Posted on 04/01/2010 1:54:41 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Okay, it’s official. Educationally speaking, the sky IS falling. Public schools across the country are actually hiring “constructivist consulting firms,” at your expense, to help teachers get on “protocol” with a total acceptance of “teachers as facilitators rather than teachers.”
Do you have any idea how dumb and dumber this is? No one will know whether teachers are good or bad, because teachers won’t be allowed to teach. They will stay in the back of the room as children try to reinvent the wheel, create science, and discover their own new knowledge.
Roger, a teacher in Connecticut, sent me an e-mail that can make a grown man cry:
“The principal has refused to recommend me for promotion because I ignored the school’s emphasis on education reform (read Constructivism). She was appalled that I had my third-grade students memorize facts. Where was the higher-order thinking involved in the task? It mattered not to her that the kids loved the geography unit. Nor that most of them scored above 90% percent on fill-in-the-blank tests (not multiple choice). That they had learned about the equator, they had seen images of maps and had talked with me about how the world seemed to grow over time in ancient maps. We talked about technology and how our planet looked on Google Earth. We talked about the invention of the wheel, of navigation, and all sorts of other fascinating things. The girls were wondering if we would soon have Google Moon and Google Jupiter. They knew what a compass rose was and what it did. They learned about scale and computed some simple scale problems. No, none of that mattered because I had violated two major rules--I had had the children memorize facts and I had taught them information.”
Some say: “Of course the public schools are garbage, so homeschool.” That rescues the kids who are homeschooled. But what about the 90% who are being destroyed by the likes of this idiotic principal? These kids will be voters in not that many years. Saving the public schools is vital. All political candidates should have to explain how they are going to do this.
(Here are two quick steps I’d like to see: this talented teacher should be Director of Curriculum. This principal should be fired.)
Last year, I spent several months figuring out what Constructivism is so I could write an article about it. Truly, it is a shifty gimmick, gaudily pretentious, and not easy to explain. But you see in the teacher’s letter the bottom line: Constructivism justifies not teaching; indeed, it actually PROHIBITS teaching.
I presume to recommend this article because I now realize Constructivism is galloping. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the bubonic plague and it’s coming to devastate your nearby school. The only hope of stopping this thing is that more people can criticize it.
“34: The Con in Constructivism” (the linked article) provides a good introduction to this education-killer.
www.improve-education.org/id55.html
These stories are great for me. Just makes me feel great about homeschooling.
Put the instruction on the equivalent of YouTube, close the schools, and test the students in strip malls.
“Do you have any idea how dumb and dumber this is?”
Yes.
“Teaching” without actually providing information has been the trend for some time. Funny that you should mention the geography unit. It’s pretty much social geography now, with stories about how people live but not much data about where. It’s like dancing around the facts but not really saying anything, IMO.
Must.
Avoid.
Temptation.
To.
Make.
Scatological.
Joke.
Blame a system deliberately skewed towards making monkeys out of men. Blame the parents for not taking their kids out of the monkey schools in the first place. If it was too much trouble or too much of a sacrifice, too bad. You get what you signed up for.
All of this has consequences. No one has to like them.
does that mean we’ll be stuck with how to dispose with millions and millions of unneeded doses of intellectuals too??
Isn’t this what Bill Ayers and Obama worked on in Chicago all while wasting a truck load of money?
Turning the kids into zombies? I think so!
This is all part of the Marxist goals.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
Solutions: Conservatives must open alternative *private** schools, and work to shut down every single payer and socialist government school in the nation. ( That means **all** of them.)
Pingue
Another major reason why you should be homeschooling your kids.
I’ll bet none of the constructivism advocates learned their Three Rs via constructivist techniques.
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
There is no way to “save” public education. Government run or funded education must be abolished.
Definitely. If we ever need my wife to work full time to be able to make it a church run school is the next choice! Funny that private school is the less expensive option for us than homeschool (we have a small family).
This helps me understand how it is that I recently witnessed a young man on a TV game show demonstrate that with not one but TWO masters degrees he STILL was not smarter than a fifth grader. In fact he didn’t seem to be ready for the fourth grade yet. I watched in amazement as he missed question after question that I answered with ease. I would not have been allowed to enter the fifth grade with his “education”.
What I found most amazing is that after failing to answer so many simple questions he still seemed to be overflowing with “self esteem”. I would have been ready to go and hide in the swamp forever at that point.
Constructivism is tossed around frequently by many folks that don’t have a great idea of what they’re talking about.
Regardless of your views on the worth of a teacher in this setting, I’m interested in how you feel about this type of educational experience:
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2009/05/great-schools-1-changing-everything.html
This was a constructivist public school in which students experience much of the same thing that current “unschoolers” and “home-schoolers” may attest to.
Thanks.
KS
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