Hands on learning should be mandated in every school

I apologize for the broken link. Here is the right one. http://www.fastcompany.com... http://www.ncrel.org... Quick off topic question, where do you study? Back to topic. " You cannot expect your higher education to mold you into the perfect individual for any career. The education can only take you so far; it is up to the individual to actually adapt and apply it themselves when they join the workforce.That is being a professional which schools of higher learning attempt to teach you as much as possible. " I cannot agree more to this. It is true that higher learning can only take us up to a certain degree and it is up to us to adapt to the workforce; however, the problem is they fail to teach us to be adaptable. At least, they can be a lot better in doing that. The current system uses standardized test to measure student's learning. This system is flawed in a lot of aspects. Standardized test tend to fail to teach critical thinking: "Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. And after four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher-order" thinking skills." (source:http://hechingerreport.org...) In addition, the current system tend to teach students to memorize and also pushes teachers to teach to the test rather than teaching the knowledge. (source: http://www.wisegeek.org...) "Take psychology for instance, how do you make that hands-on? A psychology major can only learn the concepts in a classroom in a basic lecture-style and textbook fashion. Many business courses do not have the ability to make much of the education hands-on." While this is true, I believe this is not a good excuse for schools to not apply hands-on learning. It is indeed hard to find new examples of hands-on learning for some classes, but we have to face the fact that some studies have been done. When schools have the chance, they can just replicate the study and have the students as the participants in an experiment. This in itself will help students to learn so much rather as they experience it rather than just listening to people. It is also to possible to create a scenario and have students act it out and respond based on what they have learned. For example: Business law classes can have a scenario in which a group of students become a company that will establish a new policy. Let them decide what policies the have. Then have another group act as society to respond to that new policy. Then another group will act as government and non-profit organizations that will either support or disprove the policy. Then let them interact and try to apply the theories they have learnt. There are also other examples that I can think of if you will give me the subjects of the class and the goal of the class. I believe it is possible if students and teachers will cooperate and learn to attempt new approaches to learning. PS: I will be flying soon and the flight might take me 24 hours total before I can get back to this. So I would like to apologize in advance if I fail to post the next one in time. :D