Death Of American Universities Noam Chomsky Summary

In school everyone learns differently; however, according to the article The Myth of Learning Styles, “The idea of learning styles is based on a theory… developed in the early 1980’s.” (pg 1.) A lot has certainly changed from the 1980’s as we learn new more material in every class we take. With this being said, someone the scientists referred to in the article “assumed” that learning styles challenged the way of the educational system when in reality, it is simply a myth. Students, like myself, only prefer to process information that they find useful or interesting to him or her. Thus giving us the problems of that teachers may take too long to cover one idea, and students may miss out out on information because he or she did not prefer that learning style.

Schools have changed remarkably since they were first introduced centuries ago. Continue reading in order to find out how the past has shaped education, as we know it. There are six main eras or time periods in which important things occurred for the American School System, The colonial era, The growth of public schooling, The progressive era, the segregation and Integration era, the 1960s-1970s, and the 1980- present era.

Another major issue that is addressed in the article is with the teachers and their teaching styles. The method in which most teachers teach their

"Teaching to the test" is replacing good teaching practices with "drill n' kill" rote learning.

One complaint I have heard from numerous teachers in my school is that they must teach a simplified version of the subject matter to create a passable course for the largest number of students. Based on what I have read in the article, Asian teachers present information that is slightly too difficult so that their students have something to work for. This may seem like an insignificant detail, but I believe it highlights a vast cultural difference. Sometimes in the US we focus so much on wanting everyone to succeed that we make it too simple for them to do so. Everyone should have the opportunity to succeed, but that does not mean spoon-feeding people throughout their

They have found that the teachers only go over what they really want to go over and leave out a lot of the important details. “Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next text.”(pg.12) College professors want the students to know most of the material; or of at least heard of most of it before they get to college. “History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of english literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school.”(pg.12)

Any student, whether in elementary or college, learns better when the subject matter is thought-provoking and appealing. Traditional and old curriculum provides a baseline for students to meet and follow. Also, traditional curriculum is based of individualism and discourages exchanges between the student and teacher. Individual work teaches the child to develop internal critical thinking skills but it may bore the student. Teachers should continually interact with their students and challenge the student to think outside the box. Great teachers in today's system should help students develop a new way of thinking about history, math, english, and science and their education in general.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. In his work “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students” Edmundson argues about Liberal-arts education of Universities. For him liberal-arts education was an ineffective way of education. He also mentioned that if we want to understand current universities we should not look of expert’s view, but turn to the class rooms and campuses, where new ideas are born.

The four effective practices are interdependent of one another. These concepts are the key points that provide a solution in helping English learners become fluent English speakers and be able to understand difficult lessons and high standards. The first strategy the article points out is Access, and it is used more frequently than the others. Echevarria and colleagues (2015) demonstrate that when teachers use differentiated teaching strategies, it will allow students to understand the concepts being taught more easily. For example, using multimedia to provide visual learning, or using sentence frames that will allow English Learners to be able to participate in oral

When it comes to the topic of education, most of us will readily agree that as students, we need to be dedicated learners. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of how we should be educated. Some are convinced that we need to stick with what is currently in place. From this perspective, it is completely unnecessary to do something different if the method being used works. However, others maintain that we need to change. According to this view, people need to move away from what we are comfortable and familiar with in order to be better students. In sum, then, the issue is whether we should keep how our education works the same or not.

The past educational experiences I've had that led me to UWB have been a dissatisfaction with the banking model of education. Freire is indeed correct that the banking model is demoralizing to both the teacher and the student, and does a tremendous disservice in the task of getting the student prepared to engage in the world. "The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to 'fill' the students with the content of his narration contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity" (Freire, 71). This is precisely the type of experience that I had in the traditional educational arena which led me to both reject this model of teaching, and push me to find an institution that also rejects this model, like UWB. Earlier, in life my parents were in charge of my education and they generally selected schools for me which were considered "good" located in safe neighborhoods and with reasonably satisfactory test scores for the school at large. Schools like that generally mediocre and run of the mill thrive on the banking model of education and believe that the student's job is to "learn" facts via

Wiggins & McTighe (2005) said it best “teachers are designers” and we need the right to craft our curriculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes (Pg. 13. Ch. 1). We are all teaching different students, in different cities, in different states; all of whom that have individual strengths and weaknesses, come from various homes, a multitude of diversified backgrounds, who speak different languages and all of whom who have experienced their lives in different manners. I have been teaching for well over 11 years, and I have never once modified my teaching to meet the needs of a curriculum, I always have and will continue to adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of my students.

Every teacher has a different method of teaching. The teachers that I have had in my school career have been no exception. In this way, each teacher has set an example for me, as a future teacher, to follow or not to follow as I see fit. With the examples from my teachers and in continuing my education, I am developing my own method of teaching. I plan to use a combination of teaching methods in my own classroom. My method will be an eclectic approach because I will be using components of more than one philosophy. I will be using essentialism, behaviorism, progressivism, and existentialism.

In fact, I realized, as I continued to read, my teachers did a lot of modeling and demonstrations on completing a task. In addition, they had the ability to adjust learning to their students learning need and style, even though learning styles were not part of the system yet (Hamond et al., n.d.). Therefore, much of my teaching mimics how I learned from those teachers. I believe in guiding my students toward discovery on their own; therefore, my lessons were thought out, so they encompassed each student’s learning style. I taught 6th-grade social studies, not an exhilarating course to garner excitement.

Throughout the majority of my education, including college, I have felt like a passive member of the classroom. Teachers saw me as a clear slate that needed to be filled with information. I consumed countless facts, and memorized numerous processes, most of them not being my own. This approach to teaching has proven to be unsuccessful to the goals of education. Students are diverse, with their own learning styles and their own knowledge that they bring to the table, and these should be supported and expanded on in the classroom. The goal of education is to support learners and thinkers, and not to condition minds to all think the same ways.