- MADNESS OF METHOD
- PEER TEACHING
- COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
- THE MULTILEVEL CLASSROOM
- MAINSTREAMING
- STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING
- "MEMORIZE" IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD
- READING
- FADDISM: DOES NEW MEAN BETTER?
- RELEVANCE, PLETHORA OF COURSES. CORE KNOWLEDGE
- "SHE HAD A COURSE IN YEARBOOK!"
- PROGRAMS ACROSS THE CURRICULUM
- OF LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES: BILINGUAL CITIZENS, SI-- BILINGUAL EDUCATION, NO
- FUN! FUN! FUN!
- THE MYTH OF MORE AND MORE TO LEARN
- TRANSFER OF LEARNING
- CHANGING THE NONESSENTIAL INTO EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
- NATIONAL STANDARDS, NATIONAL CURRICULUM, NATIONAL EXAMS
- IS MULTIPLE CHOICE THE RIGHT CHOICE?
- TRACKING IS ESSENTIAL
- GRADES AND ACCOMPLISHMENT
- GENUINE BUT DISTORTED IDEALISM
A favorite mantra of the education establishment has been : “We don’t teach subjects; we teach children.” That, in a nutshell, is an unconscious confession of a key weakness of American public education: the exaltation of methodology over content.
With vigorous education reform, professional educators will be able to turn away from their enfeebling mantra: “We don’t teach subjects; we teach children “and proclaim “we teach subjects to children.”
Logically, content -- that is subject-matter -- is at the center of all education, but without thorough education reform, the American education establishment will continue to ignore this essential reality, focusing instead on methodology, how subjects are taught.
Content obviously changes over time, with some aspects changing rapidly with new developments and discoveries, but the underlying aspects have staying power, reaching over decades and even centuries or millennia.
Changes in content are likely to be an evolution from older knowledge. Newton and other noted intellects, when praised for their great discoveries, have said that their discoveries were possible because they “stood on the shoulders of giants.” Methodology changes rapidly, descending into education faddism. It is generally imposed top-down on teachers and is fueled not only by theorists in schools of education but also by commercial education interests -- book publishers, for instance -- for whom ever changing methodologies are a choice means to fatten their bottom lines.
Education reform requires a mastery of content with methodologies that don’t water down that content or fritter away classroom time so that the content gets lost in the process.
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