RE: A few good things about public education
Here in the United States, education has become much more centered around assessments leaving teachers mostly "teaching to the test," rather than focusing on the most fruitful aspect of education: critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, ethics, etc.
There are certainly bright spots in our educational system - good schools and good teachers - but as I argued in a previous post this is despite the educational system, not because of it.
The AP program (Advanced Placement) is regarded as one of the best ways to prepare students for college and university. Millions of high school students each year take the various subject tests in the hopes of earning college credits. These classes certainly are rigorous, but mostly because of the breadth of knowledge required to be successful on the test. Students march through thick textbooks from start to finish, expected to remember thousands of pieces of information. AP has been trying to incorporate more critical thinking skills as a part of the test, but with so much content to be covered it is near impossible to teach students to be quality thinkers, rather than just regurgitators of information.
My hope for the future of education lies in small groups of teachers and administrators (maybe even a few schools as a whole) working hard to break free from our cultural view of what education is.
If you get a chance, look up Parker Palmer. He's my educational hero!
Oh, I am not that familiar with his work, but I know of him. He is a visionary, like Ken Robinson that I wrote about a while ago, that has the same function to inspire people and guide them towards something better. What we have left to figure out is how to get there without destroying the good parts.
Studying towards a big test has been the very essence of Japanese education for decades. That's ironically exactly what it was lauded for in the early 90s as the most successful nation in the field of education (mainly in sciences and maths, but somehow that got lost in translation) - their rigorous approach to the teaching of subject content and its testing. I believe that's when everyone tried to copy the model, and now in the US you have what you have).
And yes, workload in my opinion is one of the biggest reasons our kids have no time to think qualitatively. I always oppose the quantity over quality approach in education, but frankly, some seem to like it because it is not ineffective and, probably more importantly, easier on the teacher.