Enlightened Education Series - Part 3 - Charles L Olivea

This week we are featuring Charles L Olivea for the third show in our series on education.

Charles Laurence Olivea is a veteran public school teacher of history, who has taught high school students in New Mexico and Connecticut for nearly 40 years. He feels strongly that most ideas about school reform miss the mark by a wide margin.

Says Charles, "If you wish to solve any problem you must first address its causes, not merely its effects. The failure of educational reform is owing largely to an emphasis on the latter. Would-be reformers often place process over result, equate change with progress, make a "fetish" over innovation, ignore the best from traditional pedagogy, and confuse excellence with effort. In his view, these are some of the big pitfalls to avoid in instituting school reform.

He further asserts that genuine school reform requires improvements in teachers, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and administration. He also accentuates one fundamental core problem: reading comprehension, the foundation for any curriculum.

Charles believes that a "school" consists of relationships between persons: mind-to-mind; heart-to-heart; and, soul-to-soul. And that everything else is secondary. Unless minds are engaged intelligently, nothing educational happens. School reformation must embrace this primary reality for there to be any sensible hope of real progress (transformation of meaning and value within and among the young).

We hope you will join us for the next in this interesting and informative series featuring superbly successful and experienced educators.