MMM writes in response to my Testing and Management essay:

Problem Solving Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Critical Thinking. Learning Skills, Creativity, Communications.......
 
This is a great list that I hear a lot about....and often, because I am considering home schooling my children. This list is the classic defense against home schooling....all the things that my children will lack because I won't send them to public school and let a teacher educate and mold them. The only problem with this defense is that I don't recall learning much of them, during my public school and later college experiences. When exactly did I attend Problem Solving Class? Learning Class? Interpersonal Skills Class?
 
Translation time:
Problem Solving Skills = Learning to resolve an issue the way the teacher believes it should be resolved.
 
Interpersonal Skills = This apparently is something children magically learn when grouped together....I never had any type of educational experience related to interpersonal skills in class. What skills are these? Please name them. Just asking this question usually makes people stammer and stutter and go, 'to get along, you ... you know what I mean'. No, I don't. if it is so important to be learned, explain it to me. Break it down into little pieces so everyone can understand it. Usually interpersonal skills translates into a subliminal 'I want my child to be accepted by other children'...aka not a geek. But that gives us a problem with a few of the next ones.
 
Critical Thinking = Learning to see things how the teacher sees them.
 
Creativity? We're getting into problems here.
 
I think you sense the trend in my thinking here. And don't get me wrong, I believe these skills can be taught and even more so, I believe they can be tested. But lets move out of the box for a moment.
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I disagree with some of MMM's opinions about the skills listed (perhaps I should call them meta-skills, since they're a level removed from the 3 R's). Problem solving is about more than doing things the way the teacher wants, and in fact is exactly the opposite. Interpersonal skills are a well-defined set of relationship skills: a 4-year-old needs to learn how to make friends and get attention in a positive way (as opposed to slugging a kid on the playground); a 10-year-old should be learning diplomacy and tact; and a 15-year-old should learn persuasion and public speaking.

These meta-skills can also be taught, though as MMM points out, there is no Problem Solving class. They are learned by doing, usually in the context of some other (usually group) activity.

I'm involved in a program for teens which is attempting to teach the meta-skills. Every three weeks, the kids are given a project to work on, and certain materials they can use. They have a total of about 20 hours over three weeks to finish the project in small groups.

The projects are designed to force the students to think in new directions (Problem Solving, Learning Skills and Creativity), and the group setting forces them to develop their interpersonal skills. The adults (we're not really teachers, just facilitators and/or mentors) have, in some ways, the harder job: we're supposed to help the kids solve the problems without giving them any specific direction.

For example, if one of the students needs to find out something, we're supposed to point them towards research resources, but not give them the answer. If we think someone is way off base, we're supposed to ask questions to try to redirect them, but not tell them a better way (more like a Socratic method). If we notice that one person is dominating a group, we have strategies to try to get the others more involved.

The biggest problem with this approach is that it is labor-intensive. It simply isn't practical in a school setting with one teacher for 30 kids, unless the students are highly self-motivated and self-directed.
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You want children to learn Creativity, but yet you stress the failures of standardized tests...perhaps it is time to try something other than a standardized test. Lets get a little creativity about testing, does it have to involve #2 pencils? Aren't their other ways to test things? We live in the age of computers that offer the ability to customize tests to the individual and yet we can't think beyond standardized tests? Not only that, but even in an age of standardized tests, how standardized are we? How many tests do teachers give that they make up? And how many times do they grade the very tests they made up? Hint, where I work, I might be allowed to make up the test and I might be allowed to grade the test...but never the same one and the same time. Why? Because how else can you tell if anything was learned? The only way to tell if a teacher is successful is to have someone other than the teacher independently test the children. I know, your saying teachers have special training that makes them objective and able to make and administer tests successfully, all by themselves.....its a shame we can't give doctors this special trainging, it would speed medical advances up and reduce unnecessary double blind experiments. How would you feel if doctors were resisting independent testing of medical treatments? Would you trust your child's health to them?
 
Perhaps we are too stuck on teachers and not enough on learning. After all, if these skills can be learned with out teachers, would you want them to be learned? Or would you want a teacher to still be there?
 
I have wondered often and intensely about teaching my children Problem Solving Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Critical Thinking, Learning Skills, Creativity, Communications.And others skills and behaviors....like how do I teach my children Courage?....what good is it...if they create new things? critically understand things? or find new solutions to old problems if they do not have the courage, will and desire to act?
 
I don't have any answers yet on these, but I am looking for them. If you find some, let me know.
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I certainly don't think teachers have a monopoly on testing. The problem comes down to this:

a) If we want to compare the success of School X to School Y, or Teacher A to Teacher B, we need to have an objective, consistent way to measure the progress of the students.

b) It is difficult--maybe not impossible, but at best extremely labor-intensive--to measure the meta-skills, since meta-skills are about how the student arrives at an answer, rather than simply knowing the correct answer.

c) Therefore, it is difficult--and perhaps impossible given a very limited budget--to objectively measure how well different schools and teachers teach the meta-skills.

As an aside, there's no reason a home-schooled child can't be fully prepared for the Real World. If every parent was willing to put in the time and effort of the parents who are home schooling, then our educational system would be a hundred times better. My own bias is that the real risk of home schooling is not that the kids will get a poor education, but that they won't be exposed to the diversity of opinions and people they'll encounter in college and on the job.

I think parents who are contemplating home schooling need to ask themselves (and answer honestly!): Am I home schooling because I want to provide a better education for my child, or because I want to shelter my child from something in the real world which he or she will have to learn to deal with eventually anyway? It almost doesn't matter what the answer to this question is, as long as the parents understand their answer, and provide the child with the proper skills and experience.