Would that I had come earlier to the United States!

Posted February 3, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Quotations

Columbia University’s Pierre-André Chiappori, as cited by Guy  Sorman in the City Journal, says:

“Academic life in the U.S. is determined by competition at all levels, he adds. ‘It’s often said that American universities recruit only the best among the Europeans. I would say instead that we become better because we are immersed in permanent competition. I would have been better at what I do if only I had come earlier to the U.S.’”

What if our schools were to accept his judgment, that we become better at what we do because of the competition? It’s certainly true of athletics, which is all about competition. Why might it not also be true of learning, say, math or history?

But, whether or not it’s true is for more and more of us no longer a pressing issue. For we have become, not only in our schools, but also in the way we raise our children, afraid of competition.

We’re afraid of  turning off or away all those who can’t or won’t or don’t want to compete. And with reason, for that does happen.

And it can get ugly, as one can readily see in a large family with competing children. For there will always be winners and losers. And because of this we go out of our way and try to lessen the harm done, by such things as having all the children speak up in turn at the family dinner table, by being sure that all the kids in the classroom are raising their hands and asking questions, and by countless other similar esteem promoting actions.

But of course our efforts are mostly in vain. Competition is, as they say, in our genes, and our memes. It’s a part of everything we do. We can’t do away with it.

Rather than try we ought to accept the truth of what Chiappori says, and allow the few to enjoy the great benefits, to themselves and the larger organization of which they are a part, that come from competition, while trying at the same time to lessen the downside, the discouragement that will probably fall upon the many.

In any case, that’s reality. That’s also what’s going on between nations as they compete for global market share. And because of the competition, and the greater productivity and greater wealth arising therefrom, hundreds of millions who have only known poverty in their lives are now working and earning money and becoming the first of their families to move up into the middle classes.

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The Old and the Young

Posted February 2, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Idle Thoughts

The old, we’re told, will remain young by caring for the young, by caring about the young. Show me a real old man or woman, someone who looks and acts old, and I’ll show you someone who is probably no longer close to children.

Children are not only ours and the country’s future, but in the present they are our sanity, contributing mightily to our well-being. In spite of the really difficult work involved in bringing up children there are very few who ever choose not to do this work. And there are very few grandparents who do not pitch in and help with this work, seeming to understand that this is to their own benefit no less than that of their children.

Who would defend the old if the inevitable selfishness of old age, the selfishness arising from long years of living for oneself and one’s survival, were not attenuated by the presence of the young, by what is the transforming and life giving presence of one’s children and grandchildren?

In the words of David Brooks, “One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.”

Now enter into the old/young equation the Federal government. Not only do our leaders in Washington seem not to have read Vaillant, but they are, by their redistributive policies heavily skewed in favor of the old, turning Vaillant’s conclusions on their head.

“Far from serving the young, as Brooks tells us, “the old are now, [by the number and extent of the Federal programs directed to their benefit] taking from them. First, they are taking money…. the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.”

Then they are taking, as Brooks goes on to explain, their freedom, and with the loss of freedom, opportunity, there being for the young considerably less of both as the old receive more and more of both in the form of generous Federal entitlements.

Brooks points out the extreme irony of the situation. While we are there for our children and grandchildren the government, more and more, is there for us. As if they considered it our job to care for the country’s future, and their job to care for us.

Again a situation where one group of citizens, in this case the old, has powerful friends in Washington, and the other group, children, does not.

The situation is doubly ironic in that the old, if they were to demand and accept less for themselves from the Federal government, if they were to insure their own brief future less, they would be insuring more the only future that counts, that of their children and grandchildren.

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More on the Schools from Today’s News

Posted February 1, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Education

Three comments from today’s news concerning the performance, or failure to perform, of our public schools, two from the Times, and one from Time Magazine.

First Ross Douthat, in an op ed piece. He cites the sociologist, Kristin Luker who in her history of the sex education debate concluded that, “… it is surprisingly difficult to show that sex education programs do in fact increase teenagers’ willingness to protect themselves from pregnancy and/or disease.”

Douthat comments:  ‘This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s attended high school. What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem. (And, of course, the impact of entertainment: the MTV reality show ‘Teen Mom”’is far more absorbing than the average sex-ed curriculum, and probably more influential as well.)”

Reasonable, right? Would anyone without his own dog in the fight disagree with Douthat? It’s been evident for a long time, in my case for more than 50 years, that what is taught in the classroom does little or nothing to change the already ingrained habits of thought and action of today’s adolescents. We go on talking at our students, not with them or to them.

