We Need to Make More Readers
The danger of education as entertainment is that students will learn that learning should be a form of entertainment, and that anything worth learning can take the form of entertainment, and ought to.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
With some beautiful insights, Holt said what many already knew instinctively about school, merely by having passed through it themselves. His method was to reflect upon his own experience of teaching in his Boston classroom, by giving vignettes—diary entries of his work with children. He mused on the things children said and did in response to his
... See moreGary Thomas • Education: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
The first is the fact that although it took our species roughly 2,000 years to make the cognitive breakthroughs necessary to learn to read with an alphabet, today our children have to reach those same insights about print in roughly 2,000 days. The second concerns the evolutionary and educational implications of having a “rearranged” brain for lear
... See moreMaryanne Wolf • Proust and the Squid
I found it startling to discover that you can throw out almost everything we regard as schooling—all the testing, all the assessments, even formal teaching—and still produce people who can read, write, and function in society. This tells you how much of what we are neurotically putting our kids through is pointless (at best).