I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Good morning, Dr. Callahan.
ReplyDeleteI do not know if you are serious, but your plan is not a bad one.
Traditional K - 12 education has one goal in mind: preparing children for some type of post-high school education, whether that is in a community college or a university.
Many students, however, simply have no interest in that pursuit. (Their lack of interest stems from a variety of sources.) My solution is to allow schools to begin to create curriculum that address the needs of students who do not want the traditional path.
The parents and the child/children -- not the teacher -- would choose which path the child/children would take. Fewer people would concern themselves with whether or not the child was left-behind because the child and his parent(s) would make sure that they were "caught up."
In terms of ideas, this is not new or breathtaking. If it was ever implemented, however, I think that it would lead to some positive results.