The Latest from Bill Moyers

http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-facts-still-matter67571

Bureaucratic Threats to Higher Education

Simon Head here details the disaster wrought by an industrial-production mindset, imported from the U.S., on the system of higher education in the U.K., with some observations about analogous developments here at home.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/grim-threat-british-universities/

A Fool's Paradise

I just saw Helen Mirren in Shakespeare's The Tempest -- highly recommended -- and was reminded of a great line from the loutish Stephano. It makes a telling comment on the popular notion that thanks to the internet we no longer need to pay musicians:

STEPHANO: "This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing."

I can't say it worked out so well form him, either.

Interesting News Story

Professor Michael Taber and his class make the Post...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/23/AR2010122301922.html

More on testing

Here's Marion Brady on standardized tests:
http://www.truth-out.org/standardized-snake-oil66094
A telling excerpt:

Standardized, subject-matter tests are worse than a waste. We’re spending billions of dollars and instructional hours on a tool that measures one thought process to the neglect of all others, wreaks havoc on the minds and emotions of teachers and learners, and diverts attention from a fundamental, ignored problem.

That problem? Longshoreman and college professor Eric Hoffer summed it up a lifetime ago. Because the world is dynamic, the future belongs not to the learned but to learners.

Read that sentence again. Then read it again. Even if standardized tests didn’t cost billions, even if they yielded something that teachers didn’t already know, even if they hadn’t narrowed the curriculum down to joke level, even if they weren’t the main generators of educational drivel, even if they weren’t driving the best teachers out of the profession, they should be abandoned because they measure the wrong thing.

The Order of Things Pedagogical

Regarding the three terms of the course title, it occurs to me to wonder what ought to be their natural order. We would seem to need understanding before we could teach, but then again learning probably precedes understanding, if we take as paradigmatic the natural, playful, pre-linguistic learning of small children, their visceral absorption of the world. Likewise, the propensity of children for curiosity and active exploration long precedes teaching, both temporally, and as a fact about human nature that probably alone renders any sort of teaching a conceivable undertaking.

If this is right, then ‘Learning, Understanding, Teaching’ would be the right order of priority, as well as an order of importance. Early in the course we asked whether and how a teacher (or the architecture of a teaching context) might suborn curiosity. We still don’t know the answer in any detail, but we may have a sense of why the question remains important.

Testing...

A report from the seamy underbelly of the standardized testing machine:
http://www.truth-out.org/the-loneliness-long-distance-test-scorer65845