A Quote about Children

Emma Goldman, author -
     
"No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure."


I want to say thank you to all of the my colleagues and to my professor for all of your help and advice.  I have learned so much by working with you all.  I want to especially thank Katelyn Rasmussen and Robin Miller.  Your blogs', comments, and advice have been helpful and meaningful.  I look forward to having you guys in classes in the future. 

Testing for Intelligence

          In grade school, as I was growing up, I can remember all of the standardized tests we had to take.  I specifically remember the pressure that I felt to do well on the tests.  In our classes we would spend the majority of our time, preparing for the test.  I do not agree with this kind of assessment of education.  Forcing children to take a test and giving them a certain score they have to surpass in order to advance to the next level is not the proper way to encourage learning.  There are people that do not take tests well.  My husband is one of these people, while he was in college he struggled with this issue.  He did well on his homework and knew all of the class material; he could answer any question that someone asked him.  When it came time for him to take a test, he would freeze and he could not remember anything that he had learned for the test, and as a result he would do poorly on the test.  When I knew him during high school he was the same way with the standardized tests that we had to take every year.  There are many children like my husband that does not take tests well, but they do very well in class.  Because they do not do well on test, those children fail the standardized tests and are remediated and begin to feel like that there is something wrong with them.  Standardized tests does not evaluate children in a holistic manner, it does not look at the whole child.  It looks at the specific subjects such as English, math, or science and tests the children in those areas.  However, it does not look at all of the developmental aspects of a child.  I think that an educational assessment should look at all these developmental aspects such as biosocial, cognitive, and psychosocial. 
          In Japan, school is a competitive sport and is highly stressful.  Children have to take entrance exams (and pass) in order to enter middle school, and then for some private junior high and all high schools and universities they have to sit entrance exams and attend interviews.  To ensure that they pass these rigorous tasks most children attend private afterschool study sessions (after regular school) and  for one to two years before high school some even attend special private institutions (Education in Japan, n.d.).  I am definitely appreciative that the U. S. is not as strict and forceful about their testing as Japan is.  I do not agree with either country's ways of assessing their children's intelligence.  There are better ways such as individual evaluations and more one on one teacher/student time.  Assessing a child to understand their level of development is a necessary task, but to do so in a way that might hinder is education is unnecessary.  As educators it is our job to find better ways to help our children learn.

References

Education in Japan. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.education-in-japan.info/sub1.html