Word: rote
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much schooling works against education." So writes ex-Teacher John Holt, who has shown that schools encourage bored children to grope for rote answers and smother their spontaneous ways of acquiring knowledge. Those criticisms in his widely read books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn, made him a major spokesman for the reform movement in American education. Now, in his latest work, Freedom and Beyond (E.P. Dutton; $7.95), Holt argues that reformers of classroom methods might better work to "deschool" society...
...some kind of three-dimensional back-jacket photograph of himself to satisfy the celebrity craving of the audience which came to see him rather than to listen to his art. It is like an audience at a rock concert which comes primarily to hear the group play by rote their latest album. But listening to a familiar record with visual aids is more entertaining than listening to poetry one never reads. The audience at a typical reading becomes visibly restless after ten minutes unless the writer is a stage ham like Norman Mailer or Allen Ginsberg. The cruel part...
Their rallying cry was Ralbol!-a contraction of the slang expression On en a ras le bol, meaning "We're fed up to the gills." Their complaint: a system that stuffs students into facilities that are often grimly overcrowded, and an outmoded curriculum that rates rote learning over lively thinking...
...legal framework that propped up, then demolished dual schools is rote to Southerners: Plessy, Brown, Alexander, and last month's busing decision Swann. Georgia was the first Southern state blanketed with a statewide court order to dismantle its separate school systems. Elaborate evasions were constructed at each step and today, though desegregated on paper, circumventions continue. Private academies were established by parents who could afford to buy segregation. Some public schools integrated their enrollments, but not their classrooms: a favorite dodge is segregation by sex, thus, an all-girl history class drones through the same material that...
Another prospect is to alter genes so that babies will be born with rote knowledge?language skills, multiplication tables?just as birds apparently emerge from the egg with genetic programs that enable them to navigate. Some researchers hope to develop shared consciousness among several minds, thus pooling intellectual resources...