Thursday, May 17, 2007

Struck A Nerve

In this post I took the Educator Roundtable to task for their reasons for being against the No Child Left Behind Act. I submitted the post to the Carnival of Education, where it got wider dissemination--and today I started receiving comments from the Chair of that very same Educator Roundtable.

If you find give-and-take enjoyable, I encourage you to go take a read.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've located a quote that exemplifies my objection to "higher-order" thinking being a focus in institutional schooling:

“…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong“. “A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher’s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.” - Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in “Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives”, p. 185, 1956


Old stuff yes, but frightening still. One of the reasons I doubt that when some educators and myself both use the term "higher-order" we are talking about the same thing.