69. But what about the dumb parade?
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
I know the feeling. You see the young mom feeding her infant a can of Sprite from a baby bottle. The blog reader who thinks “bespoke” is too difficult a word (and not worth looking up). The financially afraid who get tricked into losing their houses because they don’t understand simple arithmetic.…
What about them?
How can we possibly argue about forcing students to memorize fewer facts when the world doesn’t even know who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, doesn’t know the difference between writeand right, and can’t balance a checkbook. What about them?
For a really long time, I thought more drilling, more schooling, and more homework was the only way. That schools lacked rigor and were failing students by not pumping them with enough data.
Then I realized that all of the people in this parade have already been through school. They’ve received the best their community could afford, but it didn’t work because our effort was based on the wrong strategy.
The bad decisions we see every day aren’t the result of lack of data, or lack of access to data.
No, they’re the result of a schooling culture that is creating exactly what it set out to create.
Along the way, we teach students to be open to and trusting of marketing messages. Not only is the school day primarily about students accepting the messages marketed to them by the authority figures in the school, but the fashions, gadgets and trends of teen culture (all delivered by marketers) are the glue that holds the place together. We mix obedience with marketing culture, why are we surprised at what we get?
School is successful… at the wrong thing.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
Views: 7
© 2024 Created by Steve Hargadon.
Powered by
