Public education has long been plagued with fads that have failed to improve educational performance, says American educational psychologist J.E. Stone in a new Independent Institute working paper.
Consider just a few of the now-discredited ideas that held the educational establishment enthralled for a few years:
Perhaps the biggest fad operating in the public schools today that makes educators prone to adopt other educational fads is called “learner-centred” education or “discovery learning,” which attempts to teach students how to think but without systematically teaching a body of knowledge.
While a few gifted students may learn adequately without systematic teaching, writes Stone, “most other students especially those who may be poorly prepared, poorly behaved, inattentive, weakly motivated, or otherwise not well prepared for school, i.e., the other 90 percent are not well served by this type of teaching.”
Then why do public schools keep chasing after these fixes? Because the public school system is strongly influenced by schools of education that are out of touch with the public’s desire for strong academic achievement, Stone concludes.
Source: J.E. Stone, Teacher Training and Texas Educational Reform: A Study in Contradiction, Working Paper No. 35, May 2001, Independent Institute, 100 Swan Way, Oakland, California. 94621, (510) 632-1366.
For text http://www.independent.org/tii/WorkingPapers/TeacherTraining.pdf
For more on Theory & Methods http://www.ncpa.org/pi/edu/edu4a.html#c
RSA Note:
Public schooling itself is the fundamental cause of the problems experienced with the fads described in the above article. If all schooling were private there would be myriad different education experiments and the failures would affect only those families that make the mistake of choosing their schools unwisely. In a competitive market place for schooling, fads would quickly disappear and schooling consumers would tend to choose schools with high success rates, according to whatever measures they choose to apply. South Africas outcomes-based schooling idea is another of the fads that is likely to do great harm. Professor Alan Smithers of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Brunel University, London, in commenting on the concept of learning outcomes, on which the New Zealand National Qualification Framework is based, challenged the basic assumption that all learning can be expressed appropriately as outcomes.
Eustace Davie, Director, FMF.
FMF\26 June 2001
