Learn about learning
The angst currently characterizing the Charlottesville school community has recurred in school districts around this country countless times since mass schooling began [“There’s still time to fix the city schools,” March 29]. The reason for the upset goes beyond the current set of circumstances to deeper structural faults in America’s traditional school system.
America’s public schools and school systems were intentionally set up early in the last century to work like factories, with teachers as the mid-level managers producing educated products from raw materials. They were also set up to teach a behaviorist’s child, who learns only in response to rewards and punishments, and can be filled with knowledge.
One hundred years of research since that time have made it clear that people do not thrive in factories, and that children actively construct knowledge, rather than passively receive it. Yet these models are very basic in our school systems—even the physical architecture of schools supports them (see discussion at local architecture firm VMDO’s blog, http://vmdo.type pad.com/vmdo/2005/ 02/classroom_desig. html), as do textbooks and multiple-choice tests—and so they are very difficult to eradicate. The Standards of Learning tests also reinforce these poor factory and behaviorist models, and bring to the fore the basic angst that trying to operate in unsuitable conditions creates.
Angeline Lillard
Charlottesville
The letter writer is the author of Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius.
Digging into Greenpeace
Recent pro-nuclear letter writers seek to legitimize new nukes by listing a Greenpeace founder as a nuclear power proponent [“We have the power,” Mailbag, March 29]. For the record, Greenpeace as an organization is opposed to new nuclear power plant construction as evidenced by the following from its website, www.greenpeace.org:
“After September 11th, it has become increasingly evident that nuclear power should have no role in our energy future. However, Congress is still looking to pass an energy bill that will give additional money to the nuclear industry and extend the licenses of creaky old reactors. The terrorist attacks of September 11th made many Americans reexamine the serious threat that nuclear power represents. An accident at a power plant could kill tens of thousands of citizens, make parts of our landscape uninhabitable and cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
These plants will always be subject to accidents and sabotage. Now is the time to make sure your representatives in Congress put an end to this dangerous source of electricity.”
Elena Day
Charlottesville
CORRECTION
In last week’s report on the 11th annual Muzzle Awards [“Speech therapy”] a quote was incorrectly attributed to Thomas Jefferson. While he fervently believed in the need for free expression, his actual quote should have read, “Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”