The second comment, this one from the event now taking place in Davos, Switzerland, is from Azim Premzi, head of the Indian outsourcing company, and is quoted in Alison Smale’s Times article, Bankers Put focus on ‘Real Economy.’

Premzi says that, “there may be too many people pursuing a moderate amount of education, which will leave them overqualified for low-skilled jobs in agriculture or other areas, but not qualified enough to take part in an increasingly high-tech economy.”

Also reasonable, right? What he gently calls a “moderate amount of education,” really means the school’s failure to educate large numbers of our young people, even those who have graduated from high school. It’s probably true, as he says, that too many young people upon leaving school are little fit for any job at all, let alone one in the high-tech economy.

Premzi clearly implies that we ought to be doing something else, perhaps as in Germany and in other countries, and begin to give our young people while still in school the training necessary to get and retain a job upon graduation. Whatever he means by the “moderate amount of education” that our kids are supposedly getting it is clearly not enough, and probably of little or no value to them.

Joe Klein, writing on education in Time Magazine, is the least convincing of the three. He is probably correct when he accuses the New York teachers’ union of blocking Secretary Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” by their refusal to accept Federal stimulus money that would go to support school choice and competition (charter schools) as well as a new emphasis on teacher evaluation and accountability, all three reforms anathema to the union.

But in what he says about American schools he repeats generally accepted but irrelevant clichés that don’t at all have the depth of meaning he would give to them. This is unfortunate because his criticism lends further support to the public perception that what is wrong with our schools is first and foremost the refusal of the teachers’ unions to reform themselves.

Here is what he says: “American schools have been slipping for decades — our students are now 32nd internationally in math scores, 10th in science, 12th in reading. It will be impossible to rebuild our economy — to create the sophisticated, high-paying jobs we need — as long as we have an archaic, industrial-age school system. It’s also hard to keep a strong democracy with a citizenry that is increasingly uneducated and ill informed.”

In regard to his three judgments, really critical put-downs of the teacher union dominated public schools, here is what I would reply.

First of all such international comparisons as the ones he mentions have been shown to be without substance. It’s enough to think about what groups of students are being compared to understand that such comparisons are impossible to make. Our students do quite well when the two groups being compared are in fact comparable, say at the international Math Olympiad. However, this is rarely the case.

Secondly, there are very few of those “sophisticated, high-paying jobs,” of which he speaks, out there. Most jobs that are available are in the service and retail industries and are definitely neither sophisticated nor high-paying.

In fact, there are now plenty of graduates to fill the jobs of which he speaks, and if not they would quickly appear among the thousands, tens of thousands of much better qualified new arrivals to the country, than from the inner city high schools, even from those schools where the union obstacles to reform have been lifted and removed.

And finally, the Jeffersonian complaint, that our democracy is in need of an increasingly educated and well informed citizenry. Of course, but don’t look to our schools to make this happen. The schools have never created such a citizenry in the past, and no matter what they do in the present, even if the union leaders are sent to a desert island, will they create Jefferson’s desired citizenry.

A well informed, literate, and thinking public is as much our dream as it was that of Thomas Jefferson. We ought, however, to have learned during the intervening 200 years or so between him and us that such is not in our power, let alone in the power of our schools, to make happen.

There are good citizens, just as there are good people, but are we any closer today than ever before to knowing how to make them?

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A Few First Thoughts on the End of the Printed Word

Posted January 31, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Idle Thoughts, Idle idle thoughts

Many talk about the demise of the newspaper (and perhaps also the book) as digital media become more widespread and people get “The News” from the Internet.

We need to look closely at what’s happening, especially now with the advent of the iPad, at what we may be losing, but also and probably more important, at what we are, I think, clearly gaining.

I would say first of all that the issue lies not with the intrinsic value of “News,” the subject matter of the best of our publications, or the great importance of the bringers of the “News.” The place of the news, its importance in our lives is, largely thanks to the internet and the new electronic media, greater now than ever before.

The issue that we are concerned with is much less than that. Newsprint, book paper, the printing presses, those are the “lives” that are facing their end, just as were ended, some time after Homer, the oral bringers of the news.

For 3000 years or more writing on papyrus, parchment, and much more recently paper became more effective and more efficient than oral transmissions in bringing the “news” to the people. Would we even have had an Odyssey, that is, an oral account of Odysseus’s journey, if our own “media” had been present at the time of that journey?

So, yes, of course the advent of electronic media does represent a loss, as does every change, from that of the clipper ship to the steamboat, the horse and carriage to the automobile, and all the myriad other instances when what seemed to be a vital part of our lives was abandoned by the side of the road as we moved on and into a widely different future time.

