Here is a piece from then Senator Obama’s education speech given during his campaign in Dayton Ohio in 2008:
We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st century economy. We'll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that's how we'll make sure they're prepared for today's workplace.
Some advisor of his had read my writings obviously and was quoting me on that one. I usually say reasoning and not critical thinking, but this is taken from my book Dynamic Memory Revisited, Cambridge University Press, 1999:
Learning to communicate, function with others, and reason, are the most important parts of any curriculum
I talk about this constantly and am quoted about it constantly:
http://everything2.com/title/Roger+Schank%2527s+Learning+by+Doing+Meets+Case-Based+Reasoning
http://kamccollum.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/school-is-profoundly-broken-roger-schank-visits-byu/
And what has the President actually done? Zero. Zip. Nada.
He said in that same speech:
And don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test. I don't want teachers to be teaching to the test. I don't want them uninspired and I don't want our students uninspired.
Uh huh. Did he change No Child Left Behind? No. Of course not. Testing dominates education as much as it ever did.
We are killing off anther generation of students Mr. Obama.
Do something.
