Test Scores and Teaching

This year I returned to the elementary classroom after a 20-year hiatus. I was formerly a training teacher, college professor of education, college supervisor, and a change-maker during the educational reforms of the late 1960s. I am shocked and disappointed to see that education has not changed at all. In fact, in my opinion it is doing a less effective job than it did in the 1950s and 1960s.

Even if teacher training is radically changed to encompass new ideas such as right brain development and critical thinking, the new teachers are thrust back into the same system that demands regurgitation of facts and rote learning. You cannot put new frosting on an old cake. What is needed is a radical change in the entire structure of education so that our country can develop sensitive, thinking individuals instead of “educated idiots.”

Frankly, we may not have to change anything at all. The children will do it for us as they turn off to school more each year. The real revolution will come between students and teachers and not in the political arena--and it will come more quickly than most people imagine. Wake up parents and teachers! You have been missing the boat for years. The future of the world depends on changing the thrust of education. Let us do it now before it is too late.

MAXINE ASHER

Palm Springs