ParisTampaBlog

There are some things that can never be said or heard enough, Moses’ Ten Commandments, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and almost everything Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has to say about how kids learn.

For example, these passages from an article of his in Daedalus, Fall, 1995:

"Whether or not children will learn does not depend primarily on what happens in school, but on the experiences, habits, values, and ideas they acquire from the environment in which they live."

"Education is the result of a continuous process of interaction between individuals and the environment. Children are formed by their experiences with parents, teachers, peers, and even strangers on the street, and by the sport teams they play for, the shopping malls they frequent, the songs they hear, and the shows they watch."

"Each of the young person’s experiences contributes to the shaping of his mind and character, sometimes vastly out of proportion to the time spent in the activity. One song heard on the radio or one conversation with a friend can have a more profound effect on a child’s future than a thousand hours spent in school."

"Most of the time adolescents are either alone or with friends and classmates. Very little time is spent in the company of adults. The typical American adolescent spends only about five minutes a day alone with his or her father–not nearly enough to transmit the wisdom and values that are necessary for the continuation of a civil society."

We know what Csikszentmihalyi says is true. We know that his words are an accurate description of kids’ lives. Yet we go on speaking and acting as if school, and not everything else, was the most important shaping influence in the adolescent’s life. And furthermore we even blame the schools for the kids not learning what the schools are teaching. What the kids are in fact learning, because they are learning all the time, by and large escapes us. 

Why don’t we start with what Csikszentmihalyi tells us about the the formative experiences of the adolescent’s life and go from there? For whatever reason we don’t do this and instead always start with the schools and what they are teaching. We continue to “tinker” with the curriculum and everything else, thinking that by our changes we will  improve the outcomes for the kids, higher test scores, for example. The tinkering goes on and on but the outcomes don’t seem to ever change. In our frustration we look back and talk about an imaginary “golden age” when things were better, or we look ahead to the next great hope from the political party out of power, believing that this time we will really have an education president.

If you’re not convinced by what Cskiszentmihalyi has to say about what are the formative influences in kids’ lives read the account in today’s NYTimes of the long lines of young men and women, many still in school, waiting through the night to be first for the store opening and the sale of Sony’s new PlayStation 3. The real passion that young people, not just here, but everywhere throughout the developed world where people are wealthy enough to be able to buy these games, the real passion that young people show for these games must have begun much earlier, certainly while in school. Computer games, the internet, popular music, popular culture, the culture of the mall, all that sort of thing, friends, just being with friends, hanging out, these are the things that were probably most alive for them while they  were in school. School at best was someting they had to do, an obligation, a payment to be made in order to do what they wanted to do, their school experiences probably having little real meaning for them and certainly never, like PlayStation 3, arousing their passion.

Most education writers write as if the students who would profit from what they have to say were a single, monolithic group of learners, and that whatever they were saying about education were appropriate to the entire group, say kids learning to read, or kids being introduced to algebra or geometry. The reason the education writers differ so much among themselves is that only the needs and abilities of certain students, say middle class kids from two parent families living in the suburbs, or impoverished, immigrant, and minority kids from single parent families in the cities, are most on their mind, whether consciously or not, when they promote this or that method of what and how to teach. Instead of writing about, say, the best way to teach reading and math, these people should be writing about the different needs of different groups  of students, all the ways that students differ among themselves, the widely differing ways in which they best learn, and perhaps most important of all, the differing ways in which they are ready or not ready to learn. Most of what the education writers have to say would be perfectly reasonable and appropriate with this or that group of students. Most of what they have to say is not appropriate for all kids.

This is why some educational disputes seem to never reach a resolution. Take, for example, the disputes over how best to teach math. There are those who push for the basics. There are those who push just as hard for the so-called new math. There are those who swear by applied mathematics. And there are those who back “general math,” or an understanding of numbers in every day life. Now it may be true that all kids can learn, and that all kids can learn to handle numbers in some useful and profitable manner, but it is no more true that all kids can function at the highest levels of abstract mathematics (which can begin at a very early age, such as in the Math Olympiad competitions for elementary school students) than they can reach master level play in chess. Suppose for a minute that it was chess, not mathematics, that made up along with language arts the most important subject matter of schooling and testing. Wouldn’t it be clearly absurd to expect all kids to proceed ahead in pretty much the same fashion towards chess master play? We know it wouldn’t/couldn’t happen. Yet don’t we now expect all kids to proceed in pretty much the same fashion, be this integrated or traditional or applied math, towards math proficiency? We also know that wouldn’t/couldn’t happen.

[EDDRA is dedicated to analyzing reports, dispelling rumors, rebutting lies about public education in the United States. It represents an online version of the work that Gerald Bracey has been doing since 1991.]

An article from today’s (11/14) Times (As Math Scores Lag, a New Push
for the Basics, By TAMAR LEWIN) seems like a good subject for EDDRA
commentary.

First of all wouldn’t one have thought that not once again could we
have been subjected to “a New Push for the Basics.”  For how many times
can one write about this and expect to be noticed and read, let alone
believed?

As I skimmed the article I right away thought that we were one more
time caught up in the situation depicted in the movie Groundhog Day. We
were to again live through the same day, knowing it was a repeat of the
day before, while the other actors on the set with us, Tamar Lewin et
al., seemed convinced that they were living the day for the first time.

