Has anyone ever stopped to consider the ethical question of applying the latest unproven fads of educational theory to unwitting students? Ideally before large scale rollouts?
As someone who grew up during a tumultuous time for the public education system in Ontario, Canada, it felt like ever year or two whole curriculums were thrown out and the latest and greatest "cutting edge" approaches and fads were foisted upon us. I can see a lot of parallels in software development, but I wonder about the specific potential for lasting damaging effects for children and young people. I know I experienced some gaps that took a long time to be addressed.
"Great Books in Small Seminars" is one of the older educational models [1], and is itself in the tradition of one of the oldest approaches to education in history. This project doesn't seem substantially different from other Great Books approaches, except in that it doesn't charge tuition.
In what ways are the (current) traditional models in public education "proven"? Genuine question.
Speaking of ethics, it doesn't seem entirely ethical to force students to memorize a bunch of facts (chosen by whom?) and regurgitate them for arbitrary grades for over a decade, as if that has something to do with education. Certainly there is some lasting psychological damage inflicted by that methodology.
You are building strawman there. No one said anything about testing something you memorized years ago.
And also, quickly changing methodologies sux, because they change faster then teachers can really learn and become experienced in teaching that way. And same applies to students, because different methodologies have different expectations on how they should behave. So, you have constantly teachers doing something they are not fully sure how to do yet, parents who are confused about why this or that is different then last year and frustrated students who perceive the system being inconsistent and hypocritical.
I don't believe it's a strawman at all. I was a middle school teacher for years in the USA.
Modern education is overly concerned with fact memorization, since it's the easiest and most precise way to grade. In America we force (not ask) our children to attend institutions that greatly resemble totalitarian dictatorships, where they are not even allowed basic rights like bathroom use without being given permission.
Then we force them to memorize countless facts, many of which are never brought up again for the rest of their lives.
I didn't mean that students would be tested on something they memorized years ago -- I was instead saying that this "memorization + testing => grades" methodology is forced on students for many years. I don't think it's a straw man because, at least in the US, this has been the standard model in the majority of public schools for the past several decades. The article that we are discussing specifically mentions pushing back on that paradigm. The parent commenter called the ethics of applying this "unproven fad" into question, so I think it makes sense to compare this to the ethics of the standard model.
Honestly, what they described in the article seemed less experimental and more grounded in tradition than a lot of the current teachings in the humanities.
> Has anyone ever stopped to consider the ethical question of applying the latest unproven fads of educational theory to unwitting students?
Since this Catherine Project seems to be trying to offer a traditional education practice to students who are both witting and willing, and thus, to me, at least, doesn’t seem to raise any serious ethical issues, I will comment on your point about ethical issues in public education.
I teach and do research on foreign-language education in a non-English-speaking country, and a few years ago I started to think about the ethical issues involved in that area of education. In Japan, where I live, all school children are required to study English even though the majority of Japanese children and adults have little or no need for English in their lives. The teaching methods can involve activities that some students find embarrassing, such as presentations and role playing; some children also seem to feel that being required to speak a foreign language threatens their personal identity.
While children themselves will complain about having to study English and raise ethical issues about it (“Why do we have to do this!?”), the discourse among both educators and the general public seems to ignore whether it is morally acceptable to require all children to study and try to speak a foreign language that most of them will not use and will soon forget.
When I mentioned my inchoate thoughts about these issues to a philosopher colleague, he pointed me to the is-ought problem raised by David Hume [1, 2, 3]. That helped to clarify for me a related issue that had been bothering me. A lot of research about foreign-language education seems to be based on empirical, objective information (what is), such as whether a particular teaching method leads to higher test scores or not. Education researchers, however, often conclude their papers and presentations with ethical recommendations for action (what ought to be done), such as to adopt the teaching method that does lead to higher test scores. The ethical and logical problem with that kind of is-to-ought reasoning rarely if ever is discussed, at least in my corner of the field of education.
I don’t know if the same problem exists in other areas of education or in education policy in Ontario. But I can say that I was similarly annoyed as a child, in public schools in California more than fifty years ago, when I realized that we were being experimented on with a series of educational “innovations” of dubious benefit and without our consent.
As someone who grew up during a tumultuous time for the public education system in Ontario, Canada, it felt like ever year or two whole curriculums were thrown out and the latest and greatest "cutting edge" approaches and fads were foisted upon us. I can see a lot of parallels in software development, but I wonder about the specific potential for lasting damaging effects for children and young people. I know I experienced some gaps that took a long time to be addressed.