rote instruction

The program is designed to develop decision-making skills by engaging students with coaching and questions rather than issuing rote instruction.

The school they established was one of the first to employ psychoanalytic principles, which encouraged children to learn for themselves rather than to rely on rote instruction.

These educators, including some state superintendents of public education, like to pose as courageous progressives dedicated to liberating schoolchildren from the tyranny of rote instruction and the misbegotten worship of dead heroes.

That has prompted two major objections - that schools will focus on rote instruction aimed at the exams, and that many students simply will not be able to pass the tests and so will not graduate.

Here was a form of teaching that built on the child's innate knowledge and love of learning, required virtually no rote instruction and permitted children to acquire information and understanding as a painless byproduct of pleasurable activities.

And like many a reality-competition host on her maiden voyage (hello, Heidi Klum), Ms. Antin is stiff and spacey, failing to recite the rote instructions to the cast necessary to keep the action moving.

To the Editor: Re "Seeking to Clone Schools of Success for Poor" (front page, Aug. 16): It is disturbing enough to read of charter schools in which minority children are subjected "to militaristic discipline and rituals" and rote instruction.

Teachers - for many years almost universally bachelors, called "masters," who lived in spartan quarters with the boys in the dorms - focused their rote instruction heavily on preparation for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which during this period accepted almost every single St. Marker.

If our universities are truly to be places of learning and scholarship, and not of mere training or rote instruction, professors should be encouraged in their diverse and divergent views; college students should be trusted to make their own opinions; and our nation, a nation of ideas, should be left to benefit.