Hi Malkin.

RESOLVED?  your last line in your post above.

Could you educate the participants on this blog on the criteria you use to ‘resolve’ a discussion?
Measurable parameters.

cheers.  Mirka

So myth number 7 does not apply to Canada as it is rooted deeply in the culture, history, and edu babble of the British system.  Now you know that I argued that myths #1-6 should have been dealt the same fate- does not apply.

glass half full,

Mirka

It’s All A Marxist Plot – This 21st C Learning!

I’ve just ordered this book from Amazon.ca, for over $70 (hope it’s worth the price!):
The Critical Turn in Education: The Emergence of Marxist Thought and the Rise of an Academic Left from the 1960s to the 1980s, by Isaac Gottesman, 2011.

I’m hoping it’s a TELL-ALL book:  Who, What, When, Where, Why, How.  Hope it names names. 

The “critical” in the title is important to note.  “Critical” far from being the logical thinking we want our kids to learn is not that at all.  When educators use it and university profs teach it — it means liberation, emancipation, social justice, equity, post-colonialism, release from oppression.  It is critical pedagogy and constructivism.  Constructivism in education is not only constructing your own meaning of life — forget history — but also seeing yourself in contrast to people better off.  Essentially, the swing in education, it seems, is for students to compare and contrast the 99% vs the 1%. 

So, to get back to Daisy Christodoulou and her 7 myths in Education and how “misled” she felt by her pedagogy — this is what she says.  There has been 150 years of steady incremental progressivism in education in the Western World.  And, she has been severely criticized for exposing these myths that are now pushed as 21st C Learning.

Don’t forget, as I will always remind people, this same 150 years of steady growth in progressivism was paralleled for the same 150 years by exclusion of parents from the substance of education of their children — so aptly described in “Parents and School – 150 year struggle for control” by William Cutler.  Now, when the Marxists really took over in the 60s onward, the sidelining of parents became ever more fierce. Why? Because, parents, as first responders, would simply get to know too much and would interfere too much, and might really start an exodus from public schools.  Public schools was the venue chosen by Marxists for social transformation because workers of the world just would not revolt so a surrogate was “the young”.

  So, today, we’re at 21st Century Learning all across Canada.  In America it’s common core curriculum.  For some flavor of what some people in Utah are protesting, see:

Indoctrination in Common Core English Language - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGph7QHzmo8
Math Book Comparison
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdgGqVq-akg

Mirka, the use of the word resolved was just me showing my playful side. I don’t actually expect to get consensus on or even an answer to the puzzling question of why educator leaders are ignoring common sense, research, parents’ complaints, and poor results. It’s a mystery wrapped up in an enigma inside an enigma.

Also to Mirka: with regard to my featuring Ms Christodoulou’s first six myths but not the seventh, it is my opinion that the first six myths apply fully to Ontario education. You are welcome to advance arguments against that position and I will be happy to evaluate them on their merits.

To everyone: please tell us whether or not you believe that Ms Christodoulou’s six myths are valid, giving reasons.

POSTED ON BEHALF OF DOUG

Education is just far more nuanced than the 6 absolutist myths would like you to believe.

You take the position that all research, parental positions, ..... support these positions so why don’t we do this.

As is often the case in education, the books has a point or several points in its favour but there are at least an equal and opposite set of beliefs with equally valid reasons.

There is almost nobody that runs a pure progressive or pure traditional school system. Look at the Sidwell Friends school where Obama’s kids go. You think people with that much power and influence want to experiment with their children or send their children to an environment where they will get anything less than the best education available in Washington?

For all of those who insist that only traditional education works, that money class size, unionization, poverty whatever do not have dramatic effects on educational outcomes I have a one word answer - Finland.

I don’t read anything in Seven Myths that leads me to believe Ms C is advocating a “traditional school system”.

It seems to me that Ms C is calling for schools that give a high priority to teacher-led instruction that emphasizes knowledge. It may be presumptuous, because I don’t think it’s explicitly stated in her book, but I would go so far as to say that Ms C favours a strong emphasis on knowledge and basic skills in the earlier grades, gradually giving way to more and more emphasis on “higher-order” skills as the students acquire the knowledge and basic skills to use higher-order skills effectively.

Of course, I would be prepared to listen to challenges to this interpretation of Ms C’s position.

But if my interpretation is accepted, then I also invite discussion about this week’s topic (the resistance to the ideas expressed in Seven Myths About Education is the result of the educational establishment’s hegemony, as opposed to valid criticisms) keeping in mind that the educational establishment is not pushing back at so-called “traditional schools” but rather schools that transition from a teacher-led knowledge and basic skills emphasis to a teacher-led knowledge and higher-order skills emphasis.

POSTED ON BEHALF OF DOUG

You may have noticed that there are very few teachers in the reform movement and very few teachers would buy Ms C’s argument as a whole. She has some good points to make here and there but it comes down in the end to what % of class time is devoted to teacher led instruction and fact based knowledge and that can be quite different with 2 ps teachers across the hall from each other.

90% of teachers in my experience use very large amounts of teacher directed time and fact based knowledge enriched by student centred time and extended critital thinking.

In high school facts are things like WW2 was 1939-1945 in Europe.

Critical thinking is things like, “why was Japan the first nation in Asia to develop an advanced modern economy?”

Both are important. carts come before horses, facts come before critical thinking.

Dickens mocks Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradgrind

In agree with Doug that FINLAND is worth at least the time energy that this blog spent on Daisy.  Daisy was in the classroom for three years and then went into the land of the educrats. 

I work and mentor teachers with three years in the classroom.  These are admirable individuals.

I also work with teachers that run, for self evident reasons, out of the classroom under five years.  They become the disconnected, well intentioned bubbas that consistently get in the way of real work and real progress because they need to justify their positions and their early retirement from the real work in education.

Exhibit A :  PLEASE search then Graves of Academes, The pygmies revenge. 

cheers , Mirka