[ published on Filling the Pail blog — https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/fuzzy-maths-jumps-the-shark/comment-page-1/#comment-1106 ]
The Same Conditions Are Ushering In Even More Education Malpractice
Some say it’s government failure behind poor performing schools — failing to bring in quality control regulations . Some say it’s the education system itself that rules the roost, a job security haven for its workers and devil take the hindmost.
At any rate, fads prevail in public education that drive logically minded people nuts, be they parents or concerned teachers. Whole language and fuzzy math should be movements that are way past their shelf life as research findings do not produce good ratings; but they persist.
It was Dr Seuss who called-out the “whole language” movement. Years after publishing his “Cat in the Hat” (1957) he said: “I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties, in which they threw out phonic reading and went to word recognition . . . I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country . . . there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book . . . I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme that’ll be the title of my book . . . I found ‘cat’ and “hat”, , , “
This photo should be a cautionary tale where fuzzy math prevails and where 2 + 2 = 5 if the student can show his work http://i.stack.imgur.com/hl9F8.jpg
Now, these two movements are just dress rehearsal for what’s going on today. “Transformations” are the name of the game currently — Common Core, Personalized Learning, 21st Century Learning, etc. Hard skills as reading, writing, arithmetic and knowledge are being downplayed in favor of soft competences as creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, etc. These have been deemed THE essentials that employers will demand in the future. Does anyone REALLY know what the future holds?
Of course, a cynical observer would say these new competencies are not measurable by objective standards so deliberately avoid accountability. It’s time to adopt hardheaded policies and practices that support proven evidence instead of pie-in-the-sky philosophies.