I have experienced teach-to-test, rote, European-style education both as a student in grades 3 and 4, and as a teacher of mathematics in grades 11 and 12. As a 9 and 10 year-old in Dutch grade school in the sixties I knew that the rote education I was being given was misguided. I'd had what I referred to as the 'why education' in public school in California and missed it, missed being encouraged to question, to ask 'Why?'
Teaching 12th grade in a British-based pass-by-examination system my students would grow angry with me if I deviated from the syllabus and asked them to think, to question. My students wanted only to pass the test at the end of the academic year.
As a grade-school student in my public school in California, every day, continually, we were asked to question, encouraged to be curious, to ask the question 'Why?' At the tender age of 9 in Dutch grade school I could sense something wrong, something missing. For art class, we copied drawings. For math class, we penned our arithmetic problems into a notebook in pen and ink (literally a pen stub and an ink well). Pencil work was only 'rough', a first try. The final result was a beautiful tabulation in pen and ink of what we had really already accomplished in pencil.
I recently read some of my Grandfather's high school notebook from the very early part of the 20th century, and the work he recorded is reminiscent of what I was asked to do in the sixties in my Dutch elementary school: beautiful summarizations, carefully laid out with excellent penmanship. But no record of thought processes, of errors made (and learned from). Merely tidiness.
Teaching calculus to 12th graders (6th form) in the British-based education system in Fiji as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late seventies, my students expected me to show them how to correctly answer the question types expected on the upcoming University Entrance exams, nothing more. I remember once demonstrating the separability of orthogonal forces by simultaneously dropping one piece of chalk while tossing another horizontally, and observing them both hit the floor at the same time. By dumb luck, it worked perfectly. I'd hoped for a Eureka! moment, but was not rewarded. My students by then had been trained not to think, rather to memorize, to learn by rote. They would literally ask me to stop, and return to covering material on the syllabus.
There is a reason the transistor was invented in the US: the extremely high quality of public education we once had in our nation. My public education was fantastic! I was shown and given so much. I was trained to be curious, to be unafraid of mistakes, to try. The classroom culture never punished errors by ridicule - quite the contrary, efforts at answering questions were rewarded, even if the offered answer was misguided.
Tertiary education in California was free! There still is no formal 'tuition' in California State Universities, or in the University of California system, but the logical equivalent exists, and continually grows in cost. I firmly believe California's strong tech-based economy of the nineties stems directly from its high-quality, low-cost public University system. My state had the 10th largest economy in the world!
After a career in the computing industry, I now teach at a California Community College. I teach Computer Science and Mathematics. Unlike my colleagues in the local high school district, I am not (yet) required to teach to a test. We do, however, now have 'Student Learning Outcomes' which must be written and broadcast, and my students' level of achievement of these outcomes must be assessed and recorded. In my opinion, it is only a matter of time until my performance review will be at least partly tied to my students' ability to master these Student Learning Outcomes.
In this way, our public education system is being damaged and returned to that which we had over one hundred years ago as evidenced by my Grandfather's high school notebook. I must now teach to the test. Our public education system is being damaged and shaped into the European model of rote education and teach-to-topic. We are training a generation of automotons, unable to question, to critically think. Invention is unnecessary, inventive and creative thought undesired.
Our public education system is being retooled to train the perfect fodder for the authoritarian government the oligarchy desires. It helps create the underclass of unquestioning, incurious, and grateful workers the oligarchy requires to groom hair, mow lawns, repair Bentleys. And then simply go away and leave them alone.