senses of verbs. you know, you can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. it s a very good example, you know. there he is. he s dieting. is he losing any weight? not really. teaching is a word like that. you can say, there s deborah, she s in room 34, she s teaching. but if nobody s learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.
the role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. that s it. and part of the problem is, i think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. now, testing is important. standardized tests have a place. but they should not be the dominant culture of education. they should be diagnostic. they should help. (applause) if i go for a medical examination, i want some standardized tests. i do. you know, i want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else s on a standard scale. i don t want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car.
your cholesterol is what i call level orange. really? is that good? we don t know.
but all that should support learning. it shouldn t obstruct it, which of course it often does. so in place of curiosity, what
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we have is a culture of compliance. our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. and the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. it s why we all have different r sum s. we create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. it s the common currency of being a human being. it s why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. i mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it s not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? i mean, you may have a dog. and your dog may get depressed. you know, but it doesn t listen to radiohead, does it? (laughter) and sit staring out the window with a bottle of jack daniels. (laughter)
and you say, would you like to come for a walk? he says, no, i m fine. you go. i ll wait. but take pictures. we all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and what one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.
now, it doesn t have to be that way. it really doesn t. finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. now, we only know that s what they do well at
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because that s all that s being tested currently. that s one of the problems of the test. they don t look for other things that matter just as much. the thing about work in finland is this: they don t obsess about those disciplines. they have a very broad approach to education which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.
second, there is no standardized testing in finland. i mean, there s a bit, but it s not what gets people up in the morning. it s not what keeps them at their desks.
and the third thing, and i was at a meeting recently with some people from finland, actual finnish people, and somebody from the american system was saying to the people in finland, what do you do about the dropout rate in finland?
and they all looked a bit bemused, and said, well, we don t have one. why would you drop out? if people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and help them and we support them.
now people always say, well, you know, you can t compare finland to america.
no. i think there s a population of around five million in finland. but you can compare it to a state in america. many states in america have fewer people in them than that. i mean,
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i ve been to some states in america and i was the only person there. (laughter) really. really. i was asked to lock up when i left. (laughter)
but what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in america -- i mean, as a whole. one is this: they individualize teaching and learning. they recognize that it s students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. that s how you get them to learn.
the second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. they recognize that you can t improve education if you don t pick great people to teach and if you don t keep giving them constant support and professional development. investing in professional development is not a cost. it s an investment, and every other country that s succeeding well knows that, whether it s australia, canada, south korea, singapore, hong kong or shanghai. they know that to be the case.
and the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. you see, there s a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in
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education -- that s what happens in some systems. you know, central governments decide or state governments decide they know best and they re going to tell you what to do. the trouble is that education doesn t go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. it happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. you have to put it back to the people. (applause)
there is wonderful work happening in this country. but i have to say it s happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. it s like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. and the reason i think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. it s like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in, i think, the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. it won t, and it never did.
the point is that education is not a mechanical system. it s a human system. it s about people, people who either do want to learn or don t want to learn. every student who drops
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ted英语演讲稿范文4篇
