Lucas Kent's List: Education Theory

• Ten years on, Mr. Zwaagstra is now a high school social studies teacher at Green Valley School in Grunthal, Man., a small town about an hour southeast of Winnipeg. He's had plenty of time to test the education philosophies he was force-fed while at university. His conclusion? They don't work, and we will continue to fail our kids if we don't change the way we teach and the way public education systems are administered.
• The book touches on a number of controversial practices that have made headlines recently, including no-fail and no-test policies, the spread of "edu-babble" in curricula and a diminishing of teachers' authority in the classroom.
• "Instead you get these long process-oriented explanations where students will read, write, listen, use a variety of texts to do this and that. It's just so wishy-washy.
• he politicization of education, with successive governments promising to "fix" the system, makes education susceptible to fads, Mr. Zwaagstra says. And when fads take hold, such as the ever-popular emphasis on developing students' "higher-order thinking skills," teachers struggle to focus on the basics.
• "There should be direct and focused instruction, and that includes things like spelling and grammar. The system should not be dependent on the students deciding for themselves what they will learn."

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