Consider the following quote from Bob Herbert's op-ed article Outside the Casino.
School districts across the country are taking drastic steps to cope with collapsing budgets: firing personnel, increasing class sizes, cutting kindergarten and summer-school programs and, in some cases, moving to a four-day school week. The Associated Press, in a demoralizing report, recently noted: "As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research."
Think for a second. Four day weeks? No Libraries? Larger class sizes? Cutting Kindergarten? Cutting summer-school programs? We are in a crisis. Our children need more education, not less. We should be extending the school day to include more physical education, more mathematics, more writing skills, more foreign languages, more history, more culture, and even more education about religion. And this is just a beginning. Libraries should be made larger and students should be encouraged to do research, studying, and writing in libraries. And yes they should be reading the literature in libraries. Perhaps a few more Canterbury Tales would help children understand sex through the ages. Perhaps a little better understanding of the Great Depression and how the USA finally emerged from the depression would be helpful today. Yes we are faced with a crisis with the middle class and poor having less opportunity to receive an education. This is a recipe for permanent decline we all fear.
Now to move on to Brent Staples' op-ed Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name). The Internet, that marvelous medium that has such tremendous promise to improve education in so many ways has instead become a means for many to lose the ability "to think critically and originally."
This is because instead of thinking students cut and paste "making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet." This starts in middle school and continues through college, including great colleges like MIT. This happens not just for writing but for doing homework in all areas including physics.
Prof. Pritchard and his colleagues illustrated the point in a study of cheating behavior by M.I.T. students who used an online system to complete homework. The students who were found to have copied the most answers from others started out with the same math and physics skills as their harder-working classmates. But by skipping the actual work in homework, they fell behind in understanding and became significantly more likely to fail.
Our best and brightest cheat. This leads to failure. The trouble is that not only do our best and brightest cheat, but most of our students cheat. Talk about ethics! Talk about values! This is a crisis. This will lead to a permanent decline in the country.
The USA and the world needs solutions to these problems. We need to improve education, not destroy education.
For more on education see teacherken's diary Somebody Explain This to Me.
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