http://www.diigo.com/user/Sarahhanawald/independent Sat, 03 May 2008 15:19:45 -0000 Sat, 03 May 2008 15:19:45 -0000 http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html <p>More John Gotto--his speech as he accepted the Teacher of the Year award. Written in 1990, but spot on today.</p><p><strong>Highlights and Sticky Notes:</strong><p><div class="content">The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet.</div></p><p><div class="content">Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990</div></p><p><div class="content">in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers,</div></p><p><p><strong>Tags:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald/education' rel='tag'>education</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald/teaching' rel='tag'>teaching</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald/independent' rel='tag'>independent</a> </p><p><strong>Posted by:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald'>sarahhanawald</a></p> Sat, 03 May 2008 15:19:45 -0000 http://www.dvschool.org/psngatto.htm <p>Interesting. John Taylor Gotto on education and the value of less rather than more school. He mentions that the best programmers are self-taught.</p><p><strong>Highlights and Sticky Notes:</strong><p><div class="content">I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy.</div></p><p><div class="content">In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations--not by their own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts</div></p><p><div class="content">Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork.</div></p><p><div class="content">New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.</div></p><p><div class="content">rederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables.</div></p><p><div class="content">Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their children.</div></p><p><div class="content">Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education.</div></p><p><p><strong>Tags:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald/education' rel='tag'>education</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald/teaching' rel='tag'>teaching</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald/independent' rel='tag'>independent</a> </p><p><strong>Posted by:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/sarahhanawald'>sarahhanawald</a></p> Sat, 03 May 2008 15:17:45 -0000 60