Just as is the case here, with you, it can take multiple long conversations to tease out someone’s complete lack of understanding of a subject. Here, I blame myself, I should have been clearer: I wasn’t talking about her racism, I was talking about just how much she didn’t understand how evolution works.
My point was, and still is, that ‘simple conversations’ are not enough. Besides, do the teachers have time to spend one or two hours every few weeks with each student to properly assess their progress? (I suppose you could argue that, since they’re not teaching at all, they have time to asses…)
Self-directed learning might sound like a good idea to some but to me and it might be fine for some subjects, but it presents a logical problem: how can a student, who know little about a subject, decide what’s important but not interesting.
One example I keep coming across: really bad translations of English text into French. Obviously the people who approve and pay for these translations don’t speak French or speak it about as fluently as Clement von Franckenstein does in that skin-crawlingly bad scene from The American President.
I;ve seen enough self-evaluation of what’s what that I’ve come to distrust it.
