By Tom
Last August, completely out of the blue, I received an invitation to speak at a conference in Pakistan. After I accepted the invitation, my hosts asked me to come a few days early to work with some of their trainers. Long story, short; here I am in Lahore, trying to figure out the cricket game on TV, after a long day of teacher training.
My session today was on different instructional theories; comparing the relative merits of empiricism, behaviorism, progressivism and constructivism. My audience – thirty teachers and administrators – all lined up on the side of constructivism. Constructivism is what they like and it's where they want to go. And apparently, Pakistan views the US as being a constructivist country. Student-centered and relaxed; a place where schools respond to students' natural pace of development. They think we don't rush our children, or force them to do academic tasks that they aren't cognitively or even physically able to do.
That's what they think.
I sadly disavowed them of that notion. America, I told them, used to be a place like that. We used to respect the children we teach and the place they were on the growth continuum. Not anymore. Now we try to cram as much learning as possible into their tiny minds, spending three months teaching what should have taken three years.
And why?
We're moving toward test-centered education. Not student-centered. At least at the systemic level. And why is that? Partly out of reaction to, and competition with, the education systems in other countries. America is racing to become Japan, Finland and Singapore. And Pakistan. Pakistan, meanwhile, is racing to become America. At least the America they thought they were racing towards when the race began.
In Pakistan they have teachers who are trying to tell parents that their children need to learn math at the concrete level before they memorize the times tables and division algorithms. In America we have math trainers preaching less manipulatives and more worksheets.
Weird. Maybe ten years from now, after their curriculum has become totally child-centered and ours totally test-driven, they'll like what they see in our country and we'll like what we see in theirs. And then maybe we'll invite some third grade teacher from Pakistan to come over here to tell us how to become what we used to be ten years ago.
And that poor guy will have to try to figure out baseball.
An excellent read. What a great opportunity. I think what’s sad is that any country is trying to be like any other country in terms of how it educates its children. Education, like society, is so nuanced and complex that there’s no way to line up item by item and accurately compare the two systems.
I could care less how how scores measure up against Finland or Japan. The tests aren’t the same, the kids aren’t the same, and the societies they’re growing up in aren’t the same.
This must have been an amazing experience.
It is sad that the very things that other countries once admired about the American education system are now the very things we can hardly claw to keep ahold of. There is still a lot of “right” done in classrooms all over the country, but that’s due to individual talented teachers, not to the testemall system that has been created from the outside in.