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Sarah Stover Group 3 Reading Response "On Ways of Thinking"

**Article: "What does it mean to be well-educated?" by Alfie Kohn**
I really enjoyed reading this article because it really made me think and forced me to ask questions. What //does// is mean to be well-educated? Is it based on the quality of schooling you've recieved? Is it what you were taught or what you learned? Personally, I'm not sure how to answer these questions, but Kohn brought up some interesting points throughout this article.

He started the article off by talking about his wife. She took 29 years of schooling and is a practicing physician, yet she has trouble with basic math and English. Does this mean she is uneducated? It does if the definition is a list of facts and skills a person should have. On the other hand, if a well-educated person is a "deep-thinking, high-functioning, multiply credentialed, professionally successful individual" then his wife fits the definition. Personally, I consider my dad to be a very well-educated person. He's has a wide variety of skills and experiences, yet if I asked him how to do certain Calculus problems, he can't remember how to do it even though he's a math teacher. I also consider my friends to be well-educated. They are strong students and are involved in a variety of activities, but they're taking a class on how to teach 5th grade math and it's harder than you would think. So we're right back where we started...What does it mean to be well-educated?

Kohn gave some examples of definitions that aren't accurate saying being well-educated depends on seat time, memorization, or test scores. He pointed out all the reasons why they don't make sense, and I thought his explanation on test scores was really interesting. He said how no single test is "sufficiently valid, reliable, or meaningful that it can be treated as a marker for academic success." I thought this was so interesting because a lot of the high school curriculum is now centered around standardized tests. In many schools, anyone who doesn't pass a certain standardized test won't be able to graduate. Most states now have curriculum standards that contain "hundreds of facts, skills, and subskills that all students are expected to master at a given grade level and in a given subject."

When I was doing interviews for CLUE, I interviewed a high school teacher who talked about his opinion on standardized testing. He said that public schools rely too much on standardized testing, and how in Pennsylvania, by 2014 every student should be proficient in a certain subject. He also mentioned, "We all have strengths as people, but we are not proficient in everything we do. This sets an impossible or unrealistic goal that causes a lot of frustration among teachers. We have to focus on getting ready for a test, and we're not as focused on the educational process as we want to be." Kohn also mentions how testing takes time away from "more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think."

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Howard Gardner came up with this theory that there are eight multiple intelligences (including musical, spacial, bodily kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, naturalistic, mathematical/logical, linguistic) as opposed to the general intelligence factor "g" which is used in intelligence tests. As Gardner worked with both children and brain-damaged adults, he found that it was too simple to say someone was smart, average, or dumb because each person is good and bad at certain things, which is similar to what the high school teacher said in my interview for the CLUE project.

I agree much more with the idea of multiple intelligences rather than one general intelligence, just as I thought there was more than one definition for being well-educated. People have different strengths and are intelligent in different ways, and I think the theory of multiple intelligences allows us to expand the definition of being well-educated.

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