Polarshift: China, India and the Rise and Fall of the West by Matt Buttsworth

Author:Matt Buttsworth
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Misc
ISBN: 9781466462380
Published: 2011-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Furthermore, when one looks at President Obama’s initiative, with all its talk of Charter Schools and improving the quality of education, there is not a single mention of helping truly excellent students excel. Instead, the emphasis is still upon improving total class scores which inevitably will lead to teachers focusing on teaching the restricted, limited curriculum at length to the class as a whole, and helping the weaker students to understand and regurgitate what has been taught, with the excellent students being bored, neglected and ignored within this single minded focus on simplified standardized tests.

This deterioration in the quality of many American schools has also occurred in many other Western nations. In England, the introduction of the comprehensive school system, mirrored in Germany by the introduction of the ‘Gesamtschule’ model, has seen the destruction of the earlier very successful streamed school model in favor of having children of all abilities in one class, with the argument that this helps in particular the education of the weakest children who earlier would have been sent to in the German model to a ‘Volkschule’ and that this Gesamtschule model helps maintain social cohesion by having children of all classes and educational ability in one class and one school.

The problem with this comprehensive school system is similar to the American ‘No Child Shall be Left Behind’ policy is that much more classroom time is devoted to classroom management - a problem which earlier existed only at a minimal level in gymnasiums - and a tendency to teach towards the bottom so that all children in the class can understand, rather than extending the very intelligent kids who earlier would have gone to gymnasiums. A similar change has occurred in Sweden where the earlier existing gymnasium system was abolished in favor of comprehensive schools. In all places where this experiment has been conducted the consequence has been a loss of quality of education of the best students.

As in America, this situation has been worsened by the discipline problems of increasing violence or drug use in particular of inner city schools, leading to in Australia, England and other countries a flight to the private schools, further exacerbating the problems of retaining quality of education in the state schools. Who would want to teach at a disadvantaged inner city school in London or Liverpool? Who would want their child to go to an English inner city school?

In Australia this problem of the quality of education offered by the state schools has been compounded by the introduction by left-wing pedagogues of a curriculum framework system doing away with exams and a set syllabus in favor or achievement of an extremely complex, impossible to comprehend spiral of over a thousand specific learning outcomes that had to be taught by individual teachers creating their own learning materials. The lack of external testing until the year 12 exams has worsened the chance of children at state schools to perform well in those exams, exams which the supporters of the curriculum framework

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.