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The school system today has become very standardized. Teachers teach to fit the regulations of standardized tests so that they can pass their students to the next level, only to pass more standardized tests.

Because of the requirements to teach for a test, it is recognized that teachers are working under an authoritarian system where their own creativity is lessened due to their inability to teach what they may view as important or good to know because they must teach what society and school boards want them to teach.

Alfred Binet invented the concept of a standardized test, but not the same type of standardized tests that we use today. He invented the IQ test. He created the concept of people having a Mental Age. This Mental Age (which is tested in IQ tests) is used to give the score on the IQ Test

Intelligence Quotient:

Mental Age/Chronological Age * 100

How do you feel about American schools relying almost entirely on machine scored tests?

Children at kindergarten ages are pressured by social influences, especially by adult figures, to produce higher than their abilities.

When adults give children assignments that are too hard for them, the children think that something is wrong with them when they are unable to do the task. They see adults as all-knowing people, and anyone who knows everything wouldn't give them something impossible for them to do, right? Something must be wrong with that particular child for not being able to do it... right...? That's how the children see it.

If children cannot keep up with the tests and the pressure and the accountability, they feel that they are disappointing to their peers, teachers, parents, and community. Students know that school revolves around test scores.

Labeling people by placing them into special classes can severely impact their learning.

  • When parents place their children into Gifted and Talented classes, they often do it for themselves so that they can say that their children are involved in the Gifted and Talented Program. It is humiliating to the children who cannot keep up in these classes and must go back to "normal" classes.
  • On the other side of the spectrum, putting children into Special Education classes seems to reinforce and somewhat worsen their disliked behavior and learning patterns. As Elkind says, "One a child is marked with the "special needs" stamp, that stamp is more likely to be re-inked than erased

So... Why do Asian Cultures work so well despite their harsher school system?

Although cultures like that in Japan prove that have intense schooling prove to be a good thing in creating productive-crazed robot people, the Japanese children exhibit the same stress from academic pressure as American children. In fact, many students in Japan kill themselves indicating that it is due to the stress of school.

Pre-Schooling systems are putting higher expectations on children as they enter first grade, even though children, even with the same IQ levels, are not always in the same place with their learning by first grade.

The curriculum in most first grade classes is intended for the most advanced students. This means that a lot of kindergarten students (10 to 20 percent) are retained and remain in a preschool program for another year.

How much input should a kindergartner have in the matter of being retained or moving to first grade or going to a transition class? Why should they be able to have a say in what happens to them and why not?

In what ways do other culture's education systems differ from that in the United States?

How could we improve the standardized testing issue? How do you think that it affects the way children learn?

This video portrays different children's views of their first day of school, exhibiting the different stages that they may be in of their learning experiences.

The Hurried Child Chapter 3

The Education System

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