If I had kids in Texas schools under the new textbook standards, I'd find private schools for them. Oh wait, the private schools in Texas exist mostly because the public schools aren't conservative enough. 

 

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr., The New York Times

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. 

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

(Full story)

You tell 'em, Texas State Board of Education! The youth of Texas have for too long labored under the oppressive thumb of liberal textbook writers. Your kids should be taught the social insights of Jefferson Davis, the guideposts to modern living of Phyllis Schlafly, the Constitution according to the Moral Majority, the supremacy of free-market capitalism as explained by the Heritage Foundation, and how the Tea Party movement will counteract the liberalness in Washington.

 

Texas Conservatives Seek Deeper Stamp on Texts

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr., The New York Times

AUSTIN, Tex. — Even as a panel of educators laid out a vision Wednesday for national standards for public schools, the Texas school board was going in a different direction, holding hearings on changes to its social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light, emphasize the role of Christianity in American history and include Republican political philosophies in textbooks.

The hearings are the latest round in a long-running cultural battle on the 15-member State Board of Education, a battle that could have profound consequences for the rest of the country, since Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. 

The board is expected to take a preliminary vote this week on a raft of changes to the state’s social studies curriculum proposed by the seven conservative Republicans on the board. A final vote will come in May.

Conservatives argue that the proposed curriculum, written by a panel of teachers, emphasizes the accomplishments of liberal politicians — like the New Deal and the Great Society — and gives less importance to efforts by conservatives like President Ronald Reagan to limit the size of government.

“There is a bias,” said Don McLeroy, a dentist from College Station who heads up the board’s conservative faction. “I think the left has a real problem seeing their own bias.”

The three-day meeting is the first time the board has met since voters in last week’s Republican primaries voted to oust Dr. McLeroy and another conservative and threw the future makeup of the board up in the air. Two other members — a conservative Republican and a moderate Democrat — are not seeking re-election, and it is unclear what the balance of power will be after the general election. At present, the seven hard-core conservatives are often joined by one or more moderate members in votes on curriculum questions.

Dr. McLeroy still has 10 months to serve and he, along with rest of the religious conservatives on the board, have vowed to put their mark on the guidelines for social studies texts.

(Full story)

 BasmntMadman wrote: 
I like that for a start.  The world is a diverse place, though, and being able to function well in one place may not have much to do with being able to function well in another.  An adaptable person can probably figure out how to get along in different cultures with different laws and customs, but there is always specific knowledge you need to learn based on what area you are in, right?  Which probably tends to support my notion that the local community is the best entity to define what a well educated person is.

 aflanigan wrote: 
Well, I'd say one important component of it would be "to be able to function well in the world, taking advantage of the store of human knowledge ".   

 

 BasmntMadman wrote: 

I don't want to get into a comparative discussion of different approaches to learning.  I'm asking a more fundamental question, an essential, elemental, foundational question.  What do we mean when we say "well educated"?  We have to answer this question before we can weigh the effectiveness of any approach to learning.

 black321 wrote: 

Leaving the definition of what constitutes a "well educated person" up to teachers seems rather misguided.  If schools serve the communities they are located in, then the members of the community are the ones who should be defining the school's role, and figuring out if the school is accomplishing its task.  Right?  Teachers, as members of the community, should certainly have some say, but so should other "stakeholders".  That's sort of what I'm driving at when I ask the fundamental question, what does it mean to be well educated?  It's a question every community should ponder deeply when they look at their own community school and consider how well it is doing its job.  Same with the police force.  If their job is to "serve and protect" the community, what does that entail, exactly?  We don't expect cops to shine our shoes or fetch fast food meals for us, or apply sunscreen to our faces.

So when we say we want children graduating from our local schools to be "well educated", what exactly do we mean?

Personally I think settling for "They should know the three Rs" is not a very ambitious goal.  What about understanding civics?  G.K. Chesterton wrote that "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed".  Isn't conveying that creed, i.e. the ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, a primary function of our schools?  Is it not a strong characteristic of whatever civic cohesiveness we have in the US?

