Subscribe to our Blog
A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing
Ontario’s Liberal Party has been making very little progress towards fulfilling their promise that 75% of the province’s students will pass the provincial tests, even though the government has been throwing money at this problem for years - hard caps of 25 students in primary classes, secretariats and turn-around teams, higher teacher salaries, and so on. And of course, next on the list is a multi-billion dollar scheme involving all-day kindergarten.
But the canny Liberals are taking no chances, as this Toronto Star article reveals. The government is planning to “streamline” the province’s grade 1-8 curriculum, describing it as “a series of overly robust subject-based documents which are disconnected, overwhelming and full of content reflective of 20th century knowledge”. Those who are interested in investigating the truth of this assertion are encouraged to check out the current Ontario curricula.
So what does this have to do with increasing the number of students who pass the provincial tests? Well, the province’s EQAO tests are based on the curriculum. If the curriculum gets easier, the tests get easier. And, if the tests get easier, more students will be able to pass them. In other words, dumbing down the curriculum makes it more likely that the Liberal Party will be able to keep its 75% promise (albeit several years late) and get re-elected. A happy ending for all concerned, except of course the students who end up learning less.
Re: Ontario’s review of the Primary
curriculum, Toronto Star and
associated papers, Dec. 1/09,
herewith a letter to editor sent
today by Frank Gue, P.Eng.,
Burlington:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Among the few good things and many terrifying things in this news item is this terrifying one: Karen Grose, the board’s system superintendent, said it no longer makes sense to try to cram piles of facts into young minds. “Our kids live in a world where they are immersed in content through things like Twitter and Google, so we don’t want them memorizing facts they can access easily, but we want them to think about how to apply that knowledge, and how it affects how they live as citizens and workers,“ said Grose.
Set this up against the Scientific American quote of many years ago that I have used so so often: “Every human accomplishment springs from a platform of rote learning.“
I’m a licensed airplane pilot. I’d better have rote learned my stalling speed or I’ll burn to death in my crumpled airplane.
I’m a licensed radio experimenter. I’d better have rote learned Ohm’s Law (not “discovered” it) or I’ll electrocute myself.
I’m a graduate professional engineer. If I’m assigned to design a bridge, I’d better have rote-learned Euler’s long-column formulae or the bridge will collapse.
I’m a self-taught factory production management expert, and have rote-learned that work in process equals production rate times cycle time. Expanding on this enabled me to write a hard cover text (Reston Publishing) that has been called “a breakthrough”. I couldn’t have written it without having rote learned rules of grammar, paragraph construction, spelling, etc.
I’m a licensed automobile driver. I’d better have rote-learned that I should stay back - yeah - many feet from the car ahead, or I’ll stove-in said car, just as a certain lady did last week
when she drove into me and totalled my car. “Every human accomplishment springs from a platform of rote learning.“
We’ll continue to provide kids with a ladder to “higher order thinking” that is missing the bottom five rungs.