psychology dector

Nikhil Goyal is a writer of prodigious talents, all of which are on display in his book, Schools On Trial:  How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice (Doubleday, 2016). His thesis is clear:   take students and allow them to study what they want to study at their own pace.   No tests, assignments, homework, or grades.   All work is project-based.   If this is done correctly, students become life-long learners and will naturally gravitate to a program of study that is both self-directed and incredibly rich, mainly because they decide for themselves what avenues to pursue.   In Goyal’s view, one recently formed by his time in compulsory education, a traditional classroom with desks in a row, regular structured assignments and grades, lectures and discussions, and programmed courses of study all meld together to stultify students and actually turn them away from learning. What he advocates has been done before, and he makes this clear in h...

Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the greatest musicians to ever walk the planet, once said that “In music, silence is more important than sound.” I’d broaden that advice out a bit:   in life, silence is more important than the sound and fury of constant chatter in this age of instant communication.   Lately, I’ve lost the ability to hear that silence.   This is, at least in part, due to the obsessive roar of my own engines churning up that vacant space in the universe.   I need to send a message to the battlefield of everyday life:   shut up and listen! A while back, I wrote up a list of thirteen theses statements about how to live.   My hope was that the statements would offer me the opportunity to reflect on how I comport myself each day.   The list was written somewhere in the past and dutifully filed away only to be buried by more pressing matters, more words, words, words cascading and falling through my life.   Number one on this list was...

Sam was a kid in my seventh grade English class and one of several Jewish students enrolled at this private Catholic school in Los Angeles.   In fact, more than half the kids in the school were of different faiths than the one professed by the Marianist founders.   Even though I did not teach religion, I considered integrating the point of view of different faiths into our study of literature to be a positive part of my classroom praxis.   Sam had distinguished himself as an excellent student who excelled at writing and always had insightful, if very serious comments to offer during class discussion.   His work was consistently far above middle school level.   Although he listened attentively during class when those of other religions discussed their faith views, he never commented directly based on his Jewish experience. One work of literature we covered that year was Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night (Hill and Wang, 2006), about the author’s experience as a twelve...