And what about having some scientific literacy?  hundreds if not thousands of people get duped into believing that they can buy a gizmo and attach it to their car's fuel line to cut their gas bill in half, or buy a wristband and cure illness.  If asked, vast numbers of people in the US would probably deny that evolution is a scientific fact (I speak here of evolution, not Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain evolutionary changes).  Shouldn't some scientific literacy be an important part of being well educated?

 Zep wrote: 
Usually in grad school the focus is on completing a thesis.  That's the thing that will be enduring after the degree is awarded - nobody will remember stellar course work.  When you give a presentation, meet people, and collect business cards, nobody will give a shit about straight A's in course work.  Not only that, but the grading scale in grad school is A=good, B=fine, no problem, C=failing. 

So, the courses are really just to give you the background you need to do the thesis work.  Suddenly, there's the awful realization that the coursework is not an end in itself, but just a tool that'd better be useful.  Kind of like the working world that anyone at any level will experience.

So...some variant of the grad school educational approach might have merit.  I've experienced some stabs at that approach, but IMO they're kind of misbegotten, and suppose that kids, on their own, can derive principles that baffled the best minds for centuries.  It's far better to know something before you start on the research, unless you're a true genius.  However, if you give the kids some  coursework, then put them to work on an application of it, doing something at an appropriate level that's useful and engaging, that might be a good way of education.   Come to think of it, we hear about such programs from time to time, though they seem to be sporadic. 

Or, just put the kids on the online discussion forums.  When they get into an imbroglio over politics, history, economics, or science, they have a terriffic incentive to really get up to speed on these subjects.   One time an Intelligent Design type aggressively maintained that the second law of thermodynamics proved that evolution was impossible (the second law state that entropy always increases, but evolving organisms become more complex, so of lower entropy, so it's a violation of the second law).  The ensuing free for all would make a traditionally abstract and mind-numbing subject very compelling.  (BTW, evolution is perfectly consistent with the second law).  Well, OK, such a program may be a little far fetched, but something in the same vein might be useful.

I would think we should be able to leave that up to our well qualified teachers.  But some form of "standardised test" should also help.  can they write a well structured sentence? How well is there reading comprehension?  Develop, not a minimum, but required level of math expertise.  Reading and writing help the students learn to communicate.  The math helps with critical thinking.  If you think about it, most of the rest of the material through Jr High (outside of art and gym) is more or less memorization, but not to say SS and science don't help foster a better, more rounded pupil. 

Here's an example of some of the problems in education.  I teach finance to 2nd year MBA students.  Many of these kids have also sorts of knowledge about complex transactions, yet when I ask them to analyze a set of financials and write 2 or 3 paragraph summary, 2/3 of them struggle without further direction.  They don't know the fundamentals. 

 black321 wrote: 

But what do you mean when you say "get the three R's down"?  (It sounds sort of like we're dispensing medicine).  What signifies when someone has one or all of these Rs "down"?

 aflanigan wrote: 

If we can get the three rs down with a good percentage of students before high school, than we would be making good progress.  HS can offer an opportunity to futher differentiate their skills, whether in the sciences, social studies, or some other labor skill. 

aflanigan wrote:
Facts aren't really analysed in the same way that propositions are; facts are like bricks, let's say, that form the basis of the theses.

Synthesis is a much better way of putting it: you have a thesis and an antithesis, and from that you create a "truth" (without getting to its validity), a synthesis. This is the basic principle behind Dialectics.

Having knowledge of facts helps in that I can test pieces of my synthesis against what is known: if it's possible, if there are contradictory facts, if it has been disproven or supported previously. In this way, "facts" are the bricks and knowledge is the experience I have in knowing how to place the bricks.

 black321 wrote: 

So a well educated person is someone who has mastered the "three Rs"?  I.e. language skills/reading and mathematical skills?  What are the "fundamentals"?  Do they include Science?  Art? Rhetoric? Statistics?

 Zep wrote: 
I like your answer.  Let's dig a little deeper; what is involved in the "analytical" part of learning?  What does it mean to analyze facts?

I guess one type of analysis is to gauge the truth or falsity of information, right?  Information may also have been relevant and true at one time, but things are almost always in flux as you point out.

Another helpful skill would probably be termed "synthesis"?  By this I mean the ability to put together facts that you have gathered in to reach a sort of conclusion or realization, like a scientist that confirms or disproves a theory.

