John Kozy: Fraudulent Education Reform in America!

What goes on in America's schools is essentially identical to what goes on in the Madrassas of the Muslim world. In both, orthodox beliefs are taught as truth and critical examination is discouraged. Two worlds clash in loggerheads. In the 1960s, I came across a little book entitled Master Teachers and the Art of Teaching. This unpretentious little book, written by John E Colman of St John's University, not only enlightened me as a young university professor, but proved to be invaluable. In it, about a dozen different teaching methods are described, along with some information about the master teachers who designed them. Each of these methods was used successfully to teach some subjects to some students. None was used successfully to teach all subjects to all students. Throughout my teaching career, I found opportunities to utilize many of these methods when the right situations arose. The lesson I learned from this little book is that there is no one teaching method that works for teaching all subjects to all students. Finding the right method for the students at hand is at best an art, never a science, and is never easy. Few people understand this. In fact, teacher training suppresses it. Teaching methods are taught to prospective teachers as fixed, reliable procedures that never fail, when in reality, they rarely succeed. And although carried out in numerous variations, the predominant way of teaching in America's schools at all levels has been the teacher's lecture and the student's need to memorize it. Today the lecture is often presented in various ways. The student listens to the teacher speak, or reads a teacher's words in a textbook, or watches a televised presentation or a computerized video, and students are asked to memorize some portion of the presented material. Furthermore, the memorization of presented material is the most boring way of teaching anyone anything. No one likes having to memorize stuff.