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That take has been accurate in specific times and places, but it is also blindly repeated in contexts where it's simply not true. All the teachers I encountered
by dkarl 2y ago
That take has been accurate in specific times and places, but it is also blindly repeated in contexts where it's simply not true. All the teachers I encountered in my time in the US public school system were trained in the progressive spirit expressed by Feynman, with a strong bias against rote learning and in favor of a conceptual, understand-based approach. My math education in school both encouraged and rewarded figuring things out, which was good for me because I hated memorization and was always bad at it.
Despite that, the criticism that school rewards memorization and doesn't teach critical thinking is still the only criticism I ever heard about the education I received. It's the standard thing that well-meaning people say.
Which I think is a shame. When virtually every teacher in the system is trained in the progressive approach to education, and most of them sincerely believe in it and do their best to practice it, only to have the entire society turn around and claim that they are actually implementing ideas that nobody has believed in in a century, must be incredibly discouraging.
- carabiner 2y agoThis is why American student math performance on PISA is excellent: https://i0.wp.com/www.edwardconard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2022-PISA-Math-.png?fit=1092%2C878&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/www.edwardconard.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
- LegionMammal978 2y agoYeah, it seems almost as if a lot of people look back at their experiences of U.S. schools in the 90s, and assume that the schools in 2025 must not have changed one iota. While obviously I can't speak for every school district (nor can anyone), many of the criticisms I've heard seem disconnected from the schools I'm familiar with. (Not that they aren't subject to newer criticisms!) Is my personal experience a big outlier, or are people just extrapolating from the past? It makes me worry that school districts will greatly overcorrect in their efforts to ward off the old criticisms.
- zmgsabst 2y agoThis is a general problem with social change.
- dkarl 2y agoI went to school in the early 1990s! The progressive approach to education was already orthodoxy when my teachers were trained. It has been around a long, long time and has been the prevailing belief in education for half a century or more. The situation is almost paradoxical: you have generation after generation of people saying that education needs to be reformed to eliminate rote learning and focus on understanding concepts, and where did they learn this orthodoxy? In school, from their teachers. I suspect it has something to do with how teenagers experience school. No matter the pedagogical approach, if kids are distracted with their social lives and normal adolescent stuff, they experience any attempt to teach them as dry and rote.