On 10/05/2014 05:35 AM, "Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQi?=
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dl...@gmail.com>" wrote:
On Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 09:06:45 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
Oh, I think that here in Italy we outperform your country with that,
as for sure we are the most bureaucratised country on the hearth.
Hah! In Norway parents sign evaluation of progress for 6 years old
school children every 2 weeks due to a "quality reform". And and all
pupils are kept on the same level of progress so that nobody should feel
left behind due to "social democracy principles"...
Aside from those 2 week evals (ouch!), the US isn't a whole lot
different. US schools are still notoriously bureaucracy-heavy (just ask
any school employee), and "No child left behind" is a big thing (at
least, supposedly) while any advanced kids are capped at the level of
the rest of their age group and forbidden from advancing at their own
level (thus boring the shit out of them and seeding quite a few
additional problems).
Partly, that level-capping is done because there's a prevalent (but
obviously BS) belief that kids should be kept with others of the same
age, rather than with others of the same level of development or even a
healthy mix. But also, they call this capping of advanced students
"Being fair to the *other* kids". Obviously US teachers have no idea
what the word "fair" actually means. But then, in my experience, there's
a LOT that US teachers don't know.
I blame both the teacher's unions (that's not intended as a statement on
unions in general, BTW) and the complete and total lack of "logic" being
part of the curriculum *they* were taught as kids (which is still
inexcusably absent from modern curriculums).
In Italy you have
Montesorri! Consider yourself lucky!
US has a few of those too. They're constantly ridiculed (leave it to the
US to blast anything that isn't group-think-compatible), but from what
I've seen Montesorri's are at least less god-awful than US public
schools. I almost went to one (but backed out since, by that point, it
would have only been for one year - actually wound up with one of the
best teachers I ever had that year, so it worked out fine in the end).
