Summary Of Diane Ravitch's Stop The Madness

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Dewey’s vision for education could not be any farther from the truth of how today’s school systems operate. Instead of focusing on students’ aptitudes and expanding on them, the Board of Education confines everyone into a box. Any person who doesn’t fit into that box, doesn’t excel in standardized testing, doesn’t have the chance to succeed in life. As Dewey said, “The notion that the essentials of elementary education are the three Rs mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals.” Students lose themselves once they reach high school, cemented in the same pattern of just trying to get the work done, never actually enjoying learning. High school education is stuck within the constraints of “common core standards”. These …show more content…

Is this what education has come to? In Diane Ravitch’s Stop the Madness, she states that “Test scores became an obsession… Test-taking skills and strategies took precedence over knowledge.” High schools don’t prioritize preparing citizens for the real world, their main focus is teaching the same basic principles to every student. Students’ time is being wasted learning about topics that they will never use in life once they graduate. Why should a student who is interested in becoming a doctor have to learn about the entirety of Chinese history or how to write an essay in MLA format? John Dewey, the father of experiential education said “A curriculum which acknowledges the social responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and information are calculated to develop social insights and

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