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Prof. onderwijsgeschiedenis Larry Cuban: de jaarklassenschool heeft moeiteloos de vele kritiek vanaf eind 19de eeuw doorstaan
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(Uit: Zombie Reforms and Personalized Learning (Part 2)
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The age-graded school (jaarklassenschool: e.g., K-5, K-8, 6-8, 9-12), a 19th century innovation, solved the problem of how to provide an efficient schooling to masses of children entering urban schools in the 20th century. Today, the age-graded school is everywhere. Most Americans have gone to k...indergarten at age 5, studied Egyptian mummies in the 6th grade, took algebra in the 8th or 9th grade and then left 12th grade with a diploma.
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As an organization, the age-graded school allocates children and youth by age to school grades; it houses teachers in separate classrooms and prescribes a curriculum carved up into weekly chunks for each grade. Teachers and students cover each chunk assuming that all children will move uniformly through a school year of 36-weeks, and, after passing tests would be promoted.
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These structures and the culture that have grown within age-graded schools over the past century, however, say nothing about which of the multiple purposes tax-supported public schools should pursue (e.g., civic engagement, preparation for the workplace, strengthening individual character, cultivating problem-solving and critical thinking, and making society more just). Taxpayers, voters, policy elites, and donors decide.
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Late-19th and early 20th century critics of age-graded schools saw these structures as crippling the intellectual and psychological growth of individual children who learn at different rates hence causing school dropouts as students of different ages piled up in lower grades because teachers flunked them repeatedly.*
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The development of twice yearly promotions and ability groups smoothed out some of the inherent problems of age-graded schools. But left untouched the overall structure of the age-graded school that required teachers to cover the content and skills specific to a 3rd or 6th grade class where every student had to learn that content and skills by the end of the school year or be held back. These regularities became the grammar of schooling and have persisted decade after decade. The notion that children differ in how fast they learn knowledge and skills was out-of-sync with the age-graded school.
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Nonetheless, reformers launched repeated efforts to individualize instruction. The Winnetka Plan and the Dalton Plan appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, teaching machines in the 1950s, computer-assisted instruction in the 1970s and 1980s, and now personalized learning.
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In each instance, a flurry of hyperbole accompanied the innovation, programs spread proclaiming the end of the graded school, but as time went by, these efforts to individualize teaching and learning lost their mojo. The age-graded school won again and again.
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