Now we are faced with the loss of the paper book, the newspaper, and the magazine. But is there any doubt that the digital transmission of words is more effective, more complete, certainly much less costly, much less a drain on our natural resources and hence more environmentally  friendly?

Again, it’s important not to forget that the “News” is not threatened, only the means of transmission. If that is fully understood we will stop bemoaning the loss of the newspaper, and the book, and fully partake of the much greater news opportunities of the digital world.

The strange thing is that now, when there are so many who daily experience the internet, there are almost as many who don’t understand that their new habit doesn’t mean the loss of anything vital, but that it’s only a correction, a change in vehicle, with actually much better news coverage than ever before.

How would one defend the loss of what we call “hard copy?” Book lovers say, —”Oh don’t take my book… I have it by my bed at night, in my pocket when I go to the beach, with me when I travel. Furthermore, I can’t imagine my life without my own library of books. For books, probably no less than my wife and children and now grandchildren, have been and still are such a huge part of my daily life.”

I understand this. The books I own, probably only a few thousand remaining of the 10s of thousands I have owned in my lifetime, comfort me and call me back to all, or nearly all the important moments of my past life.

The French writers, André Gide and Albert Camus, whom I read while in Medical School (and ended up dropping out as a result). Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and others of his works recalling my time in graduate school at Columbia in the 60s. The bilingual, French and Classical Greek editions of the Greek and Roman classics that I read while teaching at St. John’s College in the late 60s.

Alston Hurd Chase’s A New Introduction to Greek, the text I used in my teaching of that language while at St. Johns. Pirandello’s complete works, especially the hundreds of his short stories, one for every day of the year, that I read and reread as I wrote my PhD dissertation (never finished) while living in Florence, via Michelangelo,  …

And it goes on and on, right up until the present. In the 90s I stocked my shelves with Russian books while I taught myself to read that language following six months in the Soviet Union, and most recently I’ve been purchasing from Amazon’s used book network political science books, books about evolution, cosmology, the history of the earth, also calculus texts, the study of which had been cut short while being taken up with the running of a school I started with my wife in the 70s…

Anyway, am I implying that books, such as the ones that have accompanied me throughout my life, should somehow live forever? And to make sure that they do we ought to keep the printing presses rolling?

Well yes, and no. No because paper texts are probably not the best means of assuring the survival of men’s knowledge and discoveries. Paper texts can be lost, as was the case during the fire in Alexandria in the first century before the present era, and during the Inquisition and the Nazi periods in Germany and Southern Europe when books were first banned and then burned. That which still happens I’m sure.

In fact, books are easily destroyed and we should have better ways of preserving the best of what men have thought and written.

And as we think about these sorts of things we need to distinguish between books, what is it that they contain and that we need and want to preserve, and the news, what we no less want to preserve, the papers, journals, and magazines that contain the accounts of what the few have witnessed and/or experienced and written down for the benefit and enjoyment of the many.

In fact, of the two I would say that the “News” is the most important. It is the news that precedes the book, the news of the experience or the thought that one has had. The news that Odysseus left Troy and successfully made it home to Ithaca where Penelope was waiting. The book is just one person’s account of that trip. Present day media facilities would have given us myriad accounts.

In the news we learn that drone fired missiles are destroying segments of the Al Qaeda leadership in North Waziristan…. The book that often follows the news accounts is someone’s interpretation of what happened, perhaps a much fuller treatment of what it means, say, for the U.S. to fire missiles into the wild border regions of Pakistan. But the News came first.

In my opinion we should concern ourselves less with the writing of the book, because books will be written with or without our support. The news is at greater risk. We need to be sure that the News can reach us, and for that to happen someone has to be there and has to have whatever it takes to write it down and then transmit it…

We need to be mightily concerned that this sort of thing never stops. I would even argue that the news coming into our homes, now in electronic format, ought to be considered no less vital to our well being than the electrical, gas, water, sewer and other supply lines.

This is already happening with broadband hookups. Children are now growing up, attached as much or more to the internet supply line to their homes as to the water running from the tap, or to their parents returning into the house from the store with the groceries.

What if the News were to be treated like a utility, like heat, water, and electricity? Is it no less essential to our well-being, our completeness? In fact, is there anyone who gets by on heat, water, and electricity alone?

Actually we pay now for news coming into our household via cable or satellite. Why wouldn’t payments of this nature be enough for the creators of the all important News? Why do we also need advertisers? The latter do not accompany the arrival in our homes of the other “utilities.”

