YOU TELL ME: TIME TO MAKE STANDARDIZED TESTS AND THE ...
Recently a close friend of mine and his son had yet another bitter experience with the Amairkuhn edgykayshun system. It's an experience I hear over an over from teachers and sometimes even students who take the time to write me about their latest nightmarish encounter with "the system", and with the corporate hacks and politicians and edubabblers - the endless list of "facilitators"(read, comissars) - who pimp it. After hours and hours of preparation to take a "science" test and answers questions in one way, one is subjected to a standardized computerized test in which one has to select from pre-selected answers, do so within a limited time frame, and without opportunity to explain one's answer to a teacher who can evaluate it.
This "march of mediocrity" through the educational system has been going on since the Educational Testing (Dis)Service was a gleam in James Bryant Conant's and Henry Chauncey's jaudiced progressivist social-engineering eyes. In its latest incarnation, at least in America, we have the Common Core standards and its "adaptive assessment" process, being pushed by the likes of the Gates Foundation and by educational testing corporations. The American obsession with technological applications and solutions to everything manifested itself most recently when someone sent me an article about scientists who were developing a robot to read and teach reading to children. Exit the human contact; enter the technologically inspired mediocrity. Consider, for example, this article, shared by said friend:
There Are No Technology Shortcuts to Good Education
In my many "rants" about Amarikuhn edgykayshun, one of the trends I have lamented is the fact that these methods have been exported from this country to others: Canada, Australia, Britain, and other countries in Europe. The results have been the same there. I even included recently as one of my "tidbits" the response of a British school master to an invitation from a politician inviting himself to the headmaster's school: the headmaster responded with a firm, but polite, "no thank you; we teachers are tired of being political footballs for every zany trendy claptrap of educational blither coming out of the corporations and politicans bought off by them." Well, the headmaster didn't say it quite that way, but that was the gist of his response. And I suspect he spoke not just for teachers in the United Kingdom, but Canada, Australia, and most importantly, for teachers in America, who've all but lost any real input or voice, except for the many "teacher drones" cloned by the certification and "educational collages" themselves, who are essentially clueless, mindless, and lazy, and who go along to get along. The real teachers, who put up with that process simply so that they could teach, are the real heros of the system, but they are a dying breed, or rather, a breed being deliberately ostracized and and pushed out of the system.
So herewith the point of my edykayshunal rant of the day: it's time - high time - for principals, teachers, administrators, to start shunning these people, the corporate representatives from Pearson, Gates, the ETS, the local politician "concerned" about education, the Doctors of Edgykayshun with their lunatic studies and latest "methodology." But more importantly, it's time to make it a geopolitical issue; after all, the progressivists have been "educating for world citizenship" by their own admission since at least the 1930s. But two can, and should play, that game.
We've watched a growing worldwide revolt to the American-inspired GMO mercentilism: Europe is almost in full revolt against GMOS (though, it should be noted, another issue looms: will they ban GMO feeding of livestock?); Russia has banned them completely, and significant revolts are underway in several Indian states against GMOs.
With that tought in mind, maybe it's time for those countries to make the spread of American-corporatized "methods" of education and testing a geopolitical issue as well, pointing out its manifest and systemic failures, the creation of a priviledged (and largely anonymous) set of experts who program and write the questions, the lack of real teacher-human interaction, and so on. One can think of this not as "GMO geopolitics" but as "Standardized testing and Common Core geopolitics." You(America) can go on destroying your educational system by such nonsense, but we will have none of it here." Maybe its time for those countries to point out the failures of the American system in this respect as well, and to question the very foundation and premises on which it has been erected and the attempt to spread it to the rest of the world.
See you on the flip side...
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My understanding is that the American education system is largely based on the Prussian system and aimed at producing a compliant workforce. That’s where we got mandatory attendance, standardized testing, and a prison-like environment.
Thanks to Bill Bennett, Alan Cranston, Mark O. Hatfield and, “Global Education 2000”. Yesss, we know who you are. Wicked, wretched and contemptible. Wash yer back fellas. Hah!
Just hold on a litle longer in the USA hope is on the horizon. With all the refugees poring in europe whome can’t read and write the corporate representatives from Pearson, Gates, the ETS soon will invade total Europe with there “edgykayshun ingenious system”.
