ADVICE AND DISSENT

Open Forum: The state of education and teaching in the United States

This week’s edition of Advice and Dissent presents a link to “What Teachers Have Learned,” the Room for Debate feature of The New York Times for its August 22, 2009 issue. “What Teachers Have Learned” is an open forum on the state of teaching and education in the United States, discussing in particular the value of education degrees, teacher preparation programs, motivation and incentives for good teaching performance, the matter of teachers’ pay, the personal classroom experiences of teachers, and the quality of the graduates and professionals produced by the prevailing American educational system (which, its own officials admit, is far from far perfect—like our own).

  

With the Room for Debate feature of The New York Times as model, Jose Carillo’s English Forum would like to come up with a similar but continuing open forum on teaching and education in the Philippines. For far too long, I think, the shaping of our country’s educational system and policy has been largely a centric or top-down affair, shaped not so much by grassroots needs and realities but by ivory-tower thinking and political expediency. Perhaps it’s high time that the ideas, insights, perceptions, aspirations, experiences, and feelings of teachers, students, professionals and occupationals, and the general public are freely heard in the open, then brought to bear down-up on the country’s decision-making in education and its allied undertakings.

Who knows how much value-added these views might contribute to education reform and improvement if they are expressed unhampered by the administrative restraints and constraints of the educational and political bureaucracy? For education and teaching in particular, this is the kind of open forum that Advice and Dissent now wants to create and get going.

Before that, however, let’s hear slices of the contemporary experience of the Americans with their educational system, from which we will recall the Philippines had largely patterned its own.

Read “What Teachers Have Learned” in The New York Times now!

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Ground Rules for the “Open Forum: Education and Teaching”

This week, Jose Carillo’s English Forum is putting up a new section called “Open Forum: Education and Teaching.” To participate in it, simply look for its panel in the homepage and click to enter the section. Members of the Forum are invited to post their opinions, perceptions, ideas, observations, suggestions, and experiences about education and teaching in the Philippines; they are also encouraged to invite their associates and friends to post their views and join the running discussions.

There is no firm limit to the length of postings in this open forum, but to keep the discussions manageable, a range of 100 to 1,500 words is suggested. Postings should be confined largely to your own views, knowledge, and experience; if you need to cite long references or background material on the web, just send the links to us and the Forum webmaster will take care of setting up the links with the sites you indicate.

While openness is encouraged when giving your views, please keep the discussions in the open forum civil at all times. The open forum will be closely moderated, and postings with abusive or vituperative language will be stricken off outright.

Let’s keep our goal for this open forum always in sight: a well-taught, much better-educated Philippine citizenry.

See you at the open forum!

Joe Carillo