Well, after having said all this, I guess I do think that there is still a place for hard copies. For books and journals etc., the kind of thing you put in your pocket and take to the beach, and the kind of thing I have so many of in my library at home.

But electronic publications don’t need to threaten the book. Both can exist. We still need to find out how they might best coexist. Perhaps books are to computer screens as candles to electric lights? Is anyone without candles in their home? An interesting, but probably not a valid analogy.

I know the e-readers. I have a Kindle, and I also have access at no cost to many of the classics through the Project Gutenberg. But it would never occur to me to keep, say, Melville’s Moby Dick, Chekhov’s and Pirandello’s short stories, only in digital format, and this in spite of their being readily available for download to my computer. I still need to have them in book form.

Even though in the long run my books will be dead the way I’ll be dead (although as I look over my library shelves it is clear that their life spans will outdo my own), returned as dust to the earth…. while, although the jury is still out, the electronic form of the book may be as close as anything in our possession to being immortal.

During my life time books on paper will have fulfilled an essential role, perhaps one that electronic books, even the digital versions of the books of my library, will never fulfill. Perhaps because of this, to some extent anyway, the printing presses will continue to roll as does the horse and carriage (although not the steamboat). I guess this is what the “issue” I mention above is all about….

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The First Year of the Obama Presidency

Posted January 26, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Idle Thoughts

I find myself mostly agreeing with this commentary from Columbia University researcher, Alice Kessler-Harris, in the current edition of Dissent Magazine:

“I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan; a rapid closing of Guantánamo; and a denunciation of torture, rendition, and the endless pursuit of an elusive and protean terrorism…. I anticipated a more generous health care bill and a restoration of modest regulations on banks and financial investment firms. Obama led us to expect these things of him when, in his mellifluous and powerful voice, he advocated “change you can believe in.”

“Mostly agreeing” because I wouldn’t have placed the “rapid closing of Guantanamo,” nor the “denunciation of torture and rendition” high up on my own priorities for Obama’s presidency. Downgrading the “endless pursuit of an elusive and protean terroism,” yes, that was a high priority for me also.

For me there are other Obama, if not failures, areas of neglect and downright inactivity that have been even more important sources of my own disappointment.

In particular:

Too often Obama has allowed the Democratic Congress to set the political agenda for his administration. While reforming the country’s health care system may have been important to him the bits and pieces of reforms actually proposed were all, or nearly all the thoroughly unsatisfactory creations of Congress. And it now appears that any future reforms of the money and banking segments of our economy will be no less left to the Congress to fashion and then enact, the president again watching from the sidelines.

Similarly our country’s war strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan are not so much the President’s own creation as that of his military generals. The result being that we’re looking at what seems more and more like (as impossible as I always thought this to be) a repeat of our disastrous Vietnam experience nearly two generations earlier.

But my own greatest disappointment lies in areas of presidential neglect and inactivity. Two in particular.

Our middle classes, those who work and pay income taxes, those who make up this country’s backbone, provide the labor for the country’s industries, as well as for the country’s wars, (just and unjust) are hurting. These people’s salaries have not been rising, but their costs of living of course have been. Furthermore their numbers are diminishing as more and more of them lose their jobs and homes and join the ranks of the unemployed.

For our middle class citizens not to do well and prosper is to bode terribly for the country’s future. Improving the increasingly difficult circumstances with which these people are struggling ought to have received Obama’s full attention from day one of his presidency, more so than reckless foreign wars in the Middle East, more so even than insuring the uninsured (the cost of which would be mostly born by these same middle classes).

The other area of neglect, so far anyway, is immigration policy. Doesn’t the President understand that our country has always been and is still most about, the large numbers of people, good people, hard working people, who come here from all over, and who for most of the country’s history have been welcomed and given the opportunity to work? Doesn’t he know that it’s these millions, among whom was his own father, who have come here and with hard work and encouragement realized the American Dream?

He needs to make sure (this insurance even more important than health insurance) that the people coming to these shores, and, through the work that they do once here, growing this country’s wealth, doesn’t stop.

Open Door immigration policies have always been, if not this country’s greatest source of strength, right up there with the founding principles of our founding fathers, with such things as democratic governance, the free market, the rule of law, the protection of individual rights and the other principles that inform and characterize and make precious our lives together.

Mistakingly I believe, the President has yet to turn his attention to immigration. He should be vitally concerned with easing the path to citizenship, not only for those who want to come here but also for those millions who are already here but without legal status.

