Faulty Engineering

Autor/in	Finn, Chester E., Jr.
Titel	Faulty Engineering
Quelle	In: Education Next, 4 (2004) 2, S.16-21 (6 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1539-9664
Schlagwörter	Stellungnahme; Citizenship Education; Civics; School Choice; Academic Standards; Influences + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Citizenship; Education; Politische Bildung; Politische Erziehung; Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung; Staatsbürgerkunde; Choice of school; Schulwahl; Influence; Einfluss; Einflussfaktor
Abstract	Innumerable foundations, commissions, state initiatives, and federal programs are now seeking to renew civic education in American schools. But solutions run headlong into a series of barriers. Four of these seem especially troublesome: (1) Efforts to develop a civics curriculum are snagged by a basic truth about America: beyond a narrow core of shared beliefs (honesty, tolerance, obeying the law), Americans hold strong but often divergent views about the values they want their children to acquire and about the role of teachers and schools in inculcating those values; (2) Within the field of civics education, a battle rages between those who believe that the schools' responsibility is mainly cognitive (imparting specific knowledge to children) and those who insist that youngsters' behavior and attitudes are what schools should work on; (3) There are the limits of schooling itself; and (4) The civic and pedagogical values of many educators differ from those of many parents. Education reformers cannot overcome these four barriers and place American schools on a sure-footed path to effective civics education, at least not through top-down reform strategies that emphasize uniform school practices, and certainly not as long as the real pressure for performance and accountability centers on reading and math. There is, however, another possibility for strengthening civics education. It is to be found in the reform strategy known as school choice. Besides its other strengths, school choice sidesteps one of the big obstacles to better civic education: it accommodates the divergent views and priorities of ethnic and religious groups, parents, and educators, and allows them to tailor the approach to civics that they favor for their children rather than settling for awkward efforts at lowest-common-denominator consensus. (ERIC).
Anmerkungen	Hoover Institution. Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6010. Tel: 800-935-2882; Fax: 650-723-8626; e-mail: educationnext@hoover.stanford.edu; Web site: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10