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Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The Great Dumbing Down! By SAM DILLON One proposal calls for scrapping the current system of accreditation in favor of a National Accreditation Foundation created by Congress and the president. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/12/education/12commission.html?th&emc=th .................. This report has many troubling aspects -- the take over of academia by corporate Amerika is already well advanced with the patterns of funding that mandate ever more traveling part-time scholars -- overworked and over burdened with heavy teaching loads. But the one truthful element that leaps out of the page for me is that we are NOT teaching the vast majority of our students how to do critical research and how to write an expressive and well framed critical essay. When I was an undergrad in the 1950s we routinely did such projects for virtually all our courses apart from the sciences and math areas. Now we find the bulk of our students have not written even a 10 page paper by graduation -- many have done nothing more than a 6 page essay on this or that. Needless to say such means that our students have been taught: a) to parrot back what they have been laboriously been presented by a teacher in classes -- they do take notes furiously. b) to express top of the head opinions on this or that -- a la the brief spots on the typical TV news report. Certainly the contents of students' thinking seem to have been shaped by this media and I find that few have read extensively or read for pleasure. And most prefer to have a teacher present a 'web notes' version of an assigned reading rather that do the hard stuff of picking up ideas from reading on their own. Again and again I tell my students that they must read a text at least three times -- first a quick scan to get the from-what-to-what, then a detailed reading to figure what they do not understand, and finally a read through to put it all together and convert it from short to long memory status. I could torment them with quizzes, but to do so would be to further reduce learning to garbage-in-and-garbage-forgotten following a final exam. It is a hard stretch to encourage thinking, but at least my colleagues could give it a try with real research learning which requires more than brief quizzes, a mid term and a final exam never to be seen by the student once it has been handed in. Our students deserve better in this era when they are going to be struggling hard to obtain and keep jobs in an economy in which CEOs have discovered that massive worker layoffs are a short route to raising the value of their stock options. -- "A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy) -- Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies] http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/ http://www.bloggernews.net Blogger News Network is advertiser-supported, and your visits to our advertisers help BNN to meet its expenses. Help keep us afloat! posted by Ed Kent at 7:26 AM |
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