Although such an effort might, more than anything else, keep him from being elected to a second term, the President himself said, just today while speaking with Diane Sawyer of ABC News:

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. I don’t want to look back on my time here and say to myself all I was interested in was nurturing my own popularity.” Would that he do this!

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More on the poverty in Haiti, this time with Nicholas Kristof and Mark Danner

Posted January 21, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Idle Thoughts

(If you haven’t already read Ben Macintyre’s piece, The Fault Line in Haiti Runs Straight to France, in today’s London TimesOnLine go HERE, read it and then come back, although what Ben tells us about Haiti’s appalling French connection during the past several hundred years may make all that I have to say below meager fare.)

As if in answer to my post on the widespread failure of international development aid (see also the Wall Street Journal column, “To help Haiti, end foreign aid.”) Nicholas Kristof in “Some Frank Talk About Haiti,” asks, why are Haitians so poor?

Has development aid failed because the Haitians are simply not capable of doing whatever is necessary to fix their country and lift it out of its current position as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and in doing so improve the living conditions and opportunities of the people?

And if that is the case, if they are not capable, shouldn’t we abandon entirely any attempt to help them with our billions in aid programs?

Kristof doesn’t believe this to be so. He does cite a number  of mostly conservative pundits and commentators who are down on the Haitians’ ability to govern themselves, convinced that any financial aid coming from us would, as in the past, only be wasted, going into the pockets of the corrupt few, not to the benefit of the impoverished many.

Of course, we have to distinguish between development aid and disaster relief. The current earthquake relief effort is not at issue. Even those most critical of past Haitian aid go along with the urgency and necessity of our sending help now. Earthquake, no less than tsunami and hurricane relief has little if any opposition.

But what might be the next step following the relief effort? How can we help the Haitians move on? Is there something else we could do that could begin to substantially reduce if not eliminate the country’s ingrained, debilitating poverty?

Kristof blames the poverty most of all on the loss of the island’s forest cover (which rich and abundant as it once was can be seen in the neighboring Dominican Republic). Now what trees there still are cover hardly 2% of the land surface, the result being that the soil has so eroded that today the people are no longer able to grow enough food for themselves.

Kristof insists, however, that the people should not be blamed for their situation. They were not primarily responsible for the loss of the forest cover. And now they are not the problem.

On the contrary, he says, to visit and to meet the Haitians is to see that they are the country’s treasure. “Smart, industrious and hospitable, successful when they come to the United States,” they could with our help be successful on their island.

Maybe. In part that is Kristof, always the optimist about people’s possibilities, life’s possibilities. One would like to believe that he’s right. In any case here is what he proposes:

First of all, Haiti, far more than most other impoverished countries — particularly those in Africa —  could plausibly turn itself around. It has an excellent geographic location, there are no regional wars, and it could boom if it could just export to the American market.

According to Kristof a good, perhaps a best strategy for Haiti would be to help them build factories, in particular garment factories, producing goods for the market to the north.  For example, a few dozen major shirt factories could be transformational.

In the coming months as the United States turns from disaster relief to rebuilding it ought not only to send aid workers but also business types, people with money to invest in new businesses. That is what Haiti most needs.

And finally, in Kristof’s own words: “And let’s challenge the myth that because Haiti has been poor, it always will be. That kind of self-fulfilling fatalism may be the biggest threat of all to Haiti, the real pact with the devil.”

And here a footnote: Mark Danner in an op ed piece in today’s Times has just given us a short version of Haiti’s terrible past. To understand the people and the country it would help immensely to read it.

Danner’s conclusion? Not too different from that of Nicholas Kristof:

[What might be done to change things?] “America could start by throwing open its markets to Haitian agricultural produce and manufactured goods, broadening and making permanent the provisions of a promising trade bill negotiated in 2008. Such a step would not be glamorous; it would not “remake Haiti.” But it would require a lasting commitment by American farmers and manufacturers and, as the country heals, it would actually bring permanent jobs, investment and income to Haiti.”

Is President Obama, immersed today in battle with the banks, listening?

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Idle Thoughts

Posted January 17, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Idle Thoughts

In letter exchanges with John Adams as well as in his own autobiographical writings Thomas Jefferson proposed that, “instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions….”

But of course what we have today, some 200 years later, is still an aristocracy of wealth, along with an aristocracy of merit, in particular an aristocracy of verbal and mathematical merit, aka as intelligence, although with ample room and ample recompense for the many talented ones who entertain us.

We are still without an aristocracy of virtue, perhaps even more so than in Jefferson’s time.

