On Fri, 27 Jul 2012, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
And if the teachers don't "do as they are told", the principal can sack them now?
It's completely broken.
A potential solution, I suppose, would be to use a test for which it is not possible to prepare, but which reflects the student's level of over-all academic achievement.
Isn't the entire history of tests about the attempts to devise such tests and the way they have failed by students preparing for the test?
Other options that might help are: making the tests broad enough to cover the entire curriculum, or specifying their content only in general terms so that it's hard to do specific preparation.
Even if it wasn't for the fact that they were attempting to do that already, it would still be an overall failure in terms of education. One massive problem is that the curriculum isn't much good. English is the best example of this failure as it's mostly about essay writing when most people never write a fictional essay in their entire adult life. Calculus is often cited as a subject that's supposedly useless in adult life, but really it doesn't compare to writing fiction. A useful curriculum would start by replacing the current English subject with a subject about writing reports, email, and other documents that people actually write in the real world (for fun or money). They might as well add a section on Wikipedia to the English course as well as there are probably more jobs that involve editing Wikipedia (IE all political staff positions) than jobs that involve creative writing. Then there should be a mandatory subject about how to avoid being scammed. Having a minimum mathematical knowledge is usually justified on the basis of calculations related to money, but that's not much good if people carefully account for their money and send it to Nigeria! The entire school system is wrong, I'm not going to try and list all the ways. But it's basically a child-minding service / prison that somewhat meets the educational needs of about 70 years ago. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/