Cumulative Knowledge

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman applauds a range of innovations and changes in the school system. These programs just repackage and rename good ideas adapted from excellent educational thinkers like John Dewey and Maria Montessori.

What the current ruthless educational reformers need to address is the decline in our society’s insistence on citizens’ and students’ literacy. The new educational programs do not hold a student responsible for genuine academic achievement and mastery. None of the new classroom assessment or teaching techniques make a student responsible for formulating an independent thought or engineering a persuasive argument.

We as a society need to become a force that will make a student want to know things, speak coherently and write cogently. Young people must, by some means, be made to want to be genuinely educated even though so much of popular culture disdains it. That is the true challenge facing our educational system.

Debra Michlewitz
Bayside, Queens, Aug. 27, 2010

The writer is a retired public high school English teacher.

I agree with Ms. Michlewitz' tone, but I think she misplaces the issue.

The "new educational programs" do not fail to "hold a student responsible," they do far worse, they don't even allow them the opportunity to be responsible. Students in today's system do not have very little, if any, control over their learning. Students are not allowed to pursue in our edcuational systems, instead they are dictated what to learn, how to learn it, when to learn it, what to do with it after they have memorized it and allowed to believe the myth that "once the test is over I can just forget it."

I also believe that students already "want to know things." It is school that marginalizes the natural curiosity our kids enter school with. I watch my own children at home pursue learning (not related to required school work) with pure delight and tenacity. They try and try and try never feeling that their failures are wasted time or a judgment on their value as human beings. Instead, their curiosity piqued, they dive right in and learn.

School is not a place for curiosity, not a place for diving right in. It is a place were everything is prescribed, learning defined, and judgment made. The goal of school is like tracing - if the student can render an exact replica of the original they pass, they are lauded, they become the valedictorian . . . what they can't do is create, innovate, and as Ms Michlewitz accurately points out, can't formulate an independent thought or engineer a persuasive argument. They have been taught not to do that . . . much to this country's detriment.