Posted on 11/21/2005 5:38:51 PM PST by summer
The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena...
...Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach.
...Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is "nothing like ours."
...There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region. The countries that are leaving us behind in math and science decide at the national level what students should learn and when. The schools are typically overseen by ministries of education that spend a great deal of time on what might be called educational quality control.
The United States, by contrast, has 50 different sets of standards for 50 different states...
...The United States will need a radically different mind set to catch up with high-performing competitors. For starters we will need to focus as never before on the process through which teachers are taught to teach
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That's absolutely true.
While Japanese high school graduates may be farther ahead of their American counterparts in some areas such as math and science, Americans tend to catch up to and exceed the Japanese in college - where the Japanese learn very little except how to socialize and party. The name of the university is what's important, not what you studied or your GPA upon graduation.
Japan * ping * (kono risuto ni hairitai ka detai wo shirasete kudasai : let me know if you want on or off this list)
Right on the mark. Good post!
You know, I had a pretty darn good education in the years before we were taught to be ashamed of our past. In fact, it was about that time that our education system really started rolling downhill. The acquisition and regular implementation of critical thinking skills have little to do with knowing the dark side of your political forebears.
>>>>The acquisition and regular implementation of critical thinking skills have little to do with knowing the dark side of your political forebears.
Are you saying history should be changed? Or taught as is?
Yes, that is true.
We in America do not want a society in which a test you took when you were 12 sorts you into the "gifted" who will be tracked for college and the dummies.
Doozo.
As someone that has both a degree in Mathematics and Physics, but in deemed "unqualified" to teach those subjects in the public schools , I couldn't agree more !!! We also need to get rid of the NEA, which controls the legislatures in most of the states.
bookmark
I went to KEIO.
I mean something else is missing, like discipline (give the teachers some muscles :)/focused goals (kick out the NEAs Chapters :)/tighter studies (studies that means something :)
thanks togo for the ping! :D
"Dont know if Japan has been infiltrated by generations of ineffectual liberal educatots and hordes of illegal aliens.?"
It's in progress. More and more schools are doing away with uniforms, and they've forbidden teachers to smack the little sh@ts when they need it. This has had a disastrous effect on classroom discipline in the public schools.
Many students, in fact, consider time spent in public school classrooms to be wasted; their real test prep comes after school in the juku.
You can pretty much toss any stereotypes about Japan that have been popular. The ravening beast of PC is devouring Japanese society. It may not be as far down the road as in the US, but it is advancing at full gallop.
Japanese TV is pretty much nothing but propaganda pushing promiscuity, perversion, and divorce. The tobacco nazis roam the country seeking whom they may devour. Crime rates are several times higher than the government admits. Juvenile delinquency has metastasized.
Having had children in the Japanese public school system since 1992, my conclusion is that most Japanese public school teachers are the next thing to useless.
On the other hand, they do give kids a better background in math and science, which is important. Until college, at least, let kids do their independent thinking on their own time. All the independent thinking in the world is useless if you don't know squat. The job of the schools is to give them something to think about.
Having just recently addressing this last week in a thread, I'm not going to address it now.
I found Iranians very nice, and I found that they had a hard time obeying the law.
There is currently a crack-down against visa overstayers in Japan.
Suddenly, ordinary street policemen will stop people who do not appear Japanese, and they will ask to see your gaijin card, or your passport.
As compared with the general pattern over the past 20 years, this is unusual, but now suddenly not uncommon. Since I am physically huge and rollerblade aggressively (something faily unusual in Tokyo), I am stopped very, very often compared to others.
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