Science Forums 2

[lemit]

Turtle,

I think you might be right about the reason this thread was started. There's just a little too much detail.

Before I write anything else, I should say that I've always supported open, unstructured education, so I think I'm going to give myself something to argue against:

Any school that thinks it's giving a student all the information he or she will ever need is suffering from delusions of grandeur. The best thing a school can teach is how to work hard, how to learn, and how to socialize. The old and tired axiom about giving someone a fish as opposed to teaching someone how to fish should apply, since we are, after all, talking about teaching.

So, teaching should again be a position of trust, requiring judgment based on intangibles. Then, the student who does poorly on the test but has shown a strong work ethic and an interest in learning should be given a better grade than the student that I was, someone who picked up miscellaneous information out of the air, had that damnable ability to write, and could guess at an answer somewhat reliably when that student had no idea what the real answer was. Traditional testing and evaluation confuse education with Trivial Pursuit. We can do better.

And I haven't had a grade to complain about for 40 years.

--lemit