Shurely all peoples will manage to “dot” on a computer screen.
The WHO makes a study of cancer causing properties found in processed meat products but won’t single out chemical preservatives as the worst among other natural preservatives like smoking and salt treatment. Also interesting is no report if GMO feed has changed the meat products to make them cancer carrying. And more than that why hasn’t the WHO tested GMO corn and corn sweetener for cancer causing properties,is the WHO paid off by monstersanto,is the meat industry being held hostage here,or better still can we get the meat industry to ban GMO feed for their cattle and cops,oops I mean pigs,(I apologize to all you pigs out there)and make allegations that the GMO’s are suspect in contaminating the food chain.
Let’s face it; education has never great to begin with. It’s like that famous Gettysburg Address in November of 1863 “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” What a sale’s pitch! Nowhere in the history of mankind does the record show such a government so specified lasting longer than a few hellashish few short month[all kinds of selfish/heartless oligarch’s making damn sure such precedents NEVER survives on Planet Earth]. Even as the framers of the Constitution were penning the distribution of property & law to favor the few wealthy.
Thus, it is with an education that would pave the way for a free society -like a Gettysburg government of the people; it stands about a snowball’s chance in hell.
I went to a private Catholic school, and this school was a ‘technical” school, which meant that you could either take “metalwork” od “woodwork”, I chose metalwork.
Then there was the choice of either History or Geography, I took Geography.
There was also a subject called “Tech Drawing”, which I really enjoyed. So then there was the standard English and maths which everybody does. The problem is, that apart from English and maths, then the other subjects did in fact help me in my later years in an Engineering capacity.
BUT, I can honestly say that I have educated myself MORE, by reading books, lots of books. The moral of this story is, what you learn in school is a ‘FRACTION OF WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO NEED IN YOUE LATER LIFE.
Obviously, this is being done on purpose, to provide the corporate overlords with dim-bulb, lobotomized zombie employees with just enough sentience to carry out the rote tasks assigned but not enough vitality left to realize how utterly they’ve been enslaved, and even if the thought does occur, to be too profoundly anestheticized to attempt to do anything about it.
The rich send their children to WASPy private schools, little Ivy League campuses for the little oligarchs and privileged of tomorrow. Meanwhile, the masses are processed like Dyson chickens.
As I has written before this society built on drug addiction and ignorance. Books and other reading material and plain taking and listening to other people is better than staring at screens. Zombiefacation is the goal of our elites but then they are the ultimate zombies themselves and don’t know or are in denial of their condition.
Any language can be weaponized, maybe some easier than others but I don’t think the fault lies in a language itself. The Intent hiding behind the use and abuse of it’s favorite conceptual impositions by way of a cultural totalitarian value system might be more like it. To know a bit more about the historical thread leading to the drone brain leaders of modern ersatz education, a junk techno-feudal instructional cognitive lowering/digital amnesia system, I would recommend “The Leipzig Connection” By Paolo Lionni, the many Charlotte Yserbit’s Youtube videos and a wrap up with Hart Randall’s “THE TRIVIUM OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION, HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT DECLINE IN THE 20TH CENTURY AND RESURGENCE IN RECENT DECADES”. Very educational in themselves. Don’t we all need to seriously educate ourselves about the vicious war on education? Without education a two legged being tragically can’t become a human.
By the way (and some of you may have already seen this) but there was a recent article in The Atlantic detailing some of the differences between American and Finnish version of kindergarten:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/
The basic idea is that Finnish kids are given plenty of time for play while American kids and put into a grinding machine of standardized testing.
“In my many “rants” about Amarikuhn edgykayshun, one of the trends I have lamented is the fact that these methods have been exported from this country to others: Canada, Australia, Britain, and other countries in Europe”
America, Canada, Australia, Britain…I often think that it’s not as simple as referring to “America” or even “the West” anymore. I don’t really know who the powers that be that control America are but it does seem that they are the some one throughout these “Western” countries. Which really leads me to wonder if the English language itself isn’t the biggest weapon and threat to the world today. I’ve done enough international traveling to know that one doesn’t really need anything beyond English to visit most countries (at least in a superficial sense of “visit”). Every airport & hotel now seems to be an outpost of English cultural domination, making the foreigners feel superficially welcome while providing an alluring goal to the aspirations of the lower classes amongst the natives.