I'm sure that you, Louis, and Doug would agree with me if I say that there is no "Social Security crisis" and that crisis-mongering is merely the power elite's tactic for privatizing it or cutting its benefits or both. It's a shame that you don't agree with me when I say there is no educational decline, even though the story of decline is used in a similar way by the power elite -- in this case, for instance, to sell the policy of subjecting teachers and students to more meaningless tests, allegedly to restore the fallen standards. Why smart people -- all presumably functioning at Adult Literacy Survey Level 4 or above -- buy the myth that goes against their interests is an interesting question.
yellek oudeis at gmail.com, Fri Mar 4 15:52:42 PST 2005:
>Although, I'm more curious to hear from Matt (and anyone else) about
>what teachers should do to make things more exciting.
<snip>
>http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20050223/od_uk_nm/oukoe_odd_japan_korea_north
>Japanese students can't place N.Korea
>Wed Feb 23, 3:08 AM ET
>TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) has menaced Japan
>with missiles, kidnapped its citizens and stands between it and a
>place in the soccer World Cup finals, but one in four Japanese
>high-school students can't place the country on a map.
Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com, Fri Mar 4 16:03:33 PST 2005:
>Actually that doesn't sound too bad, since you have to be at the
>90th percentile of US high school seniors to locate the Mississippi
>River & the Rockies on an unlabeled map
><http://nces.ed.gov/pubs97/web/97579.asp>
Being asked to locate countries, rivers, and mountains on an unlabeled map sounds like an activity essential to the banking model of education that Paolo Freire criticized in _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_: students accumulate information in their mental banks -- information that is deposited by teachers, rather than sought for by students -- and then get tested on whether they can retrieve the deposited information quickly and accurately. Neither an ability to do well on this model, nor an inability to do so, says anything about students and their intellectual capacity.
[Questions that go beyond identification are no better -- e.g.:
7. Look at the maps on page 74 of the atlas. Based on the maps and your knowledge of the region, which of the following was an important economic activity affected by Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967? A) Industrial output in the Gaza Strip B) Shipping on the Dead Sea C) Agricultural exports from the Sinai Peninsula D) Transport of goods through the Suez Canal <http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ITMRLS/qtab.asp>.]
The way the media reports on the results of tests based on the banking model turn them into a spectacle not unlike "Jay Walking" on _The Tonight Show_ (cf. <http://www.nbc.com/nbc/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/jaywalking/index.shtml>).
Education could be a little more useful -- and perhaps even exciting -- to working-class students if they are freed from the "Jay Walking" school of gotcha tests and their teachers are liberated from having to teach to tests.
louis kontos louis.kontos at liu.edu, Fri Mar 4 15:18:02 PST 2005:
>the fact that greater parts of the working class now have access to
>some form of secondary education is not, in my view, necessarily
>anything to celebrate; not when they're required to gain academic
>credentials to earn even a mediocre living; not when they incur huge
>debt in the process;
It sure would be earthshaking if high school graduates en massed boycotted post-secondary education, on the grounds that it's way too expensive and that they can already do jobs that ostensibly require college degrees. But they are not going to do that any time soon, so our demand should be more state subsidies to schools, in exchange for lower tuitions, and more grants to students in need, so that students can go to college without falling into big debts or having to work too many hours to study. -- Yoshie
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