lectures, lectures, lectures

I was just doing some reading for my history of education class and came across an interesting paragraph which I thought I might share with you all. The topic of the paper is a survey on education in BC done in 1924 by people named Putman and Weir. Within the survey they make clear their dissatisfaction with the present day teacher's college: the normal school. One of their beefs is with the perpetuation of lectures as the most used style of teaching.
"[Putman and Weir's] third subject of concern [was] knowledge transmission by indiscriminate use of lectures... For several reasons, they deemed lecturing inappropriate as the unique teaching device. For one thing, few who delivered lectures actually excelled in the art. For another, lectures denied students an active part in an intellectual transaction. Then, too, student teachers themselves nurtured on the lecture method would probably inadvisedly adopt it as their own way of teaching in the public school classrooms of BC. More threatening than all of these reasons was the fact that lectures stressed subject matter, whereas the ideal normal school, that 'laboratory for child study,' necessarily placed its emphasis on the child." *

I found it very interesting that in 1924 there was a movement to move away from the lecture - and here we are in 2006, over eighty years later, discussing the same issue at our "teacher's college."

* from Calam, John. "Teaching the Teachers: Establishment and Early Years of the BC Provincial Normal Schools." in Schools in the west: Essays in Canadian educational history.