What other helpful skills or techniques might there be that are related to our accumulation and processing of facts and data? Scouring (where do you find those nuggets, those hard to find facts that turn out to be crucial)?  Comparing/drawing analogies?  Finding and processing contradictory facts/data?

 islander wrote: 

I'm not sure that it's only about age, but also about the quality of education.  I work with some of the support staff here, and seriously they are not able to think outside of the scant directions that they were given when they were trained.

Case in point, and I kid you not:  our Psychiatrists see kids in 30 minute slots.  One of the Dr's asked that a patient be scheduled for a one hour slot any day the following week.  The front desk told the patient that the Psychiatrist didnt have any time to see the patient.  When asked later she stated that although the Psych's schedule was open for many many hours the following week, they were all half hour slots.  She had not thought to ask if she could take two half hours and make and hour.  This person's been working at the front desk for like 6 months. 

 meower wrote: 
I see a lot of this. I can tell a lot about  a person's background from their approach. Younger people/recent grads work hard to get 'the answer'. More experienced people sit back and develop the process they will go through to achieve a solution.

Education should always be about the fundamentals...that should be the core of any succesful progrram.  Beyond that, there should be a strong emphasis to identify the various "levels" of students and break them out according to their needs.  An effort to help the ones with learnings disabilities, and to ensure the more advanced kids aren't bored and turned off by the slow pace. 

I know each school district has its own unique problems, ranging from the struggles of underfunded systems, to those where the funding goes into a black hole.  I just see way too much waste and sense of entitlement when it comes to schools. 

For example our school system recently felt it necessary to upgrade the outdoor lights for the football field at a cost of about $250k...why do we need night games for football?  These are the types of questions school systems need to start asking...not simply asking for more money to fund the same systems. 

 Welly wrote: 

OK, so I know how to "ask the right questions".  So I stand on a street corner and proceed to ask probing and thoughtful questions:  "How does an automobile work?  What makes it start or not start?  How do seatbelts protect me in the event of a crash?"  And the answers come strolling up to me for my consideration?

Or I go to a public library and stand at the reference desk and fire pointed questions at the reference librarian all morning long.  Am I now a critical thinker?

Being able to ask the right questions is important, but perhaps there's more to it than that?  Like being able to figure out where to find answers for my questions, and how to discriminate between a high quality answer and a low quality answer, or between a relevant answer and an irrelevant one?

aflanigan wrote:
While facts are important, facts by themselves don't mean anything.  There is a Knowledge Management model that begins with data and moves up through information, knowledge, and wisdom.  Every level is an amplification on the level that came before it.

Facts is somewhere with information and knowledge.  With facts, you can make informed decisions.  But facts are always changing, and memorising them isn't always helpful.  So it's important to have the skill to develop knowledge and wisdom, the analytical part of learning.

Our learning system is entirely too fond of letter grades.  After almost finishing graduate school, I have concluded that grades are meaningless, grad school grades doubly so.  Yet, when I look back all the way to elementary school, I see that the entire educational process is about scoring.  We score our kids on an ability to answer multiple choice questions, and this happens at an early age, so what are they really learning here when they take SOLs?

They're learning how to take tests.

 aflanigan wrote:

 

It means you can look at a problem (whatever problem you are interested in or are presented with) from more than one angle.  It means to be able to question "facts" as they tend to be presented in school settings these days.  People have different strengths as it pertains to thinking right?  I cant design science equiptment, but I can think about how a family may be interacting in a way that is unhealthy.  So, I dont think a "good education" is so much about teaching "things" as much as how to think about things.....

What "scares" me about our educational system's evolution is that we are teaching more facts and how to do well on tests and not so much about thinking outside of a box.  My brother teaches in Turkey, University level 10 months out of the year and two months at Berkley.  His biggest gripe in Turkey is that his students want facts and to give those facts back but when presented with two ideas, they have a very hard time integrating them into a cohesive thought on their own.   

EDIT:  I'm not negating the need to teach facts here.  I mean that along with teaching facts one should be taught to question them, as well as taught how to put two different facts together into a conclusion............

 aflanigan wrote: 

Critical thinking is the ability to ask the right questions to gain the information you require to make an informed choice or decision, not to simply believe what you are told or see or read.