the issue.

What's the solution? I don't know exactly. If I had the answer, I'd be able to make billions, wouldn't I? I have some ideas...

1. Traditional methods work better than all of the "progressive" methods being experimented with. Certainly there are things that could be improved with traditional instructional methods, and technology has an important role to play (NOT giving calculators to 1st graders, though).

2. We need to ensure that teachers have a solid background in what they're teaching. I think elimination of all math (or whatever) education majors and replacing them with majors in math (or whatever) is a VERY good beginning. Teaching techniques are important to teach, but they should not replace content knowledge.

What can we do as individual citizens to fix it?

I attended at various times lectures by Jaime Escalante (the teacher on whom the movie "Stand and Deliver" is based), Ernest Boyer (who at the time was on the Board of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) and William Bennett (the former Secretary of Education). In each case, I posed exactly this question and did not get what I considered a satisfactory response from any of them. If they can't address this question satisfactorily, I'm not sure what I can say. But here goes...

1. Fight the school system. Attend school board meetings. When you hear the board members begin to accept this nonsense (and remember they are NOT educators, and generally don't know shit from shinola), speak up. I have seen public outcries stop this type of nonsense cold, most notably in 1992 in Miami, when they tried to slip constructivist nonsense into the elementary school curriculum as part of "Project Pheonix" - a rebuilding plan in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.

2. Be informed on educational issues. We are very much (too much, in my opinion) a country of credentials. We tend to bow to the opinion of "experts" even when those "experts" are the witch doctors (a nod to Richard Feynman) who bring us all these miserable failed educational experiments. Know enough about their absurd theories to be able to hold your ground in a debate.

3. Debate these ideas. Publicly. Loudly. Often. One of my friends (DAS - where are you? are you planning to pipe in here?) when he heard about this blog thought it was an excellent idea. He assures me that the best thing I can do is bring this discussion to light, and he has confidence that discourse, over time, is how we will eventually defeat bad ideas.

I’m not as confident myself that good ideas will always drive out bad ideas when both are open to the public scrutiny of open debate (if that were the case, would we be surrounded by so many bad ideas?), but I can certainly understand that the chance of this happening is much greater if there actually is debate than if the issue is ignored.

Someone like you, with insider experience, seems far more appropriate to do some good. Have you ever considered the bigger picture?

I consider the big picture all the time. But I’m not sure what I can do about it. I’m not an educational researcher, I’m not an expert on any of these educational/psychological subjects and I certainly don’t have the time to discuss this kind of thing (much less do something about it) on anything approaching a full-time basis.

On the other hand, I have given this a lot of thought, and I definitely have strong ideas on the best ways to teach most of this stuff. Someday I hope to have the time to develop my curriculum ideas into a full-blown set of textbooks, but that day is not yet here. My wife and I will probably home school when the time comes; that will probably provide the impetus to get this project started. For now, all I can do is the same as you – debate the ideas involved and hope that I can convince people that I’m right and all the NCTM math “experts” are wrong. I think that’s plenty “big picture” for now.