52:48

Alfie Kohn:

“What are we trying to do? If our goal is to help kids become critical thinkers, lifelong learners who really enjoy thinking and reading and playing with numbers and ideas; if we want to help them become good learners and good people who can create and sustain a functioning democracy, then education would look very different from the way it looks right now, at least in our culture. We would have to question the use of grades.”

(This does not follow. True, we would have to question the unquestioning use of grades as if they were the only metric used to measure a child’s educational progress. But if we are to teach, then there must be a methodology to detect and confirm the child’s learning. When I was coming up through the public education system, I could see that grades were a way to test one’s knowledge. Sure, I wanted good grades, but I wanted was the learning too. It is inconceivable that I was the only child who felt this way about learning.

Grades, in and of themselves, are simply not the problem.)

“What research finds, is that when kids are trying to get good grades in school, three things tend to happen: They begin to lose interest in the learning itself. Now the purpose is to just get a good grade, rather than to engage with the question or problem at hand.”

(My anecdotal observations agree with this idea. But our schools reflect culture, and it is not the schools which have created our culture.

Mr. Kohn has yet to observe that the school system and its practices fall within the greater context of American culture today. It is this culture, assiduously nurtured by corporate insiders and meddling social engineers, which has resulted in today’s largely amoral, mechanistic culture.)

“Second, they tend to think less deeply and retain knowledge for a shorter period of time, compared to kids who don’t have any grades.”

(This is simply not true in its absolute sense. I cannot have been the only child of the late fifties and sixties who went through the standarized tests of the time, and came out of the process loving learning.

Mr. Kohn is deliberately posing the quiet axiom that schools, in and of themselves, could teach as he would propose, resulting in “good people who can create and sustain a functioning democracy”. He does not mention family at all. This is where he begins propagandizing.)

“And third, they tend to pick the easiest possible tasks. That’s not because they are lazy, it’s because they are being rational. We tell kids we want to see a better report card, we want to see higher grades, naturally they’ll pick the shortest book or the easiest project, because that maximizes the chance of achieving that goal.”

(Suddenly, Mr. Kohn adds choice to the standardized curricula. This skews all of his subsequent observations. If the kids are required to read Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 55’ as a standard, they will not have the choice to read Nash’s ‘The Termite’. It is a principle of standardized teaching to minimize subject choice, not maximize it.)

So, regardless of what your goal is, if you’re interested in assessing kids, and teachers, and schools, to see ‘are we doing a good job here’, you would never need tests in order to see where kids are learning and where they need help; and you would never need grades to report the results of the evaluation place on those assessments.

We would certainly do away with standardized testing, the kind of testing used in particular states or provinces where everyone takes the same test and you compare everyone’s scores. These tests tend to measure what matters least. It tends to be a good marker for family income, because what standardized testing mostly measures is the size of the housing near the school.”

(Here, Mr. Kohn begins blatantly lying. He has deliberately overlooked the role of family in both determining income and whether or not the child is supported in learning at home.

There’s no question that deep thinking is only mildly related to standardized test scoring. Again, when I was growing up, essay tests typically counted more than multiple choice tests, and open book tests were typically harder than multiple choice tests, and also counted for more.

Those essays were handwritten, usually in cursive writing, and required the teacher to think about the writing too. The discipline of neat penmanship, the discipline of composition, the discipline of deep knowledge, all came into play.

Mr. Kohn will not discuss penmanship, since that topic is no longer seen as germane to the discipline of education. It would be disingenuous to argue that penmanship alone forms the basis of my argument, when I have already invoked a stable family and the ensuing sufficiency of income, along with the morality of the culture, as a part of my argument.)

55:30

Some of his subsequent comments are pretty good, but look at the time, and look at what compensation I’ll be getting for thinking and writing about ideas.

“In turn, such thinking rests on the premise that human beings are Pavlovian dogs. Programmed biological machines. If the program currently fails to obey the mandate of ‘greatest dood for the greatest number’, change the program.”

The mechanistic view of the universe takes on faith the belief that the Big Bang occurred, creating the universe ex nihilo, and also that evolution started immediately in the presumably inanimate matter so created. The current result, based on Darwinian survival alone, is the appearance, and the appearance only, of human sentience.

For survival purposes alone, a group of like minded humans is actively practicing evolution, according to their arbitrarily defined and not too clear purposes. These pruposes are probably along the lines of controlling large swaths of the Earth’s population. Pavlovian control of children, along with drugged control of adults, are the key techniques being used to control people, and thus the progress of evolution.

Freedom was real in the first place. It is deliberately being made less real today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rnJEdDNDsI