I believe
that assessing young children, such as state’s standardized tests, it’s
important because we need to be able to measure and see where are the areas
that we need to improve. It gives us the opportunity to analyze how strong is
the curriculum and how well it’s implemented. It’s not necessarily an exact measure,
but it more or less serves as a guide to what should be proceeded. Assessing
children not only assesses the child’s progress, but teachers, schools, and the
school system.
In Japan,
Elementary school has a focus on music, fine arts, and physical education. They promote cultural diversity and its
acceptance in the school system. Japan promotes the learning of more than one
language. By the time they are in college, they are already fluent in other
language besides Japanese. From day one
in elementary they are taught to value punctuality, loyalty to their peers,
duties in the classroom with democratic choices.
I believe
that in the U.S. we have a model sort of like Japan but we have too much to
learn still. I’m not saying that the school curriculum is bad, but we need to
focus more on cultural aspects and globalization in our curriculum. For example
in many different countries children are encouraged to speak more than one
language, we should make our children competent enough to face this new
globalized perspective and not limit them to one.
Thank you for doing Japan, I wish our culture would adopt some of Japan's educational beliefs. Our students need to learn a second language at an early age, and we also need more fine arts being present in our school systems instead of the fine arts department being the first thing being cut from the schools budget, during a "financial" crunch.
ReplyDeleteI agree, having the ability to speak more than one language will only be beneficial for their later life. Not only will it provide an advantage financially; however, it will provide an advantage to communicate and understand others. Schools are taking the fun out of learning and are dwindling the opportunity to be expressive in a fun way. Fine arts and other extra curriculums are being done away with; however, all children do not learn by being forced to do exceedingly well on standardize testing, moreover, this may hurt the child more in their academics and development.
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