“Child Abuse” And Schooling Is An Urgent Matter
When I was in Teachers College (Ottawa), ’70-’71, practically the first thing we were cautioned about was not to exploit the students. This was equivalent to the dictum for doctors to “At least do no harm”.
Though I never taught in a classroom I have ever since been struck by the humbling experience it is to be a teacher.
Our current division in approaches to teaching arises mainly from the monopoly nature and compulsory attendance feature of current public schools. People generally act as if there should be one-best-way and it’s THEIR way or the Highway!
Unfortunately, the biggest split is between those who favor pedagogically supported methods and those who have an ideological worldview. The “basics” or teacher-centered approach does differ significantly from the child-centered approach, which in the literature is sometimes dubbed as working for “emancipatory social change.”
At this moment (as I have to run over asap and lengthen trousers for growing grand teens) I will provide only quotes on this topic (BTW, I’m on the teacher-centered side) from “The Conspiracy of Ignorance”, Gross, 1999”. The quotes are about Reading, which along with Math, is a hotly contested education issue:
Ken Goodman, a prominent leader in a new reading program in the 80s says:
“Whole language classrooms liberate pupils to try new things, to invent spellings, to experiment with a new genre, to guess at meanings in their spellings, or to read and write imperfectly. In whole language classrooms risk-taking is not simply tolerated, it is celebrated.”
William Honig, superintendent in California says:
“Whole language swept the nation . . . it pushed out phonics and substituted the new system . . . It became the gospel in education colleges . . . many school districts . . . The results as shown by the NAEP reading results . . . were catastrophic. The whole language experiment was interesting, but as we found out, the theory is dead wrong.” (pg 78-79)
Pedagogic research finds whole language wanting, yet to this day it persists across education systems in the Western world. Similar concerns are now being expressed concerning Math.
Why does the education establishment favor and cling to discredited methods? How can this malpractice be allowed to continue? Is this not “child abuse” of the highest order ?
[ posted Apr 04, ’16 to SQE http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/blog/read/child-abuse — topic: Child Abuse? ]