The Rest of My Response the Recent NCLB Announcement

Yesterday, I commented briefly (to briefly?) on President Obama's intention to continue many of the central parts of NCLB. I did not think that was a good idea, and I still don't, but I read something today that explained my aversion to this plan.

I was reading the Introduction to the Cambridge Handbook Learning Sciences and the editor (R. Keith Sawyer) summarized the assumptions about human learning that were that basis of how schools were structured in the 19th (and then the 20th) century:

1. Knowledge is a set of facts and procedures.
2. Learning involves getting those facts and procedures into human brains.
3. Teachers can transfer those facts and procedures from books (and any other media) into human brains.
4. The order of transfer matters: start with the simple, then move to the complex.
5. The best way to measure the transfer is with a test.

That sure sounds like the schools I went to and it sure sounds like the schools NCLB wants.

There is only one problem... and I have know this for a while, and many in the NELMS community know this, and Sawyer reminded me in his Introduction... none of this has been demonstrated by science!

I am not sure how long this will be available, but the Dilbert comic on March 15, 2011 (today) sure illustrates what appears to be our approach to science: