The "Common Core" - The set of school standards promoted and supported by the Obama Administration is off to a rocky start. Tea Party activists decry it as federal interference in the duties of parents and individual states. Some parents say the testing provisions are too hard and worry that children will fail.
What I worry about is whether parents and other adults are well enough educated to know if the new standards will be good for children. At the risk of sounding smarmy and smug , many of us have not been trained in the one thing The Common Core is designed to teach - Critical Thinking. If we were, we might first educate ourselves in the new standard. For your edification, here is the link to the site: http://www.corestandards.org. Then if we thought the ideas had merit we could try them for a long enough period to discover their usefulness. That is the scientific way to discover truth, or at least usefulness. Why don't we try it?
Perhaps we don't really love children? Maybe what we want from children isn't critical thinking and the ability to act creatively, but to have them be just like us. Maybe what we really love is ourselves and our own prejudices reflected in the next generation?
If we want to believe in progress and the proposition that our children will be better and better off than us we can't kill new methods before they bear fruit. Let's love our children enough to test the new for a little while before we retreat into our caves.
We had a debate about our teacher model, sparked by the school's owner's question. "Does how we teach hurt the children we teach?" We use the common core standards, but we teach them through integrated, thematic units based on student-interest. We expand background knowledge by taking our kids on 10 field trips a term. One teacher in the debate suggested that what we do migth hurt our children's ability to pass state tests. My response was that it may be the test that is doing the harm and not the creative teaching.
ReplyDelete