Comment Re:put yourself in thier shoes (Score 1) 2124
The cult of standardized testing has made it virtually impossible for teachers to teach this sort of thing, much less teach it well. In most states, the curriculum is decided by a board of education with comments from various people pushing political agendas.
The result is that students are being imbued with memes (intentional oxymoron there) rather than understanding the most important parts of life, citizenship, scholarship, and humanity. For example, the Texas state exam requires that students know who wrote Common Sense. They don't have to know what it was about, when it was written, what "pamphleteering" is, or how it fits in with the American Revolution. All they have to know is that Thomas Paine wrote it.
I know it's fashionable to blame teachers for everything. But you have to remember, most teachers are not in the game for the big salaries or the glamour or the prestige. They're in it because they love to teach. If they were left to their own devices, most government and American history teachers would spend weeks on the Bill of Rights and discuss the implications of each amendment to American life today. But that's not on the test, so they don't because they can't.
You can't straitjacket and manacle a man, throw him into the ocean, and announce that he has to swim. States and the federal government have tied teachers' hands in the name of school improvement so important things that can't be answered by a multiple-choice exam are no longer deemed important.
The cult of testing wants schools to be equally excellent. But instead what we have is a communist (or perhaps Rawlsian) notion of equality: everyone is getting pulled down to the lowest common denomonator.
So don't blame the teachers, at least not completely. Parents, communities, administrators, voters, elected officials, and academia have a lot to answer for in this one.
The result is that students are being imbued with memes (intentional oxymoron there) rather than understanding the most important parts of life, citizenship, scholarship, and humanity. For example, the Texas state exam requires that students know who wrote Common Sense. They don't have to know what it was about, when it was written, what "pamphleteering" is, or how it fits in with the American Revolution. All they have to know is that Thomas Paine wrote it.
I know it's fashionable to blame teachers for everything. But you have to remember, most teachers are not in the game for the big salaries or the glamour or the prestige. They're in it because they love to teach. If they were left to their own devices, most government and American history teachers would spend weeks on the Bill of Rights and discuss the implications of each amendment to American life today. But that's not on the test, so they don't because they can't.
You can't straitjacket and manacle a man, throw him into the ocean, and announce that he has to swim. States and the federal government have tied teachers' hands in the name of school improvement so important things that can't be answered by a multiple-choice exam are no longer deemed important.
The cult of testing wants schools to be equally excellent. But instead what we have is a communist (or perhaps Rawlsian) notion of equality: everyone is getting pulled down to the lowest common denomonator.
So don't blame the teachers, at least not completely. Parents, communities, administrators, voters, elected officials, and academia have a lot to answer for in this one.
