Word: rote
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that litigation actually slows the progress of medicine. "Innovative techniques don't get used very often for this reason," says George Miller, an orthopedic surgeon in Washington, N.C., who last year won a malpractice suit that had dragged on for "eight long years." Doctors find themselves taking a more rote approach, what some call "cookbook medicine." By following standard procedures as much as possible, the physician may hope to avoid any controversy that might arise in court -- and thus steers clear of promising, if less proven technologies and treatments...
...Teaching an interdisciplinary core curriculum that would include English, fine arts, foreign languages, history, literature, math, science and social studies. The emphasis would be on critical thinking -- making connections between ideas -- rather than rote learning. To promote positive values and encourage good citizenship, the curriculum would include health instruction and community-service activities...
...help children cope with the demands of a changing society, many teachers are encouraging a spirit of inquiry. Some ninth- and tenth-graders are choosing their own elective courses. Rote learning, long the mainstay of education for the 42 million students in the nation's 130,000 schools, is beginning to yield to free debate. Like America's system of local school boards, councils made up of trade-union and party members, parents and students have been created to give people more control over their children's classrooms. Boring textbooks that only timidly touched upon the terrors of Stalin have...
...oldest son, Grant, began his education at a public school in St. Louis, but his parents removed him after six weeks when they decided the education there was "very rote and uncreative." Mother Micki Colfax, who has a master's from the London School of Economics, says she was happier with Grant's next school, a private alternative education school, but decided to begin teaching at home when they moved to California...
These gains in rote learning are offset by a worrisome inability to reason effectively. More than 60% of all high school students cannot understand the material they read, including newspaper stories or topics they study in class. Fully a fourth of all 13-year-olds fail to grasp the principles of basic math. That problem is apparently not remedied in high school, where almost half of all students are unable to solve problems using decimals, percentages, basic geometry or algebra...