Squee wrote:Hype wrote:...
From my brief experience as an educator, I can also add that I have seen far too many students mistake reading words on a page for understanding the thoughts those words are meant to convey. I once described the phenomenon as mistaking familiarity for understanding. It's not a new phenomenon. Religious ideas are maintained in this way, under the guise of "knowledge", even when there's nothing to know.
Reason, in the sense of thinking carefully about what one has reasons to do or believe, certainly isn't more prevalent now than it has been in the past. I don't know why anyone would think that.
We interrupt this programming for a comment from the peanut gallery-
The bold-ed is one of the reasons why we now have Common Core Curriculum ... don't get me started!
As a parent of two children 18 years apart, I am experiencing the difference in teaching from then to now.
With all the new changes, I wonder and am sometimes frightened what the next generation will be like once they get to college having grown up with this "new learning"
Teaching should not be a one size fits all solution. Some of the stuff my younger one comes home with is driving me to want to drink before she asks me for help with it.
and...now back to our regularly scheduled Philosophy thread...
I wouldn't worry about it too much, because there are always going to be some really bright kids, regardless of what a common curriculum tries to make a baseline, and some of those kids will get lucky and figure out a way to do really good, cool, difficult stuff.
But, you're right that the common core issue is one that we really should think carefully about, because as you suggest, it generates some odd outcomes later. For one thing, there's been a huge push for all the kids of the boomers and gen-xers to go to university, without any regard for desire, ability, suitability, etc. Universities have responded in some really strange ways, especially once they realized that many parents were willing to pay lots of money. The Ivies and other large private US schools are somewhat immune to this because they have huge historical endowments and a vested interest in retaining the appearance of selectivity (well, except for legacies... that's a whole other problem). But now public institutions are all being run on a neo-liberal funding model that privileges high recruitment and turnover, and of course, this penalizes programs that aren't associated with immediate income benefits. The Renaissance and Enlightenment ideals of free individuals self-creating and self-learning through the opening up of opportunities is basically being usurped to make wealthy people wealthier. There's immense pressure on university professors to simply pass students who would have failed many years ago, because it means they continue to pay for the university's existence.
Worse, the humanities are forced to, somewhat disingenuously, suggest that what we're good for is... skills that help other fields. Philosophy is a great major for crushing the LSATs. English is a great major for technical writing or basic communication skills. These and language departments are closing like crazy, because they just can't compete with the pre-med/pre-law/engineering programs that have effectively turned undergraduate education into apprenticeship programs and job-training. And of course, that's not to knock those programs. They are necessary. And it's not a slight against parents wanting their children to do well. Of course that's fine, though often misguided.
The problem is that the promises of these things are all being sold as products rather than something valuable in itself (products are only as valuable as people believe them useful, or can be suckered into buying whether or not they turn out to be useful).
A lot of this comes down to failures at the policy-level, and I can't really blame parents and kids for getting caught up in it. I will say that many professors are convinced that new university students are far less skilled in certain basic things than they were even as few as ten years ago. This might be a cognitive bias, because these professors are ten years older, and thousands of students further on, and may be mistakenly remembering only the better students from the past. But there does seem to be something strange going on with students on average. They come in with very high marks, and expect high marks, but have to re-learn how to do everything. They can't spell, they can't write coherently, they can't even follow simple instructions like "Write your name and student number on every page of the exam." Oh, and because of all of this and the fear of looking stupid, they cheat in ways that weren't possible, or weren't as easy to pull off, even five years ago. It's a mess.
This is on the front page of Reddit right now, and reminded me of your complaints about the Common Core:
The strategies are stupid, but in this case, the teacher is even worse. Sometimes you just get duds. I had some really awful teachers that, looking back, I think probably played a large role in steering me away from things that I had enjoyed up until that point (sciences, math, music, and English all come to mind, at various points in my education). But it's really hard to be a good teacher. I don't think a common curriculum can help that.