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I wonder if our President reads Thomas Friedman

Posted January 17, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Online readings, Quotations

Thomas Friedman has no need of me to call attention to his op ed pieces. He has a readership. I have none. Nevertheless today he speaks exactly my mind (and I suppose that of many others).

When he says this in today’s Times:

“Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which ones they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil — nothing would make us more secure — and we would be reducing the reward for killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to exactly what he’s worth: 10 cents and an autographed picture of Dick Cheney.”

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More on Chester Finn and school reform

Posted January 16, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Achievement Gap, School Reform

Chester Finn, no less than Arne Duncan and his “Race to the Top,” labors under the (mis-)conception that student achievement levels depend primarily on what the educators, – the teachers, administrators, and politicians — do, and that downward or flat, as at the present time, achievement levels call for additional reforms.

Maybe, but so far a long series of public school education reforms  beginning in this country in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik into orbit 4 October 1957, have done little or nothing to raise the achievement levels of all our students, and have done particularly little for our most vulnerable, most impoverished and most often minority, Latino, Black and other, students, those for the most part living and attending school in our largest inner cities.

Why is this? The answer is obvious but so far educators have not been paying attention. What have we ever learned ourselves that has not come primarily from our own efforts, from our own active involvement in the learning process?

Why would it be any different for kids? For what students learn, translated into measurable achievement levels, depends most of all (as for the rest of us) on what they do for themselves, not on what we do for them.

What reforms, if any, have sought to make the students primarily responsible for their own education, for their own learning? The three reform movements of which Chester Finn speaks, national standards, data driven instruction (testing), and school choice, have little or nothing to say about the role of the students in all that.

As it is now, even the best students, the so called “good students,” are probably doing what they do in school to please their parents or teachers rather than themselves. Although they may be learning the lessons of the school and classroom, what they’re really learning, what’s becoming an integral part of their makeup, and most important for their future lives, is probably not what they’re doing in school.

When and if learning does take place, if progress is made and achievement gaps are narrowed or closed, it will be most of all thanks to the efforts of the learners, of the kids themselves.

I thought of all this while reading David Brooks writing about the devastation brought about by the earthquake in Haiti. The extent of the devastation, he says, is much more to be blamed on poverty, that which had made for a totally inadequate infrastructure of support systems, as well as permitting contractors to build without meeting proper building code requirements.

Brooks reminds us that an earthquake in the Bay Area of Northern California, on October 17, 1989, just as powerful, 7.0 on the Richter scale, did a tiny fraction of the horrendous people and property damage that we are now witnessing via the Media’s constant coverage of the aftermath of the quake in Haiti. The poverty of Haiti and affluence of Northern California are the explanation of the hugely differing quake damages in the two places.

Then Brooks goes on to say that all the development aid of the past several decades has done little or nothing to reduce, let alone dispel the poverty not only in Haiti, but in the under developed world generally. He concludes with the simple admission that “we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty.”

Brooks then quotes the economist Abhijit Banerjee who has this to say about the effectiveness of aid to the undeveloped world: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

And it was here that I thought to myself that similarly, or analogously the best way to raise our students’ achievement levels was not to go on tinkering with the public school environments and curricula, for perhaps making real progress in reducing ignorance and raising achievement may also not be within our power or control.

And in fact the real growth and development, that is taking place in countries like India and China, is not to be attributed to international aid efforts, such as those of the World Bank and others, but to the efforts of the Indians and the Chinese themselves. Similarly perhaps real student achievement will only take place when the students themselves assume the major responsibility for their learning.

This clearly has not yet happened.

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School Ramblings brought on by reading Chester Finn

Posted January 14, 2010 by Philip Waring
Categories: Goals of Education, School Choice

Chester E. Finn, Jr., in an article in the most recent issue of National Affairs, no less than the educational reformers of whom he speaks, has it all wrong. It’s not so much that the reforms have been misdirected, gone after the wrong targets, not been basic enough.

It’s rather that the reforms and the reformers, no less than the protectors of the public school status quo, have not, like the blind men, seen the whole of the elephant they would describe.

“Blind monks examining an elephant”, an 1888 ukiyo-e print by Hanabusa Itchō.

The whole elephant, well what is that in the educational context? What is the beast out there that one ought to see in its entirety?

We need first of all to agree on a number of assumptions, not so much concerning educational goals or aims, as the nature of the reality out there, the reality that confronts not only the kids every day of their lives, but us too, especially those of us, probably most of us, who are vitally concerned with the education of kids.

