Quote

I’ll tell you something I’ve noticed from visiting a lot of American schools: the more traditional the teacher, the grimmer the mood. These classrooms don’t always resemble Dickensian factories, mind you, but if you watch the kids’ faces (or the teachers’), the phrase “joy of discovery” probably won’t leap to mind. And here’s the interesting part: the people who defend the Old School usually don’t deny that this is true, and they don’t even seem to mind. Sometimes they actually take a perverse pride in presiding over (or sending their kids to) this bleak house because for them that constitutes proof that real education is happening. No pain, no gain….No need to look at the data to see whether kids tend to grasp ideas better in such a classroom: if they’re not sweating, how productive can it be? Case closed.

Quote ID: 01859

Author

Alfie Kohn

Source

The Schools Our Children Deserve

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