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emphasizing all print and oral skills Children and young adults learn in a great variety of ways, not all of which are addressed pedagogically in the schools. Some ways of learning actually distract, interfere and even counter other more organized ways of learning that teachers invent and design. That is why educators need to identify both the areas of learning in which students need to succeed and the best methods to deliver knowledge and information. For if children are not progressively taught how to learn, how to use and how to access knowledge by every teacher assigned to them from kindergarten through college, none of the other efforts that school districts undertake to “improve education” will matter much. If students are not taught how to learn and how to make use of the ideas, knowledge, and information to which they are exposed in school, the schools will continue to fail our students. Within the constraints of the curricula and the policies that school districts follow, currently there are no national across-the-board practices or pedagogical methods that educators employ to improve the academic performance and the achievement of students. We have found, mainly by listening closely to students, many of whom are minorities, that most have never been told what their courses are supposed to help them accomplish, either in class or later when they leave school and become adults. Given the multiplicity of learning and teaching methods and techniques devised by educators over the years, we want to propose a more comprehensive, overarching print and oral pedagogy that reinforces existing curricula in every single grade. We are proposing this approach because in our classes we have seen that such a curricular blueprint gradually allows students to build their self-esteem by demonstrating day in and day out to their teachers that the knowledge they are acquiring will progressively make them more sophisticated learners as they move from grade to grade from kindergarten to college. By singling out lessons and processes that actually teach students, Chapter 13 146 a print and oral approach from mastering the alphabet to writing a full-fledged college essay, teachers can creatively devise classroom experiences that will usefully show students what learning allows them to accomplish. Since today’s culture is primarily visual, one in which images, pictures, and films dominate, educating students about the value and the significance of books and words is an especially difficult endeavor. For this reason, we believe that educators need to develop pedagogical methods that emphasize learning how to read all print symbols available as well as gradually learning how to speak to different audiences to secure and to maintain attention. We are not interested in promoting a particular set curriculum that all teachers can follow. Rather, we believe that the best way to teach all students is to outline a print and oral approach that allows teachers to use their best instructional skills to unfurl the talents of students by building on what students have learned in the previous grades they have passed. Given national and state testing requirements, teachers sensibly need to teach the subject areas that students are required to know to pass such examinations , and by continuing to develop their teaching skills we know that teachers can help students enormously, achieving what everyone desires: a quality education. When considering education curricula, E. D. Hirsch observed that educators can historically be divided into two camps: the “contentneutral curriculum of [ Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and [ John] Dewey” and the “narrowly specified curriculum of Plato.”1 In order not to encroach on the academic freedom of teachers, administrators, and school districts responsible for determining the content of the curricula for which their students are accountable in national, state, and grade-level tests, we have decided mainly to emphasize a print and oral approach. Learning the skills associated with these two areas particularly well, we believe , will allow students to employ and to access whatever knowledge they will subsequently need in our information society. Since educators follow both instructional camps, our interest is in emphasizing the learning skills, the tools that students can use to learn more successfully and with a clearer purpose visibly before them. Students often hear the admonition to stay in school to secure something called an “education,” but they are seldom specifically informed in ways they can understand what an education is. They are also seldom told or shown how they might someday use the knowledge that teachers spend so much...

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