Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Berenstain Bears Are Different by Abilities : Classical Identites Matter

But to believe that one person might have a talent that is better then someone else's is to establish classes of individuals in a society that practices 'all inclusiveness' can not be tolerated. No matter who you are by ones ability to succeed must be shown to be out of step with the larger community of individuals.

Identifying ones self as having special talents and using those talents to advance yourself to succeed where others have failed is a form of greed and therefore must be denied.

Again, our country welcomes the new world of progressive socialism witnessed by voting for Mr Objma and the progressive democrats twice, where the ideology of, "to each according to one's needs, from each according to one's abilities" is the new norm, the ideological basis for our new world. 

Have we really fallen that far from our heritage of individual freedom to chose? I seems so.

The Berenstain Bears Avoid One-Dimensional Thinking: Why Can’t Educators and Policymakers?

The Berenstain Bears are the cartoon characters in a popular series of readers and DVDs for children. I was reading one with my boys. I was stunned to see this line:

Like most cubs, Brother and Sister Bear had their strengths and weaknesses. Brother was good at math and science, but sometimes he had trouble with language arts; Sister vice versa.

Really, there shouldn’t be anything remarkable about it. We constantly recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the people around us. So, it is remarkable that it is remarkable.

What I call one-dimensional thinking about student and teacher ability is pervasive and frustrating because it prevents consideration of useful policy reforms. We see widespread resistance to sorting children, by ability, because we abhor the stigma, and that such tracking seems to close opportunities to some. But if we recognize that abilities probably differ widely, by subject, and certainly differ in interest and thus level of engagement, we need to recognize, further that we better NOT track as if ability and talent is monolithic.

Imagine putting a math whizz in a school where all of the course offerings are geared towards the extraordinarily talented; possibly a disaster in the English and history (etc.) classes. But, we had better sort by ability, by subject or risk losing our society’s future world-beaters in the subject area where their talent and engagement level is high.

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