Princeton University Professor Stanley Katz voices concerns to Montgomery Township Board of Education
By: Jake Uitti
MONTGOMERY There is a divide between secondary and post-secondary schools in this country that leads to inefficiencies in education, Princeton University Professor Stanley Katz told the township Board of Education on Tuesday.
Professor Katz, chairman of the undergraduate program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said a "test culture" pervades secondary schools a culture that places unnecessary pressure and stress on students.
And this culture detracts from more effective ways of learning, he said.
For example, certain tests like the Advanced Placement exams, Mr. Katz explained, have "changed completely" from their original intent of having students place out of basic courses to start more advanced work or to allow them to finish college in three years.
Now, he said, AP exams are just another hoop students have to jump though in order to get into college. Their original use has been abandoned for the misguided ideal of achieving a perfect score, he asserted.
This test culture, Mr. Katz said, makes "it very difficult for creative teachers to do their own thing."
Mr. Katz said students need to be taught to be synthesizers, to be able to apply knowledge from many areas across disciplines in order to make decisions.
"The world doesn’t break down into disciplinary problems," he said.
To make a good decision about even something as mundane as potholes in the roads, he said, a person needs to understand about local government, about economics and about making tradeoffs.
In other words, students need to learn how to solve problems.
Mr. Katz also accused secondary schools of putting off teaching intellectual maturity, making students wait until they enter college to learn how to learn.
This, he said, wastes important time in a student’s development.
Mr. Katz promoted the idea of active learning also known as the "discovery method" which requires students to engage themselves with materials in order to solve problems. This method should be taught from kindergarten through the 12th grade, he asserted, so that students, when they get to college, can apply their understanding to more advanced topics.
"Students are going to forget everything they are taught about history in the lower grades anyway," he said, "and that’s OK. But what I want them to learn from history is how to think historically."
The ultimate goal, he said, is for students to learn to make good choices to make human choices that are informed and will benefit other people. A person needs to be informed, he said, so that he or she can be "a good democratic citizen."
Mr. Katz said, perhaps above all else, students need to be encouraged to write to a high standard, which will provide a means to organize and present thoughts. Students also need to know how to present arguments orally, he said.
To that end, Mr. Katz said more general humanities courses need to be offered in secondary schools, such as a course on "good and evil in Western culture," or "creativity in the arts" or "music history."
These classes, he said, involve a broad understanding of several disciplines and require a student to think synthetically. In addition, he said, parents need to take a step back from putting pressure on their children and instead be supportive, forgiving and "talk up" their children.
In the end, he said he sees there are many good things in today’s education, but more of a concentration on problem-solving over test-taking and promoting intellectual maturity in younger grades would make students better learners and better people.

