Beware of Bandwagons

There’s an excellent article in the OSSTF’s latest newsletter, although the navigation is quite cumbersome (use the arrows in the upper right-hand corner). The author is a high school geography and history teacher, and he tells an interesting story about university librarians who took it into their heads that their books were in danger of crumbling, and so they should quickly microfilm them all - even though that meant cutting the books along their spines. They spent something like $39 million on this process, not to mention the destruction to the books, only to find that the books were actually more resilient than the microfilm. 

The author then suggests that the education world may be labouring under some similarly-flawed assumptions, for example the emphasis on self-esteem, the reluctance to insist on correct spelling, and the assumption that technology is good. Here’s his powerful ending. H/T WSN

• People have been teaching other people since long before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and frankly, the methodologies that owrk have not changed all that much. We seem to get locked into the idea that because something is new it is good. In fact that assumption might actually be the most potentially dangerous trap we could fall into, since ‘old’ ways of learning are the ways we learned and we know they work.
• We have to challenge those who claim to have new knowledge about how to educate. Failing to do so leaves us with an entire generation of kids who have no idea how to deal with failure, criticism (constructive or otherwise), or how to push themselves through challenges and obstacles when they leave the safety and protection of the education system. If we get it wrong, the blunder made with those microfilmed books will seem minuscule by comparison.

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