Talking Points About WHOLE CHILDREN
Professor Deborah Meier (NYU Steinhardt School of Education) is among those in the educational community calling for a “different discussion about what the point of education is.”
She spoke with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about why.
WHOLE CHILD TALKING POINT #1:
Numbers-driven Education Reform is totally out of touch with who children are.
“Behold the child, by nature’s kindly law
Pleased with a rattle
Tickled with a straw.”
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
“ESSAY ON MAN”
Children need recess time or else they burn out.
NEW YORK TIMES
The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
By TARA PARKER-POPE
New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
February 24, 2009
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Children need vigorous and rhythmic physical exercise or else they fidget.
NEW YORK TIMES
They Stand When Called Upon, and When Not
By SUSAN SAULNY
A new adjustable-height school desk that allows students to stand or sit is gaining popularity……..Unlike children almost everywhere, those in Ms. Brown’s class do not have to sit and be still. Quite the contrary, they may stand and fidget all class long if they want.
February 25, 2009
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Kindergarten children need to acquire social skills more than academic skills.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Plan to Test the City’s Youngest Pupils
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
The Bloomberg administration, which has made accountability the watchword of its overhaul of public education, is asking elementary school principals across the city to give standardized tests in English and math to children as young as kindergartners.
August 27, 2008
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL (1782 – 1852) is the founder of the modern Kindergarten movement. In his “Kinder Garten” youngsters played to learn. Froebel’s wood building blocks are iconic for what early childhood education used to be.
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ROBERT FULGHUM describes the purpose of kindergarten better than anybody.
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Children need an intrinsic motivation to learn, not cash incentives.
NEW YORK TIMES
Money for Nothing by BARRY SCHWARTZ
NEW YORK CITY has decided to offer cash rewards to some students based on their attendance records and exam performance. Diligent, high-achieving seventh graders will be able to earn up to $500 in a year.
July 2, 2007
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Children must be taught to work with their hands and to respect manual labor.
NEW YORK TIMES
The Case for Working With Your Hands
By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD
High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.
May 24, 2009
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WHOLE CHILD TALKING POINT #2:
Day to day instruction in American schools ignores brain research, violates developmental child psychology and marginalizes more than 2,000 years of Western Civilization.
Plato
“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
circa 420 BC
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WHOLE CHILD TALKING POINT #3:
The traditional values of WHOLE CHILD EDUCATION can rally support from both Conservatives and Progressives, fundamentalists and atheists.
John Murtha was a Republican candidate for NY State Senate in 2008.
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WHOLE CHILD TALKING POINT #4:
Mandated testing means mandated spending.
Request an accounting of your school’s total expenditures on all standardized testing AND test-related teaching and test preparations. Consider the costs of testing materials and test preparation materials. Also consider the pro-rated salaries of teachers and supervisors accounting for time on testing and test preparation. Include scoring and reporting costs. Account for all test-related instructional services for students, including after-school and on Saturdays.
Account for test-related meetings and professional development for teachers and supervisors by the hour.
Also count cash and prize incentives and rewards for supervisors, teachers and students.
Download PDF file:
How to Audit the Costs of Mandated Testing at Your School
Send data to:
The Orion Society
187 Main Street
Great Barrington, MA 01230
413 528 4422
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WHOLE CHILD TALKING POINT #5:
Kids should not sit still so much in school.
Make an inventory of all the physical activities engaging your children during a typical day in school. How much time do they spend using broad movements such as dancing, singing, choral reading, sports, exercise, yoga, recess play? To what extent do they use their hands as they learn? Compare the amount time your boys and girls are engaged in physical activity with the amount of time they spend in narrow movements such as sitting at desks, sitting at computer screens, sitting on the floor, walking quietly on line.
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WHOLE CHILD TALKING POINT #6:
A system which produces clever people does not automatically produce good people.
If you think that the best assessment of your child’s success in school should be a performance level measured exclusively by VERBAL and MATHEMATICAL achievement, then you should delight in Adolph Hitler’s cabinet. His ministers were all high academic achievers as well as Nazis. Many held advanced degrees. Their verbal-mathematical-reasoning training was hugely successful. But don’t we feel that something much more important than academic achievement was missing at the core of their humanity?
As we watch the Wall Street scandals unfold in our own time, we see the faces of grown ups who must have been very high achievers in the verbal mathematical-reasoning domains favored by multiple choice testing. Measured by the numbers, these Wall Street Whiz Kids epitomize just the kind of success our American academic delivery system is straining to achieve. But don’t we feel that something much more important than academic achievement is missing at the core of their humanity?
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WHOLE CHILD TALKING POINT #7:
Preparing children for the future means investing in ALL their capacities today.
According to Daniel Pink’s research for A WHOLE NEW MIND (2005), the good jobs of the future will require “high-concept, high-touch” sensibilities— creativity, imagination, out-of-the-box thinking, synthesis, a playful attitude, empathy, and even an awareness of personal transcendence.
The linear-sequential, left-brain drone thinking being drilled into children today for timed tests will ultimately handicap them.
