lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.) (03/30/84)
(This is spinoff of a net.religion article about secular versus religious values in the school system) Paul Dubuc stated: >Critical thinking is *not* taught in the public schools, >however. The emphasis there is on "right" or "wrong" answers. How >old do you think kids have to be before they can question the opinion of >a teacher, or realize that it may be good to do so? Both my children have recently had experiences which led them to realize the teacher can be wrong. Lisa, in the third grade, participated in a class exercise of composing their "long address", that goes through town, county, country, up through "universe". She related this to me, but when she recited it, she jumped from "earth" right to "universe". I immediately launched into a big tirade about how it should have gone through "solar system", Milky Way", etc. She sloughed this off, but a few days later some kid in her class raised the same point about the solar system. (Maybe his mom or dad got to him.) Anyway, the teacher glibly responded, "well, the solar system is in the universe". I think Lisa could see the vapidity of this, and she seemed impressed with the teacher's inflexibility on this matter. Her habit had been, as Paul suggested, to accept the teacher's authority on this sort of thing. Max's experience was a little more poignant. One night at dinner he stated out of the blue, "The teacher should listen to David more 'cause he knows a lot sometimes." The story was that they have these exercises which require them to identify the names of various hazily mimeographed objects so they can classify them by "beginning sound" and so on. It seems that David had a natural talent for recognizing some of the more obscure configurations. One time he enthusiastically blurted out the answer without raising his hand. The teacher came down a little heavy on him with the classic, "Perhaps you'd like to come up here and teach the class, David". A small, but very definite injustice, which Max had no trouble recognizing. He admires and respects his teacher, so he was very sober about the whole thing. Paul concluded with: >At any rate, I'm sure you must have noticed that the public schools aren't >as great a place to learn (in general) as they used to be. Whose >educational philosophy is responsible for the present crisis? I know there are a lot of problems in the nations schools, but they haven't manifested themself to any degree I can see in the Wheaton Public School my children attend. They are both way ahead of where I was in reading and math at that grade level. I was in elementary school in the Golden Era of Dick and Jane, too. My uncle is a high school teacher in Pennsylvania (he is very religious incidentally) and he once remarked that the kids were definitely not as good students as the kids ten years ago. But then he added somewhat cryptically, "... they're a lot SMARTER now." Remember the classroom scene from Wargames? That was right on. OOOOOOHHHHH THE TAAAAAAAAAAMES THEY AHHHH ERRRRA CHAAAAAAEEEEEEAAAANNNGINNNNN Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew