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Keeping track of fads in educationist circles is a challenge. One year, whole-language will cure everything from illiteracy to condom shortages; next year, the panacea is a teacher-facilitated curricular revaluation; a year later, they'll rake in consulting fees with site-based management or childhood-trauma assessment.
Given that such trends come and go, it's hard to see why
there's so much controversy over outcome-based
education
as opposed to fundamental education.
Why bother to support one side or the other? By 1995,
they'll have vanished in favor of one or more of these
impending reform proposals:
· Gifted and Talented Endowment Curriculum. Parents will bring in their children to be tested. During the test, school officials will examine a recent financial statement from the parents. If they qualify by possessing sufficient assets and liquidity, their child will be declared gifted and/or talented.
· Real Computer Literacy. All students will learn
to read
computers by dumping hexadecimal print-outs
of core memory and to write
computers by reciting
RISC and CISC assembler mnemonics. This will make them
computer-literate, but unfit for many environments because
they'll always start counting with 0
instead of
1,
and they'll insist that 0A,
not 10,
comes after 9.
· Parental Harassment Performance. Student advancement will be determined by how many ways they can find to get their parents in trouble, and creativity counts. Reporting suspected abuse of controlled substances is mere plagiarism, as are accounts of midnight rituals involving goats and black-draped altars inside pentangles.
The aspiring valedictorian will instead sue his parents
for once allowing a guest to light up on the back porch,
thereby possibly exposing the child to tendrils of
second-hand smoke. An ambitious student might arrange for
her father's arrest under the Colorado Vegetable Reputation
Protection Act for complaining about that damn rabbit
food
on the table when he craved meat and potatoes.
Upscale school districts will bring in famous people like
Roseanne Arnold and the Menendez brothers to serve as guest
lecturers and role models.
· Afro-centrist Education. The argument
apparently goes like this: Western Civilization has
brutally enslaved and exploited our people over the
centuries. However, the Greeks don't deserve any credit for
it, because they swiped everything from the Egyptians, who
had lots of melanin that makes them superior to other
races, and so we invented Western Civilization, horrible as
it is, and we want the credit for it.
Why somebody who
believes Western Civilization is evil would want credit for
inventing it is a curiosity, but hey, tenure is tenure.
· Jingo Basics. Cast aside all that
multi-cultural mumbo-jumbo from those self-styled social
engineers. Daily matin and vesper prayers required.
Discover that Ngo Diem, Reza Pahlavi and Anastasio Somoza
were stalwart and incorruptible supporters of Jeffersonian
democracy. To graduate, you must memorize and recite the
entire Book of Virtues.
Learn to think for yourself
so that you can be a dittohead.
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