Before coming to MediaTec Publishing, I worked as a newspaper bureau reporter. As a result, I became intimately familiar with all of the educational acronyms that determine the brightness of a student’s future. What I saw dismayed me, because now more than ever education is dependent on standardized tests. Gone are the days of spontaneity and in-the-moment learning. Now everything in a teacher’s planner is highly structured, every moment of time accounted for and targeted toward an end-of-the-year test.
One might wonder what the state of secondary education has to do with training. Well, I would argue that it has a lot to do with corporate America and learning.!@! If the students who are graduating under No Child Left Behind only know how to take a test, then how will that impact our training? Will their conditioning mean that we have to take on more training to prepare them for the workplace? And to what extent is corporate America responsible for the education of today’s children?
The graduating class of this year will have been under the tutelage of NCLB for seven years. Four years from now, those same students will be graduating from college and entering our workforce — a generation of NCLB-ers, who only know tests, who had little exposure to informal learning in the classroom and who may be good test takers, but not the best collaborators and team players. Needless to say, I think corporate America has a huge stake in today’s education, because these are your future workers.
What do you think? Let me know in the Comments section.