Analyzing "Confusing Harder with Better" by Alfie Kohn

There are a lot of different issues about the education system which are very controversial in public. One of these issues is nowadays schools concentrate so much on raising standards to assess knowledge for students. Students have been learning really hard to achieve the higher demands on tests. However, asking students to do many difficult tasks in their studies, sometimes it will be not helpful. This matter is demonstrated obviously by Alfie Kohn in “Confusing Harder with better” published in Education Week. As Kohn mentioned, making the standard of the education harder does not mean it better. Considering schools at this time, his opinion is reasonable and realistic. According to Kohn, there are three major points that are expressed effectively in his reading to show that how raising stands affect to the education.
Firstly, Kohn thinks, forcing students to study many difficult tasks will create negative effects in the education. He pointed out the problems of schools is they just concentrate on how students do well on standardized tests. However, they do not know that they are making students lose the opportunities to receive more knowledge because most of student’s time is spent on preparing for these tests. Students have become passive when they have to follow and catch up the high demands of schools. Like Kohn described that students have to memorize almost everything they study and struggle with text books in order to get high scores. It is true when he showed that this old educational method will make the educators under pressure of learning and lose interest in their subjects. Students will be easy to give up because think they are not good or not qualified enough to deal with a lot of difficult assignments and exams. Furthermore, asking students do a lot of stuff will not help them to concentrate on a specific subject. For those reasons, Kohn gave a good argument about how raising standards affects the results of study.
Therefore, Kohn demonstrated that it is essential to focus on improve the quality of teaching rather than just concentrate on raising standards. Kohn mentioned that people cannot judge the qualified schools by looking at the high standards they make for students. He supported his opinion by showing John Dewey‘s idea that letting students think deeply about what they learn is more useful than making them to study forcedly. Thus, the difficult task is just a small part of the students’ success. The more important thing is making students become interested in their studies because students just have good results when they like what they are doing. Some of schools just let their students study exactly all the contents of the texts, and do not care about how much useful knowledge students will get from doing this. Students have to do many homework and assignments without taking a break, even though not all of them are necessary. Kohn wants people realize that the educational system does not have to be hard when students could not have any benefits. Kohn was right when he pointed out the problem of schools at this moment.
Finally, it does not make sense for students to achieve unnecessary higher demand when they can apply those in a real life. Kohn showed that there are a lot of hard examinations students have to pass in order to graduate from schools. They have to study really hard and seriously to have enough the ability to solve the standardized tests. If students cannot pass, schools will make the tests tougher. Obviously, they have to know and remember a lot of difficult tasks, but even the adults cannot. Kohn gave a really reasonable point about Meier’s Mandate statement: “No student should be expected to meet an academic requirement that a cross section of successful adults in community cannot”. This is realistic that in fact, students study a lot of things; however they are not needed in the real life. It does not make sense to accomplish difficult studies when people do not apply in reality. This example is a strong argument of the author.
In conclusion, Kohn gave effective supporting points for his argument about the issue of raising standards in schools. He expressed his idea that raising standards will not be useful if schools do not improve the quality of education. From his argument, people can realize this problem in the method of teaching nowadays. Schools should spend time find an effective way of teaching rather than force students to study a lot of difficult tasks, if those are not necessary.