David Elkind, the Tufts University professor of child development, reminds us that, “every child is like all other children, like some other children, and like no other child.” Or, as he says, there is the biological, social, and psychological child. My biological grandson will eventually walk upright and use language to make his wants known, [...]
Archive for the ‘Education’ category
My Three Grandsons
July 8, 2009Aptocracy
July 5, 2009It’s true that much that we recognize as merit is not tested. (See the article by Walter Kirn in today’s NYTimes.) Schooling and testing right up to and on through the SATS is most of all a measure of one’s aptitude, one’s mental quickness, one’s readiness with and understanding of words and numbers, and in [...]
Why were these ideas of James Coleman, written down in the Public Interest in the Fall of 1967, allowed to die?
June 23, 2009Toward Open Schools by JAMES S. COLEMAN Since the publication, in July, 1966, of the Office of Education’s report to Congress and the President on “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” there has been much speculation and discussion concerning the policy implications of the report. The report itself, which focused principally on inequalities experienced by Negroes and [...]
Do No Harm
May 29, 2009Only public education, James Bryant Conant said in 1942, could restore the key American ideals of opportunity, democracy, and classlessness. These ideals were also Horace Mann’s goals for the Common School. Public education was intended to establish equality of opportunity, promote democratic ideals, and, although not right at the beginning when the country was still [...]
Schooling and Education, 3
May 24, 2009Schooling is easy. Education is hard. Schooling takes place in a school, when a classroom, teacher, and kids are provided, usually at tax payer expense. Education, aka learning, may take place anywhere, but only if the learner is interested and excited either by the teacher or the subject matter, or, best of all, by both. [...]
Kids are human capital
May 23, 2009The problem is usually not a lack of knowledge. There is enough knowledge out there to solve most of our problems. The problem is getting the people in power to drink of the knowledge that is available. A case in point is our system of public school education. Claudia Goldin, in a June 2001 article. [...]
Howard Gardner: Group Comparisons Don’t Help
April 29, 2009Everyone, and by all means everyone at all connected with public education including our President and his new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, ought to read this short statement by Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Gardner reminds us forcefully and correctly that “Group Comparisons Don’t Help,” [...]
The Educational Experiment We Really Need?
March 22, 2009Two recent op ed pieces, the one by Sara Mosle in Slate Magazine, The Educational Experiment We Really Need, and the other by Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times, Education’s Ground Zero might profitably have been placed side-by-side in the same publication. Why? Well Mosle makes this judgment of KIPP or the Knowledge Is Power [...]
Nine Truths about the Public Schools
February 22, 2009There are truths about public school education that need to be said. The endless debate about the schools, the equally endless series of reform efforts mostly ignore these truths Truth number one. Public, as in public school, doesn’t mean public. The word, a poor choice from the beginning (common was better but not much) probably [...]
Learning, a Bell or normal curve
February 20, 2009Learning is no longer an exchange between the student and a mentor or tutor. Instead, we have made learning (or at least schooling because it’s highly questionable whether it’s mostly learning that goes on in the schools) an exchange between some number of students, as many as 30 or more in some inner city public [...]
