Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The New Republic's Elizabeth Weil: Schools Are Damaging Non-Conformist Students

In an article for The New Republic, Elizabeth Weil argues that American schools, in creating a cult of student "self-regulation," are doing significant damage to those students who are non-conformists by nature.

Weil's article is linked below.

Elizabeth Weil: Harming Non-Conformist Students

"Yet here in 2013, even as the United States faces pressure to 'win the future,' the American education system has swung in the opposite direction, toward the commodified data-driven ideas promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor, who at the turn of the century did time-motion studies of laborers carrying bricks to figure out how people worked most efficiently. Borrowing Taylor’s ideas, school was not designed then to foster free thinkers. Nor is it now, thanks to how teacher pay and job security have been tied to student performance on standardized tests. 'What we’re teaching today is obedience, conformity, following orders,' says the education historian Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System."

---Elizabeth Weil, The New Republic 

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