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  3. Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of

Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of

admin2014-10-24  28
问题     Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of last week’s coverage of Apple’s new iBooks platform, which the company promises will radically change how students use and experience textbooks. Under Apple’s plan, companies and individuals will be able to self-publish textbooks, ideally creating a wider array of content. Students will be able to download and use these books on their iPad much like they would use a regular textbook.
    Let’s slow down. Textbooks or tools that look a lot like textbooks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And since high quality educational material isn’t cheap to generate, simply tearing down distribution barriers will only go so far in reducing the costs of producing good content. Lost in the heated claims, however, is a more fundamental question: what have educational technology efforts accomplished to date and what should we expect?
    As a field, education is easily seduced by technological promises. Textbooks? Thomas Edison saw movies as way to replace them. These days, conservatives are in love with the idea that technology will not only shrink the number of in-classroom teachers but render the teachers’ unions obsolete.
    The experience to date is less grandiose and more worrisome considering the billions that have been spent on technology in schools in the past few decades. Interactive whiteboards have been around since the early 1990s and done little to transform how teachers teach, and computers are often unaligned with classroom instruction, even though 90% of classrooms around the country have them.
    The reasons for the slow pace of change are as obvious as they are stubborn. Altering classroom and school practice in our wildly decentralized education system is always a slow process. Many teachers are not familiar with technology or how to use it in the classroom, and high-quality training programs—either in schools of education or as part of a teachers’ professional development—are rare.
    Besides, even a top-shelf product can only augment live teaching. Likewise, technology is bringing back in vogue the idea of the "flipped classroom" with the teacher acting as a "guide on the side" rather than the primary source of instruction. I say back in vogue because, ironically, talk of devaluing the teacher as content provider has been a fixture of progressive education thought for a century. Another variation of the flipped-classroom idea is to use technology to explain concepts at home and use classroom time differently. But much of the online content available today merely replicates the lame instruction already available in too many of our nation’s schools.
    American education desperately needs an overhaul that goes far beyond upgrading computers in the classroom. Jobs was right: technology by itself won’t fix what ails our schools. He saw teachers’ unions and archaic practices as the big barriers. Perhaps, but I’d argue they are symptoms of our larger inattention to instructional quality. The bells and whistles of technology, for all its promise, are distracting us from this mundane but essential reality.
In the author’s opinion, the biggest obstacle to the improvement of American school is______.
选项 A、poor job of teachers’ union
B、outdated teaching practice
C、indifference to teaching quality
D、decentralized school system
答案C
解析 在本文中，作者用一大半的篇幅论述了教学设备和技术更新并没有带来教育质量提高这一论点。讨论这个问题，作者真正的目的是引导读者重新思考影响教育的核心因素。作者在最后一段直接表明了自己对这个问题的看法。他首尾呼应，在最后一段再次提到了乔布斯的那句话：“技术不能解决教育的全部问题”。乔布斯将美国教育的问题归结于teachers’ unions和archaic practices，正足[A]选项和[B]选项的内容。但这是乔布斯的观点，作者的观点比他更进一步。作者认为教师联合会碌碌无为、教学方法陈腐，这一切归根结底都源于对教学质量的不重视。因为不重视教学，因此才不去想方设法改善教学方法，因为不重视教学，教师联合会才因此坐以待毙。因此，本题的正确答案应该选[C]。而[D]选项是利用文中第五段提到的一个概念decentralized educacion system设置干扰，作者在第五段中提到“美国教育体系分散化”是为了说明更新设备和技术手段在美国总是收效甚微的原因，和本题并没有直接的关联。
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