Summarize Alfie Kohn's criticisms of school systems, and outline his suggestions for making ...

Alfie Kohn is a contemporary writer who is interested more in what teachers do than in the latest curricular movement of the newest program to change American educators. Kohn asserts that turning students into enthusiastic learners is more important than what is learned. He argues that memorization of facts, endless drills of multiplication problems, blind obedience to the teacher, long periods of time sitting behind desks, and the latest fad of standardized tests and graduation requirements harm the educational process more than they help it. Kohn is an outspoken critic of using standardized tests as a means of measuring educational achievement. He asserts standardized testing needlessly pits students against one another and ultimately leads to mediocrity. When students become obsessed with how well they're doing in school, they often lose interest in what they're doing, and ultimately they think less deeply. Worse, he asserts that when standardized tests are used to measure how well students are doing, intellectual life is squeezed out of classrooms, and the classrooms then become test-prep centers. The back-to-basics philosophy of teaching treats children as passive receptacles into which forgettable facts are poured. Standardized tests force teachers to spend time preparing to take them instead of helping the students to become critical, creative thinkers.
He asserts that a better teaching and learning equation is one in which learning is regarded as an active process in which students need to be given a creative and active role, and he argues that the product of learning is not facts and skills. Although the learning of facts and skills will occur, he asserts the key product of learning is the development of an ability to critically, creatively, and individually think and problem solve. The essence of teaching is involving students in a community-their classroom. Students are involved in processes such as cooperative learning (group problem solving), mentoring relationships (with older and/or younger students), and hypothesis-testing experiments that build an ability and a desire to learn. To Kohn, standardized testing cannot measure what is ultimately most important-the ability to think for oneself.