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10 things wrong with what kids learn in school
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post blog
Posted: April 14th, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/...
Mainstream media, cued by corporate press releases, routinely claim that Americas schools are markedly inferior to schools in other developed nations. The claim is part of an organized, long-running, generously funded campaign to undermine confidence in public schools to prove the need to privatize them. Educators have been handicapped for more than a century by a curriculum adopted to serve a too-narrow purposeadmission to collegeand failure to address that curriculums problems has made the institution vulnerable to destructive corporate and political manipulation. Below are brief descriptions of some of the more obvious of those problems. 1. The standard core curriculum is stuck in the past. Adopted in the late 19th Century, the curriculum now shaping Americas schools reflects the big idea of that earlier erathe factory system, standardization of parts, mass production, centralized decision making, and passive worker compliance. None of those fit the present era. 2. The standard core curriculum is so inefficient it leaves little or no time for apprenticeships, internships, co-op programs, projects, and other ways of learning by doing (which is how most of us learned most of what we know). 3. The standard core curriculum gives thought processes other than recall short shrift, or no attention at all. The ability to remember is, of course, important, but the main educational challengemaking better sense of real-world experiencerequires the ability not merely to recall but to infer, generalize, hypothesize, relate, synthesize, value, and so on. 4. The standard core curriculum ignores vast and important fields of knowledge.
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