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  3. Sometimes you have to travel very far to gain perspective on things in your own country. Recently, I taught a UNICEF-sponsored c

Sometimes you have to travel very far to gain perspective on things in your own country. Recently, I taught a UNICEF-sponsored c

admin2010-11-29  92
问题     Sometimes you have to travel very far to gain perspective on things in your own country. Recently, I taught a UNICEF-sponsored course in Malang, Indonesia, on educational innovation. My audience consisted of teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, and high-ranking officials from the Indonesian Ministry of Education. Unlike in the United States, the public school system in Indonesia, as in many other countries, is run by a centralized ministry. Not only does this government department develop the curriculum for schools, it also employs curriculum officers who write the textbooks for the curriculum areas. Thus, the powerful Indonesian Ministry of Education controls essentially all aspects of education in the country.
    During my presentation about schools that have sustained meaningful innovation in the United States, I noticed a rising buzz coming from the audience. The people’s expressions of concern and the emotion in their voices was clear, but it wasn’t until their questions were translated that I understood the reason for this agitation. Their comments went something like this: "Tell us, Steve, why your country is moving in the direction of more and more tests for your children? Our system has been doing that for years and we have decided to move to a freer, more creative process. We invite people like you to help us untangle ourselves from all of that testing and the centralized control that goes with it. What is going on in America anyway?"
    Maybe it was the heat of the equatorial climate; maybe it was my own temperature rising from anxiety. Whatever the source, I started to feel quite feverish, and it was at this point that the metaphor of the flu popped into my mind. I told my Indonesian colleagues that in the United States, we periodically fall victim to a kind of "educational flu." When we are overtaken in the international education arena (in the recent Programme for International Student Assessment, the United States ranked 15th out of 32 countries surveyed), our politicians and educational administrators get feverish. They start to manufacture lots of standardized tests and devise very severe consequences for students and teachers when test results do not meet expectations. Like a rising fever, these steps are a clear indication that we are coming down with our educational flu. Brilliant or not, this analogy was enough to get me through that difficult point in my lecture.
    The next day, things got worse. Again, like one falling victim to the flu, I began to feel out of step with the rest of the world. I picked up a regional newspaper and found that Thailand was also moving away from a hierarchical system and standardized tests and toward a more creative education program for children. When I came home, I read that a similar move is taking shape in China where inventiveness, not the traditional national test, is moving to center stage. Thus, I was confronted with a real paradox: Some of the Asian societies well known for rigid bureaucracies are looking for ways to break free, while my country, renowned for its creativity and supposedly child-centered approach to education, is busily sewing itself into a thick hide of conformity and control. Why are the different cultures moving in such opposite directions?
According to the Passage which of the following is true?
选项 A、The author caught a flu and had a fever during his teaching in Indonesia.
B、American schools are giving more and more standard tests.
C、Indonesia, Thailand and China are looking for more test-centered educational practices.
D、The Indonesian students did not understand the author’s teaching.
答案B
解析 细节题。因为题干部分没有提供任何具体信息，所以定位词需要从每个选项中获取。选项A中的flu是关键词，但是通读全篇即可发现作者仅仅是使用了“educational flu”的比喻，而非真得了感冒。从作者和他的授课对象间的交流可以发现美国的教学系统开始越来越多地采用标准测试来衡量学生的水平。选项C所述内容与文中事实刚好相反。
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