My Principal once told a story of a speaker at an educational conference who was from India. This Indian presenter summed up the major difference between education in America and the rest of the world when he said “In America you spend all of your time measuring the elephant. In India we spend our time feeding the elephant.”
How I wish I could spend more time feeding my students than I do measuring my students. Teachers with high stakes testing courses feel even more strongly about this than I do–I teach in the arts.
I was all inspired to blog about this but I was having difficulty putting it all into words. Then I read Canadian educator Jack Miller’s “Education and the Soul.” It sums the topic up so well I decided to just paste in my favorite paragraph and then let you go to his article if you wish.
The accountability movement is another example of mechanization in the curriculum. Teachers are expected to be constantly testing students so that the public is satisfied with the what is going on the in the classrooms. Unfortunately, the tests focus on a very limited portion of the curriculum and ignore the important areas such as personal and social development. These tests tend to stress information that will be soon be forgotten by the student. The student begins to see school as a game where succeeding is based on passing tests that seem to have no relevance to anything except what we might call useless knowledge. When school is seen as a game, there is no vitality. Classrooms become lifeless places where students focus on achievement in a narrow and competitive manner. A curriculum of meaningless tests is another example of education without soul.
Education without soul…what a frightening thought.
