my thought of the day has to do with striking a balance between education as a forum for facilitating creative expression and critical thinking, and education as a forum for imparting certain indisputable facts and elements. the american - and to some extent, european - system is lauded as one that creates thinking human beings: children grow into adults who have the capacity to learn for the sake of learning, who aren't forced through years of rote memorization work, whose creativity is encouraged and supported and guided [when there is money for it, that is. these days i'm not so sure it's the case]. in the international/development education field, we're constantly talking about 'child-centered learning,' about teacher training to help adults develop the skills to become good teachers. this is because in many places learning does occur simply through methods of rote memorization. i remember sitting in on an english class in mozambique and being absolutely shocked at the way it was being taught: repeated recitation of verb conjugation, with no opportunity to use that verb in context, to practice feeling the language or interacting in it [even with me there, a native english speaker asked to sit in on the class for just this reason].
so clearly we in america are ahead of the curve to some extent. but something i read yesterday made me re-think the focus of american education. this was a letter written by a well-educated public official: specifically, the governer of kentucky [this letter is not a public document - i saw it due to a connection who has a copy of it]. the content of the letter is secondary here: what really took me aback was how badly written it was. what this says to me is that while the american educational system may pride itself on producing adults capable of thinking for themselves, it is not producing adults capable of expressing themselves in writing in a clear, logical, grammatically-correct manner. sure, our president can hire a speechwriter - i'm sure governer fletcher can as well. but that does not hide the fact that as an elected official, serving as the voice of his constituents, the governer should know how to construct a well-structured paragraph!
in any case, this letter struck me as an example of where the american educational system has failed. so the question is: how can we strike the balance that will let us succeed in educating the next generation to be creative and critical while at the same time having enough of a well-founded understanding of the english language to express their creativity and criticism articulately?
thoughts?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
one simple idea is to encourage students to write creative papers but to insist that they use grammatically correct english
yes, but that requires students already knowing grammatically correct english. it's something that has to be taught. and college composition classes are too late, in my opinion, for that teaching to occur.
Super color scheme, I like it! Good job. Go on.
»
Post a Comment