Question

"But in the name of reform, it's as if somehow the goalpost has been moved without our realizing it. Now education -- for those "failing" urban kids, anyway -- is about learning the rules and following directions. Not critical thinking. Not creativity. It's about how to correctly eliminate three out of four bubbles. The whole messy, thrilling, challenging work of shaping young minds has been reduced to a one or a zero. Pass or fail."

After reading the quote above, think about your own experiences and worldview. Do you agree, disagree, or feel somewhere in between? Explain your reaction, level of dis/agreement, and why.

Answer 1

Education should help the students initiate their thinking skills thus improving their creativity. Creativity should be the direct output of any educational programme but today, sadly, it revolves around marks, grades and ranks. Education, has undergone lots of reforms during the late 20th century such as from project based, outcome based etc. All the reforms were initiated in the name of change but according to me, they have all failed except the new infrastructures that were added in the name of reforms.
Education will be more effective if,
The learner is interested in learning
The class size is small
There is enough opportunity to transfer the knowledge to skill
The teacher is capable of transferring the knowledge and motivate the students
There is enough infrastructure  
It is learner focused.
Today, education has become a business where anyone can get an admission as long as they have more memory power for rote learning. Excellence in education is based on the marks they score and the mark is decided by the memory power and not thinking ability and creativity as most of the questions have a set answer. But in reality, any problem has more than one solution.
Another problem with today’s education is the presence of mixed ability students where everyone is given the same input, same level of assessment and expected to perform in the same level. This system treats people equally despite the fact that people have different needs, skills and interests. Even if someone is not interested, they are forced to score on par with the so called toppers but the toppers are not performers when it comes to industry expectations. This is a worldwide phenomenon and the only difference is that in some countries it is teacher dominated scoring system and in others it is student oriented scoring system.

It's all about luck and not about understanding in the standardized tests in educational institutions all over the world where the tests test only few abilities such as mathematical and linguistic ignoring all the others which is an unjust and unequal.
History has proven that most of the dropouts have been successful entrepreneurs and all the top scorers are working for them. So, education should strive to develop thinking and thus improving one's creativity.