Andrew Delbanco:

The more one ponders the statistics, the more murky their meaning becomes.

Whatever the merits of this or that testing regime or this or that curriculum, the only way to break up the impasse would be for governments and philanthropies to put in place real incentives and rewards for talented, well-educated, passionately committed teachers -- on whom, as everyone knows, everything finally depends.

Have you seen The Class?

Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about.

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

Tom Friedman:

The best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who inspire.

Charles McGrath:

In practically all the foxhole memoirs there is a common villain: standardized testing, which the authors agree has been so overemphasized that it is now an obstacle to the very education it was supposed to measure.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Dorothy Sayers (via Alan Jacobs):

However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number -- perhaps the majority -- of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits -- yes, and who educate our young people -- have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning -- the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane -- that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or "looks to the end of the work."

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the clos... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]