Diane-- I wanted to thank you for your description of Ozik's novel on
learning. There is a lot to the following:
Brill is forced to realize that while his curriculum assumes greatness,
success in school is based not on originality or difference, but on
mediocrity, those who aspire to "get the right answer" and achieve good
marks, teacher praise, those students who cause no trouble but who learn
quickly what the teacher will reward, and can provide the response in
exchange for the reward.
Once, in a prior lifetime, my colleagues and I at a branch of the university
of California, voted to award honors on the variance of a students' grades.
Seems like similar evaluations of the outcome of normal, successful, education.
One thing that may or may not have been in the novel, I am uncertain, is that
the forms of testing used are an almost perfect model of directed forgetting.
So, not only would the brilliant, trouble making student, but the average
study, for different reasons, could be expected to remember nothing of their
prior educational experiences.
mike
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