Today’s American educational system has implemented a standardized paradigm to assess each student’s learning capabilities. They believe that standardization better prepares students for succeeding in college and the most efficient way to do so is by having an expert transfer their knowledge to a body of student(s). Contrary, Cathy Davidson, author of “Project Classroom Makeover,” argues that standardization of education isn’t appropriate and instead, believes that education must shift its focus towards finding more ways to interactively promote student learning in a classroom environment. The educational system standardization focuses on a former concept of preparing student skillsets for industry-based jobs that for the most part, no longer …show more content…
The monarchial reception model suggests that we learn from an expert and the students act as sponges to ingest and retain the information. However, this style of learning doesn’t lead to promoting the student to embrace any sort critical thinking because they are being walked through everything. The implications that follow a shift to democratization are that we initiate students to start brainstorming, critical thinking, and problem solving. Possessing those qualities also leads to a natural inclination in the eagerness to learn. Notably, student success derives from those who can think critically and outside the box on their own. Nowadays, many jobs require their employees to be able to think critically and creatively since many of the jobs that require “routine thinking skills are increasingly performed by machine” (Davidson, 60). Many of the “basic level jobs” that didn’t require much effort or thought are now being performed by machines, which makes jobs that much more competitive. This implements the fact that people need to …show more content…
Most of the time, students are bored in class because they feel like the information they are learning is useless and they don’t understand why they are learning about that topic. Students can’t properly prepare for college if they’re not even paying attention to what they are supposed to be learning. Davidson writes about the top quartile of high school students, “the most frequent complaint and cause of disaffection from school is boredom and lack of rigor” (59). Whereas many assume that the problem with kids failing is the course material is too hard, the underlying reason is the complete opposite, it’s simply too boring and uninteresting. This is because we don’t encourage students to think creatively and on their own. We enforce the acceptance of passive learning by allowing one single person to talk for an hour and a half or so while students sit and listen as the information goes in one ear and out the other. They are not actively interacting with the information or in other words they are simply not doing anything with the information besides copying it. When we shift to democratization, we see an increase in the eagerness to learn. In the example of Mrs. Davidson, through her interactive and fun learning, many times she had “to remind [the students] that study hall was over and that it was time to go outside to