A Holistic View

It is my belief that children learn many different ways.  One child may be a visual learning while the next kinesthetic.  There is no one correct way to teach just as there is no one correct way to learn.  It's tricky when looking at how schools test children so much to try and determine what they know or have learned.  I, for one, do not find it fair.  There needs to be anther way to measure knowledge that considers the whole child.  Sure, it would require a lot more work on everyone's part but it would be for the benefit of the child.

I know that in some areas there are vocational schools.  I'm not talking just a VoTech school that high school students can go to in the afternoons after doing gen ed courses at the public high school.  I'm talking about the vocational schools that children in middle-high school can choose to go to instead of regular public high school.  These can be found in other parts of the world, but there are also a few in the United States.  I think that they are great in that they meet the needs and interests of each student; these kids can choose their focus and really excel!  They don't need to waste time on things that they don't care about and probably will not do well at.  One example is in Philadelphia at the Mercy Vocational High School.  Here students can choose from the following areas of focused study: business, carpentry, computer, cosmetology, culinary, electric, and nursing.

Around the world you can see a variety in means of assessment of school-aged children.  My husband observed while in China that some school-aged assessments were mainly group effort and not based on individual assessment.  In the times that I have visited Spain I noticed that school-aged children are expected to sit and listen to lecture-style instruction and then are given formal assessments on what they have heard.  In third-world countries many children do not even attend school.  They are assessed by their community by how they perform self-care tasks or other things that are important to their particular culture.