Since the publication of Academically Adrift in 2011, it has been a commonplace that educators in the US are failing to prepare students to think critically. The inevitable question of who to blame for this, sadly, seems almost tailor-made to pit K-12 educators against their counterparts in higher ed. Being in the latter category, a refrain I frequently hear from colleagues in the US is that students are turning up at their institutions every year who are less prepared for college-level work than their predecessors of a few years prior. While many (I would even go so far as to say most if not all) of us do not blame K-12 teachers, whom we know are subject to a great more interference in their professional lives than many of us could ever stomach, we do blame the political dysfunction that causes their woes. Increasingly it threatens higher ed too.
“The Student in His Study,” by Jan Davidszoon de Heem, 1628
On that subject here’s a piece from Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post that deserves a lot more attention than it’s had to this point. It was written by one Kenneth Bernstein, apparently upon reflection at the time of his retirement as a High School AP government teacher. In this piece Bernstein gives clear voice to the feeling that many professional teachers have that the priorities of the national education agenda in the US are seriously, dangerously out of alignment with the standing mission of K-12 education to produce functional young adults with sufficient critical thinking skills to make them capable of entering either the work force or higher ed. Quoting from a must-read blog post by 2009 National Teacher of the Year, Anthony Mullen, he also captures well the absurdity of an educational system that puts the fate of its charges in the hands of people with neither classroom experience nor any substantive background in education: (more…)
RAIL 