From Thom Hartmann's Complete Guide to ADHD. Talks about how
one man changed the education system from a learning model
to a factory line assembly model 200 years ago. This is not
intended to criticize current teachers, most of whom
have to work in large classrooms and grade students,
but to provide some historical context why the system they
may be in has become that way.
Here's
a bit from the article.
"Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences, and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Franklin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for René Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato.
But there is one thing unique about the education of all these people, which is different from that of you, me, and our children: none ever were given grades. All attended schools or had teachers who worked entirely on a pass/fail system...
Students
of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves
because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated
knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them.
This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD.
Then came William Farish."
"Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too
much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating
daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their
needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning.
It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could
thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money
he could earn.
So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow
him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades.
Grades
did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite
effect: they made it harder for those children
to succeed whose style of learning didn't match the didactic,
auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.
* Grades didn't give students deeper insights into
their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children
to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the
tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject
matter.
* Grades didn't encourage critical thinking or insight
skills, didn't promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are
useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations
were considered so irrelevant that today they're no longer
listed among the goals of public education.
* Grades didn't stimulate the students, or share with
them a contagious love for the subject being studied.
The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of
grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm,
any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into
larger significance or practical application of content.
What grades did do, however, was increase the salary
of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering
his workload and reducing the hours he needed to spend in
the classroom. He no longer needed to burrow into
his students' minds to know if they understood a topic: his
grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just
as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred."
more on the website
