Eric,
It seems that you imply that instead of spending more money on more research
we should just have the public officials and the 16 and 17 year old
unschooled teenagers somehow agree on what the right classifications of
information should be. The question here for me is: who should we persuade
to change their classification systems: the teenagers or the public
officials?
Sorry for being a bit sarcastic
Ana
----------------------------------------
Ana Marjanovic-Shane
home: 1-215 - 843 - 2909
mobile:+267 -334-2905
-----Original Message-----
From: MnFamilyMan@aol.com [mailto:MnFamilyMan@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2002 8:27 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Today's impossibility is tomorrow's possibility
Bill;
Of course I accept them because they are the exception to what I usually
get, nothing. Whether you are in authority or not, you are in a position to
provide insight into this debate, being a former 'hard' scientist. Here is
the dilemma as I see it. Today public education policy is decided by people
who only accept quantitative data and numerous decisions are made based on
faulty quantitative data - that classroom tests are an indicator of good
teaching. I would agree that qualitiative reports make more sense when
discussing human development but right now those in control of public
education view qualitative measures as 'feel good' science.
What's my point? Among sociocultural theorists there is an accepted premise
that human cognition begins with culture - after that there is no agreement.
When I speak about quantitative measures it is for the purpose of discussing
how people start to make sense of their culture. SOme people do not make
sense of their culture at the 'correct' [as decided by public school
officials] time and they are labeled as disabled. USing 'feel good' science
does nothing to assist the argument for denying these students a right to
public education. Instead, we have a system that measure progress using the
very tools that these students couldn't make sense of in the first place.
The Vai Project and the Mayan studies that Michael Cole was critically
involved in have shown that constructing tests for comparing the unschooled
mind to the schooled mind merely reinforced the obvious that unschooled
people will categorize and make sense of information in the same way they
have been doing all of their lives regardless of how schooled testers would
like them to categorize the information.
The problem, we have unschooled 16 and 17 year minds in our schools who are
being labeled as disabled merely because they have not been able to
categorize information the way public school officials would like them to.
My point then is that instead of continuing to invent new terms or new ways
to discuss this age old chicken or egg problem we need to get at the very
heart of meaning-making units in order to break the stranglehold acountants
currently have regarding the spending of public education dollars.
eric
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