Teaching for a test or educating our students? Noam Chomsky

give you one experience from a couple of weeks ago  but there's plenty like it i have to be talking to   a group which included many school teachers that  one of them was a sixth grade teacher teaches   kids i guess 10 or 11 or 11 or 12 something like  that she came up to me afterwards and i've been   talking about these things and she told me  that i'm an experience that she had just had   in her class after one of the classes  a little girl came up to her and   said she was really interested in something  that came up and she asked how she could   could the teacher give her some ideas about  how to look into it further and the teacher   was compelled to tell her i'm sorry but you  can't do that you have to study the past this   national exam that's coming that's going to  determine your future the teacher didn't say   it but it's going to determine my future like  whether i rehired and so on the system is geared   to getting the children to pass hurdles but not  to learn and understand and explore now that child   would have been better off if she had been allowed  to explore what she was interested in and maybe   not do so well in the test about things she wasn't  interested in and they'll come along when they fit   into her interests and concerns and so a test i  don't say that tests should be eliminated they can   be a useful educational tool but ancillary  you know something that's just helping improve   for ourselves for instructors and others  what we're doing and tell us where we ought   to be moving but they don't even passing  tests doesn't begin to compare with uh with searching and acquiring and uh  into pursuing topics that engage us and   excite us that's far more significant than passing  tests and in fact if you pursue if you if that's   the kind of educational career that you're given  the opportunity to pursue you'll remember what you   discovered which is a famous physicist  world famous physicist right here at mit who like a lot of the senior faculty  was teaching freshman courses   he once said that in his freshman course students  will ask what are we going to cover this semester   and his standard answer was it doesn't  matter what we cover it matters what you   discover and that's right teaching ought to be  uh inspiring students to discover on their own   uh to to challenge if they don't agree to look  for alternatives if they think they're better ones   to work through the great achievements  of the past and try to master them on   their own because they're interested  in them if that's the way teaching   is done students will really gain from it and will  not only remember what they studied but will be   able to use it as a basis for going on on their  own and again education is really aimed at just helping helping students get to the  point where they can learn on their own   because that's what you're going  to do for the rest for your life   not just absorb materials given to  you from the outside and repeat it you

Channel: Rick Smith

Views: 33,159

Keywords: Interference, Education, Government, Teachers, Educators, Learning, Test, Book, ban

Id: t3uniSXGx4o

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020