Leituras sobre educação

Vou limpar a casa, isto é, os rascunhos, e sem grandes comentários, a não ser os "bolds" que são meus. O primeiro conjunto de referências de leituras é sobre a educação; eficácia, impacto nas desigualdades, evolução de comportamentos estudantis, e tendo os EUA como objeto: entretenham-se a detetar as semelhanças e as dissemelhanças com o que se passa em Portugal.

Yglesias » Edunihilism and Early Childhood: "Children spend the majority of their time outside of school buildings. Consequently, peer group effects and parenting constitute the bulk of the non-biological influences on kids. And human children are biological systems heavily impacted by nutrition, genetics, prenatal conditions, ambient lead, etc. But schools also matter. Effective schooling is possible and important. Lack of strong evidence about which methods are most effective points to the need for rigorous assessment, organizational flexibility, and choice.

UnderstandingSociety: Education a leveler?: So it isn't really possible to answer the simple question with a simple answer: do modern educational systems in democracies level inequalities or increase inequalities?  It would seem that they do some of both; they provide access to disadvantaged people who can then leverage success for themselves and their families, and they also create mechanisms of recruitment into elite organizations that are anything but egalitarian.

College the Easy Way - NYTimes.com: A provocative new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation’s seemingly successful undergraduates the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.

Intellectual effort and academic rigor, in the minds of many of the nation’s college students, is becoming increasingly less important. According to the authors, Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia: “Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”

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