Progressive educators gave us a vision of the whole child. Where has that vision gone, now that we need it most?
1. The dominating values currently guiding the reform efforts focus heavily on boosting test scores and standardizing outcomes - a means-ends model. Measurement technology increasingly defines what students will be required to learn.
2. Limitations: means are not always follow goals - goals can also follow means; our preoccupation with standards freezes our conception of what we want to accomplish in our schools. Technical orientation vs organic or humanistic
3. Reasons driving technically rational approaches
- Historical. The industrial revolution invented a way of thinking about productivity (using systematic control to achieve high levels of predictability)
- Making comparative analysis possible. The competitive culture
Care for the whole child
- Recognize the distinctive talents that individual children possess and create an environment that actualizes those potentialities
- Take into consideration the various ways in which students respond to what teachers plan
- Provide a more complete picture of the developing child (not everything that matters is measurable, not everything that is measurable matters)
- Prioritize the social and emotional life of the child
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
--Jean Piaget
Links
Eisner, E. W. (2002). What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education? The encyclopedia of informal education.
