American Kids Should Be Building Rockets and Robots, Not Taking Standardized Tests

I have long been critical of the way we're doing education in America. We spend more and more time and money on testing kids and therefore less and less time teaching the things they actually need to know. My personal belief is that this is mostly driven by the "privatize education" crowd in an attempt to show that public schools fail our kids so they can get their hands on that money. I won't go into an in depth explantion of this point because I believe that we need to abandon testing and get back to teaching.

I'll let this article in Slate do the arguing for me. The author shows a text of instruction in the use of a microscope and then test questions supposedly based on that text. He couldn't figure out the correct answer based on the text. 60% of kids couldn't either.

The author then goes on to explain: "This is what test designers want. As an educator once told me, if the question was such that everyone got the right answer, then it wouldn’t be a good question"

Okay, I'll only ask this once: This is want we want education to do? Fail almost 60% of our children? The point here is that we should be engaging our children instead of finding ways to make them and our schools, look like they're are failing.

Enter Maker Faires. If you don't know what these are then you are missing one of the most vital ways to gets kids to learn: get them to MAKE something. Remember Science Fairs? Maker faires get kids to make something.

Read the article. If you have young kids, get involved.

Caine Monroy, whose homemade cardboard arcade recently became a viral Internet sensation, hosted a

workshop at Maker Faire, where he invited young makers to build alongside him, sharing his materials,

construction techniques, and spirit.