Talk:Traditional education

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[edit] Bias

This article is on crack! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.206.235.62 (talk) 14:02, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

It seems to me that this article is strongly biased towards Outcomes-Based (or standards-based) education. This undoubtedly needs fixing. The example of Phonics is particularly poor. -- TimNelson 13:24, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

I wrote most of it, in fact any bias was to make outcome education look silly. --matador300 00:45, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, that at least I'm in favour of. The only outcomes-based education I want to see is to test different educational systems against each other, and use the one that gets the best outcomes :) -- TimNelson 09:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
I, too, think that OBE is a pretty flakey idea. But that doesn't change the fact that this article is clearly not NPoV. My main objection is that this article is mostly about how traditional education differs from newer educational philosophies; it seems to be defining "traditional education" as just something opposed to OBE. This is too simplistic. I think we ought to nominate this article for an NPoV check. Dkostic 22:44, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Good point. The POV check is back. Also, I think Wiarthurhu could have given better examples of Traditional Education; some of them are so brief that it looks as though it's saying "This isn't important". Wiarthurhu, I think an accurate description of OBE makes it look stupid enough, but I think the traditional education needs to be better described; assume that you're writing for someone who went through an OBE system from prep, and wants to know what traditional education was so that they can help themself. --TimNelson 07:55, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Philosophical basis

Most of the statements here need links to their associated Philosophy of Education (both the ones in the Traditional and Alternate columns). I've had a stab at the "Person" row under "Instruction Centre". -- TimNelson 13:24, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Explanation of my reworded statement...

The previous article is completely discussing how traditional education is horrible. I made it more neutral. I added another part stating that in traditional schools that students call teachers by their last names. --Ladii artiste 17:22, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Definitions of TCI and SCI

Going to:

Topic Traditional approach Alternate approaches
Person Teacher centered instruction: Student centered instruction
Materials Book based instruction: What is the nation's capital? Project based instruction: a student might be asked to build a model of the US Capitol out of 100 toothpicks

The terms Teacher centered instruction and Student centered instruction are ghost links. Anyone know what they mean so that we can have articles on these?? Georgia guy 16:10, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] We need some history

I intended originally to just fix the hyphenation failures. And then I thought I'd perhaps adjust some of the stupider examples while I was at it. But this article is really odd, and my edits basically ended up re-writing each section. What the article desperately needs is some history -- about the modern use of the term. "Traditional education" is currently used as a political term, and it needs to be defined as such. After all, the article (as it stands) pretty much defines TE as "what Hollywood thinks public schools were like in the 1950s (if you were white)." If you actually want to have an article about traditional education, then the article needs to cover real history. Whipping a student who forgets an answer is a highly traditional teaching method. Expelling disabled students (unless they were really wealthy) is traditional. Making students profess the dominant religion is traditional. Separating students according to gender, race, and class is traditional. Teaching different subjects to girls and boys is traditional. Beating kids for speaking the 'wrong' language is traditional. These pedagogical techniques were used for centuries -- and used precisely because that's what the teachers themselves experienced as students, not because they work better than other options -- and they can't really be called anything except traditional. But I strongly suspect that proponents of TE don't want these traditional approaches restored. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

This is more or less what I wanted to say. Traditional education needs a decent definition. The more highly coercive approach certainly seems to part of it; but so is the much higher level of respect for traditional knowledge. Traditional education also seems to have an aspect that kids can cope and do not need to be mothered. Also traditional or mainstream education varies quite a lot from culture to culture and surely that should be reflected in the article. Perhaps several different definitions are needed for various cultures. I have put some of this into the second para edit. I have only put a very sketchy start to this but I feel that it is important to start. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Respecter (talk • contribs) 03:32, 16 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Statman41's recent essay

Statman41, the reason I took out this essay the first time is not just because the quality of the original writing was low (thank you for improving it before reinserting it), but because it's basically your personal opinion. For example,

  • traditional education is not just about participation in "American society,"
  • I've never heard traditional education "derided as extremist,"
  • whether it produces "superior results" or pathetic ones depends entirely on what you measure, and
  • your metaphor that "it seems right that the suns [sic] moves through the sky as one lies on the beach on a sunny day" is entirely out of place in an encyclopedia.

Additionally, you mangled the formatting for the next subhead when you were reinserting your essay, and we need a full bibliographic reference, not just a date and a name. (Did you by any chance write this originally for a class?)

The single biggest problem in this article has not been the absence of America-only, persuasive, or flowery language. The biggest problem is getting a decent verifiable definition together. It sounds like you have some resources with which to do that, but we need specific, concrete details, like "Traditional education emphasizes practice and drill, memorization and correction instead of discovery," complete with a footnote that proves we're not making it up.

Also, Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. The "traditional" methods used in America are not the same as the traditional education methods in use among (for example) Canada's First Nations. This article should cover it all, not just Hollywood's version of the 1950s classroom for middle-class, non-disabled, suburban white kids (which is what the politicians mean when they're talking about traditional education).

So: Welcome to Wikipedia. I really do appreciate your help; this article is in horrible shape. Please edit this section to list the parts of your essay you think are neutrally phrased and concretely specific and easily (without even a small stretch) supported by the source that you were reading. From there, we'll see what we can build for this article. Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:24, 28 December 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Give traditionnal education a break

In France, since the early 90s, we've been told again and again that traditionnal education was all crap, that rote learning was for morons, "old fashionned" respect for teachers (calling them "sir") was retarded, etc... and here are the results : most of 18 years old can'st do exercises that were given to people of the same age 30 years ago, their cultural knowledge is a joke, their orthograph sucks and even basic mathematics (equation, percentage) is a pain in the ass for them...

I think that this article should not be so biased and should also point out the danger of getting traditional education awayMitch1981 (talk) 13:31, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

This article has a lot of problems. What it needs is a reliable source that says "Here's what traditional education is: these contents, these techniques." What it has right now is more like "Traditional education is whatever we did last decade, or by the previous government administration, and which clearly isn't working, because people are learning X instead of Y, and I think Y is more important." WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:30, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Here is the limit of wikipedia. This kind of article can't be written by amateurs. It needs people who actually know the subject (teachers, sciologist, etc.). Mitch1981 (talk) 12:59, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I think what it needs is a historian. Most teachers don't know anything about what was taught fifty years before they were trained, much less what was done for the last several hundred years. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:26, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

It reminds of what Hannah Arendt wrote about american education in Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought. She said that school was giving kids too much liberty, that teachers were treating them as their equals, what they couldn't possibly be yet, taht they were focusing too much on stimulating their creativity instead of giving the necesary bases to fully develop this creativity much later. Well, I don't really know american culture so I don't know if this description is accurate but I think it's relevant in the case of french education. Mitch1981 (talk) 19:33, 17 March 2008 (UTC)