"What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. We need character. We need people who want to do the right thing. And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called "practical wisdom."
If it is true that doctors should see patients not as organ systems and diseases but as people - people with lives, then it is equally as true that teachers should see students not as test scores but as people - people with most of their lives ahead of them!
However, the rules and incentives that are driving education policies today are squeezing the life out of classrooms. Standardized curriculums and high stakes testing are demoralizing both the practice and practitioners - that is, the teachers, along with entire education system, are being demoralized and deprofessionalized by policy makers' incessant demand to rule and incentivize everything in education -- read on "for the love of learning"
In this interesting TED talk, American psychologist Barry Schwartz dives into the question "How do we do the right thing?" With help from collaborator Kenneth Sharpe, he shares stories that illustrate the difference between following the rules and truly choosing wisely.
Barry Schwartz is an American psychologist and Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College.
-- Schwartz's TED talks
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