Dear Arlo, On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 1:45 AM, ARLO J BENSINGER JR <[email protected]> wrote:
> [Arlo] > I'm trying to recall what practices I mentioned... [Otto] Tracking. The first article which you sent us, thanks again for that, said that Finnish schools do not track students up to the age of 15 when the students take the international exams. I wonder how much Finnish success has to do with the avoidance of tracking. We are in agreement about the importance of creating tighter school communities to increase school quality. Thank you for the additional articles on that, which I need to follow up on. > [Arlo] > Fundamentally, I think we as a society need to ask (reaffirm?) what it is > we > educate for. Dewey comes into play strongly here. Do we education to > prepare > people for careers? For an informed citizenry regarding voting and > democratic > duties? For a "liberal" enlightenment going back to the Platonic Academy? > All > of the above? I've said for years that the root turmoil in the American > system > is that it can't answer this question, and so it flounders around not > really > knowing why it is doing what its doing. [Otto] I wonder if this turmoil is a bad thing. Societies are changing so fast that some argue we cannot safely predict what skills will be necessary 5 to 10 years from now. Perhaps we need to trust students more to enter in the dialogue of what they will learn and value. Otto Zequeira http://mdcpsprofessionals.wikispaces.com Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
