<p>Form trumps content every time…
I am not going to call out any single post as an example, but a quick peruse of this website offers plenty to ponder in terms of ivy-seeking-student word choice, sentence structure, faulty syllogisms and other big fun on the high seas of web communications 101 by the “I- has-cheezburger” generation. </p>
<p>It does seem to me that a rare few students can diagram a sentence today, and that even our best and brightest are not necessarily gifted communicators or, in truth, critical thinkers. It also seems to me that this phenomenon represents a massive failure as a society to distinguish (and fund) what’s most important in education.</p>
<p>By way of example, my son’s former magnet school essentially eroded its (expensive) interdisciplinary humanities curriculum two years ago in order to accommodate parental requests to implement the ubiquitous slate of AP offerings. (Somehow studying high school material in high school became less than chic.) Since the AP curriculum is, for the most part, standardized, it is ergo quite difficult to make the respective course material interdisciplinary in nature. Suddenly, everyone is teaching to a test, and suddenly, teacher performance is evaluated by student performance on said test. The highly socratic and age-appropriate interdisciplinary development of the humanities curriculum is eschewed in order to somehow appear more competitive on an Ivy League application and give administrators a lazy way to evaluate (and discipline) staff.</p>
<p>And then there’s the apparent necessity to engage the ‘21st Century Attention Span’ in the classroom, which appears to be not only an uphill battle, but one born of incessant exposure to various media (except books : ), passtimes, devices and approaches to information gathering and communication children experience at home. </p>
<p>So, in some corners of the field of communication studies the theory is that if Big Bird taught your kids the ABCs, what your kids really learned was to watch a television to learn what they need to know. If Google or Wikipedia explained the parts of a sentence, what you kids really learned was to trust someone else’s (summarized) explanation or authority, generally without question.</p>
<p>To counterbalance the instant transfer of information and its availability, the blasting prevalence of “form” delivering and endless array of “content,” we <em>could</em> chose to teach our kids the “basics” of written communication, logic, critical analysis, et al, in SMALL classrooms that afford teachers sufficient time to actually assign WORK for grades, meaning, meaningful and frequent work that is difficult to mark and discuss. (The all-too-rare fully developed essay, for example, that appears to be disappearing at the cyborg hands of the Scantron : ) Instead, our refusal to adequately fund education for ALL students in the country (urban AND suburban); our refusal to fund EARLY education for ALL students in the country; our refusal to implement humane MATERNIY LEAVE programs to enable children to get a running start at cognitive development all combine to undermine the development of fully critical, innovative thinkers.</p>
<p>As they say, garbage in, garbage out. What is extraordinary to me is that there are many many parents here on this discussion board who continually compensate for this lacking in our society by rightfully taking the lead in their children’s education yet somehow we can’t all pull together to create the educational environment we seek in this country.
Hi ho.</p>