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"This is really going to be the big battle in public education over the next few years ? what is it our students are going to learn," said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, a group that monitors the state board for influence by the religious right. "We could see a lot of textbooks that are based on personal and political beliefs of a majority of the state board rather than on facts that students need to learn."

The last sentence sounds like what the kids got when the liberals were in charge, so I guess this guy must be in favor of the conservative changes. ;-)

This is really going to be the big battle in public education over the next few years
What we have is a conflict between teaching approaches. There's what I call a constructivist [Deweyian] approach, where the students are given material and each student gets his own "learning" from the material. So, 22 students in a class will each come away from the material with different, personalized learning. That's nice, but it's hard to test students objectively, which is what the TAKS test does. With this approach, a lot of important learning falls through the cracks if the teacher isn't alert.

The teacher-centered approach [the one that most of us experienced if we were educated in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and distinctively non-Deweyian] means that the teacher gives the students lessons with specific objectives. Kids don't get to pick what they learn from the lesson.

As in most things, each approach has advantages and disadvantages. I teach fisrt-year Spanish at the middle school level, and I use the teacher-centered approach. That's because my students better learn what I tell them to in order to be ready for 2nd-year Spanish. I find myself teaching them things about English that we all used to learn in elementary school--both vocabularywise and grammarwise [for instance, the difference between "infinitive" and "infinity," what a direct object is, etc.]