Response to Eisner's "The Three Curricular That All Schools Teach"
When I was reading the article, I came to my first stop when I read "School socializes children to a set of expectation that some argue are profoundly more powerful and longer lasting than what is intentionally taught or what the explicit curriculum of school publicly provides." I agree with this statement since I always believe education can have a stronger influence on social perspectives other than the academic life of students. Teachers need to keep in mind that they are also educators no matter what they choose to be. It's impossible for them to just teach academic content without having any influence on other aspects of their students' lives. They need to be aware of what kind of value and ideas they are teaching as well as their students' response to them.
My second stop was the time when I came to the idea that although teachers have different teaching philosophies, students tend to "provide the teacher with what [they] want or expect." This is a significant issue I can expect when our ideas came into practice. Even though teachers' expectation for students might have changed, students might still be just following rules or doing whatever their teacher asks. Teachers need to be more careful about the balance of getting students to think critically and to follow the rules.
After reading the article, the quote from the beginning interests me: "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time." This quote gave me an idea that there should not be an end to learning. People can learn both proactively and passively through many things happening around them. I believe this approach is connected to the recent changes occurred in the new curriculum. Having focus more on inquiry other than just academic content means that people are starting to realize that learning in a school setting is not bounded to academic content taught in class. Since there is more beyond the classroom teaching, teachers should focus more on teaching students how to think critically.
My second stop was the time when I came to the idea that although teachers have different teaching philosophies, students tend to "provide the teacher with what [they] want or expect." This is a significant issue I can expect when our ideas came into practice. Even though teachers' expectation for students might have changed, students might still be just following rules or doing whatever their teacher asks. Teachers need to be more careful about the balance of getting students to think critically and to follow the rules.
After reading the article, the quote from the beginning interests me: "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time." This quote gave me an idea that there should not be an end to learning. People can learn both proactively and passively through many things happening around them. I believe this approach is connected to the recent changes occurred in the new curriculum. Having focus more on inquiry other than just academic content means that people are starting to realize that learning in a school setting is not bounded to academic content taught in class. Since there is more beyond the classroom teaching, teachers should focus more on teaching students how to think critically.
Thanks for this thoughtful and interesting blog post! I like your ideas about formal and informal lifelong learning.
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