Not so much educational goals because there can be any number of these, as you will readily agree if you’re just a bit familiar with all that’s been written about education during the past several hundred years or more — goals such as making kids into life long learners, imparting to them all the necessary skills and knowledge, turning them into good citizens and good people, good fathers and mothers, and now especially turning them into the skilled workforce that will enable us to better compete in the global economy, and so on.

Rather we need to start, not with these abstract goals that have little to do with the kids, but with the kids themselves, and with the world in which they are living.

In regard to the kids no two of them are alike. They are all different, with different interests, abilities, talents, different backgrounds, family situations. And they live in different ethnic and class communities, experience different walks and rides to school, and so on.

And then in regard to the world out there in which they are living. you’d be hard pressed to find much out there that corresponds or relates in any way to what the kids are doing in school. For example, if you’re an adult living, as I am in Tampa, Florida, how many times during the past year have you encountered out there in the life of the city an algebraic or geometric  expression, let alone problem?

And how many times in your everyday lives have you even looked up at the moon and the sun in the sky let alone looked beyond these two objects and with the help of the stupendous findings of the astronomers looked all the way back to the big bang?

How many times have you been taken up with a consideration of your own biological make-up, shared, as we have learned since Charles Darwin (that which you ought to have learned in biology class in school) to a greater or lesser extent by all life on the planet?

In other words what is going on out there in the world where the children, where all of us are living, that at all reflects, or relates to in any way, let alone supports the academic programs of our schools?

I’ve never encountered anyone out there in Tampa either writing an essay, or reading a great book. What is going on in the world, and what the kids are witnessing and being a part of in that world, when they’re not in school, is something else entirely.

Do our professional educators ever ask themselves how many people, let alone kids, outside of the classroom are writing? or even, in the world of the computer and television screen, reading books? Yet reading and writing, we’re told, by these same educators, is what school is or should be mostly all about, two activities that are pretty much absent from people’s daily lives. The kids know this.

This is why, as Finn points out, the achievement levels in our schools have remained flat for a generation. We’re asking of our kids things that are not going on anywhere else. This is why kids never seem to learn a foreign language in a classroom. This is why our reforms have not made a difference. What we have the kids do in our schools is totally out of sync with what is going on out there in the world.

And there is not only the world out there, out of sync with the schools. We are not helping the kids to be in sync with themselves. No two kids, no two of anything alive, are exactly alike.

And when, perhaps because of our concern for providing if not equality, equality of opportunity, we treat the kids as if they were all alike, we naturally fail to reach more than a few of them. And if we do reach that few, it’s only because the few by chance happen to fit the description of the student we have imagined.

As I write I realize I’m not saying anything new. There are those I’m sure who said at the time of Horace Mann’s Common School that school was not the only, or perhaps the best way to prepare kids for life.

And there are those still terrifically alive and interesting, what I would call the “no school” people of the sixties and seventies, the Paul Goodmans, the John Holts, the Ivan Illichs and many more, who valiantly although in vain tried to convince us that school was dead while giving birth to a creation of their own.

If the “no school,” the school is dead people did not succeed it was not because they were wrong. Actually, I think they were right in most of what they said about how kids learn (and for the most part not in school).

It was rather that society, in the form of the educational establishment couldn’t change its spots. Didn’t even try, and instead went on pretending to change by one endless series of reforms after another. Finn does make clear that following all these reforms nothing of real substance did change.

Kids continue to go to school. We continue to pretend to teach them, and they continue to pretend to learn. Not too different from totalitarian states where people pretend to be citizens with rights, where the country’s leaders pretend to recognize those rights, such as the right to vote, but where the real life, the people’s lives, all of that is confined to private spaces, such as about the kitchen table in the former Soviet Union.

What would it take to change things, to do away with the pretense that presently engulfs our public, and probably also, although to a lesser extent, our public charter and private school environments?

It would take two things:
1) A recognition of the world for what it is and of people for what they are, and
2) The abandonment of the principle, now current in our schools, that one size fits all.

And we need to accept and admit that the schools are not going to change the world. They don’t have that power. Virtue can’t be taught. The schools are just not going to shape the kids, let alone the world, in the ways we would like them to.

But somehow kids will become what they are, what they’re suppose to be, at least when they are successful and happy, and they will do this in spite of the obstacles placed in their way by the schools. The best schools, and among the enormous variety of such places in the country there are those that are “best”, will help their kids to become what they are, not place obstacles in their way.

The irony is that we do know much about kids and the world, enough to improve our “schools,” or whatever other means we employ to prepare our kids for adulthood, but we act as if we didn’t have that knowledge. We know, for example, what adults spend their time doing, doing things that have little connection with what these same adults (and now their children) did and do in school.

And we know that kids are different and need quite different paths to follow. The traditional academic and college preparatory path is, at best, only one among many, only appropriate for a minority of kids. That in itself, the fact that only the needs of a minority are being met, ought to make us reconsider what we are doing, or rather not doing, for the majority of them.

Here, taken from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics I list the jobs that the adults in the country are now doing. The total civilian labor force as of December, 2009, was 153 million, 144 million of whom were employed.

Of those employed 22 million were farm or farm related workers, 19 million were in goods producing industries, mostly construction and manufacturing.

The remaining 113 million were in the services, 22 million in government, 19 million in education and health (the fastest growing sectors at the moment), 17 million in professional and business services, 15 million in the retail trades, 13 million in leisure and hospitality, leaving the remaining 27 million jobs in other miscellaneous services.

Now have our politicians and educational establishment figures, who have so much to say about the responsibility of our schools to turn out graduates who are ready and able to compete in the global economy, have they at all considered what our own economy consists of in the way of occupations, have they considered the actual jobs that are being done by our adult population, and what sorts of preparation would be needed to get and hold these jobs?

I don’t think so. For they most of all speak as if we needed to get our kids ready to outperform the hundreds of thousands of Chinese engineers who are graduating from engineering schools in China every year. Where are the jobs to be found in this country that would employ these desired graduates?

No they can’t have thought much about the kinds of jobs adults are doing and the kind schooling, if any, that would be most appropriate to insure that the jobs out there are being filled adequately as they open up and become available. For the kind of educational goals our professional educators like to talk about have little or no relevance to the actual job prospects that the kids will eventually encounter.

Our country’s jobs, by and large, need at the most only basic literacy and numeracy skills. The sorts of things that kids ought to be able to obtain with 8 or fewer years of schooling. Most of the jobs out there are not helped, probably hurt by what we would do in the schools, or at least pretend to do — that is, teach higher forms of literacy, higher mathematics, advanced placement courses etc. Hurt, because of what we might have done instead.

We need most of all in our thinking about schools to stop believing that kids need to be highly skilled and highly knowledgeable to enter the job market. For the vast majority of positions out there they need only two things — the basic 8th. grade or less education I have mentioned, and something I have not mentioned, but that is probably even more important, good work habits.

These would be such things as the ability get up in the mornings after a good night’s sleep, to be on time, have ready for the job whatever one might need, know how to listen and to learn while  on the job, and other such things. The acquisition of these kinds of skills and habits could and ought to be stressed in the schools. It’s not, not nearly enough, and here lies perhaps the greatest failure of the schools in respect to what they might have done.

Not that preparation for the job market, which means now preparation for the service industries, should be the primary function of school. It shouldn’t. For as long as school makes up such a huge part of the kids’ growing up it should have as its primary function helping kids to find out about themselves, to discover their own gifts and interests, find out who they are. Know oneself is still relevant.

For many kids, probably the majority of them, a selection from elective subjects and activities such as music, theater, art, athletics, vocational training, including courses in computer hardware and software, public service and work internships, debating etc., and not required academic classes, would be much more appropriate and desirable for their time in school. But more and more we seem afraid to go in this direction. Afraid of the “chaos” it might bring?

It is from these sorts of electives, once having achieved a basic level of literacy and numeracy, that the kids should be allowed to choose. This is the meaning of choice. And these activities would get their attention, and then, if they were ready and interested, they would learn.

In fact, what does one ever learn without being ready and interested? It is here that lies the greatest explanation of the failure of our schools and of the reforms of which Finn speaks

Finally, and in spite of the fact that the ideal for many of us is still an academic education, meaning by that the acquisition the skills and knowledge stemming from the study of history and literature, math and science, foreign languages, et al. these skills and knowledge are not now, and probably never have been within the power and possession of more than a tiny minority of the now 7 billion people on the earth.

Why continue to force kids to believe that an academic education, suitable perhaps for a minority, is what’s most important for all? It’s not.

If the teachers were in fact capable of making kids life long learners and more reliable and responsible citizens of the Republic, those kinds of educational goals that Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann and others assumed were desirable and possible some 200 years ago, then what we are trying to do would make some sense, but they are not.

In fact, we have learned, over and over again, that the acquisition of the habits of good citizenship as  well as becoming a life time learner have never had much to do with what goes on in the school and classroom. Once again the most helpful “reform” would be to accept that these sorts of educational goals are simply not within the school’s power to realize.

To accept that and to go on to do what is within our power. That would be reform, probably even for Chester Finn, reform you could believe in.

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