We know better. Jerry Bracey himself reminded us on an earlier occasion how
common it is among those who write about the schools to repeat,
seemingly unaware, what past writers on the same subject have said:
“About schools, the media report the present with no apparent
historical awareness that it’s the same story once again.”

In the movie Phil Connors (the actor Bill Murray) finds he’s doomed to
repeat Groundhog Day — again and again — until he learns that his
actions can affect the outcome.  In regard to math education in our
schools is there some way that we also can break out of the cycle of
repeating, in this case the same reforms over and over again? Is there
an action that we might take that would change the outcome, move us
onto something new, something that would restore our confidence in the
way math is taught in the schools? Well, evidently not yet. As of this
time our groundhog day movie has no resolution,

Perahaps EDDRA might want to comment on the accuracy of a number of
(unsupported) statements in the article, as well as the general
applicability of a number of the quotations from the various people
interviewed. Is this Misinformation? Disinformation? [What’s the
difference between the two?]

“students’ lagging performance on international tests”

‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.”

“…recommending a tighter focus on basic math skills and an end to ‘mile
wide, inch deep’ state standards that force schools to teach dozens of
math topics in each grade.”

“Many point to California’s standards as a good model: the state
adopted reform math in the early 1990s but largely rejected it near the
end of the decade, a turnaround that led to rising math achievement.”

“…at a time of increasing globalization, the math skills of children in
the United States simply do not measure up: American eighth-graders lag
far behind those from Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan
and elsewhere on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study, an international test.”

“It [traditional math, whatever that is] produces people who hate math,
who can’t connect the math they are doing with anything in their
lives,…”

“In Asian cultures,” she added, “the assumption is that everyone learns
mathematics, and of course, parents will help with mathematics.”

“….the whole country has been in denial about mathematics, and now we’re sort of at a second Sputnik moment.”

Now I realize as I take certain statements from the article, that it’s
really the whole article that is mis-, disinformation. Furthermore it
probably could have been written with few or no changes in any year
since when, the sixties?  If I hadn’t seen it in today’s Times I’d be
probably unable to say when it was written. Just as Phil Connors woke
up again and again to the same day, I’ve been reading this article
throughout some 45 years spent in or close to education.

Before the Civil War the one room school house was common, being nothing more in the small towns and villages than a structure about the size of a single large classroom. In the cities where the students were more numerous it took a much larger building to house them all together. But in both the students were not separated into groups by age. What did this mean for the students? Did they learn better when they were in close contact with those both older and younger than themselves?

We don’t know if they learned more. I suspect they did from what I know about large families. We do know that reform, unable to leave things as they are, came along and changed things. The first and most significant reform, and one which is still very much with us, was the graded school. No longer those large rooms with students of different ages learning together but students stil in a large room but with others of the same age. David Tyack (in Tinkering Toward Utopia) says that this reform came about because school superintendents and school board leaders were impressed with the division of labor and hierarchical supervision common in the brand new factories, and sought to adapt this tidy and efficient system to education.

The change to graded classes came about quickly and just as quickly came the unintended and what would prove to be much later in the mid twentieth century disastrous consequences for our schools.  For while the graded school may have succeeded with a few, with those whose abilities and family and cultural backgrounds fit the school environment and curriculum, for too many others the graded school didn’t work at all.  For difficult now to understand reasons we had put students equally ignorant all together, expecting what, that they would all learn to swim? They didn’t.

This is our situation today. The graded school didn’t and doesn’t work for those kids who come from impoverished and disadvantaged inner city and rural areas. My conclusion? If you want to improve the schools, get rid of our age graded educational system.

There is actually one current reform movement that could help to bring this about. That is school choice. There should be many different schools out there, including no school at all, and those not based on the age of the student, for children and parents to choose from. And the many schools of choice ought to reflect the diversity which is no less great among students of the same age as it is among students of varying ages. Other current reform initatives such as the longer school day and year, merit pay, better teacher preparation, and the movement for higher standards and accountability, in particular No Child Left Behind, won’t do it. Keeping students equally ignorant and widely differently endowed together in an age graded classroom will prevent these reforms from ever having the desired result.

Learning succeeds best when the kids have been separated from one another, not by their age but by what they can do (the Math Olympiad), like to do (play soccer, piano, other games), want to do (write, collect, speak) etc. As long as we keep them all together, simply according to their age, as long as we disregard their enormous differences, say, of interests and abilities, there will be those who understand the lesson and those who don’t, as well as all those in between. There will be those who succeed, and those who fail and are held back, and those who drop out. Now it seems to me unbelievable that this situation has been with us, for at least 100 years, and we haven’t tried to change it, let along do away with it (home schooling being an exception to this), but have kept it pretty much intact, even while changing everything else.

The kids themselves are aware of this situation by the fourth grade if not before. In the fourth grade large numbers of them lose their excitement and interest in school. The classroom activities are now more boring than anything else. The situation is much more pronounced in the “common” or public school classroom because many of these children, coming from poor and immigrant families, especially in the cities, are much less prepared for the learning activities that the school would have them do. So in addition to the differences of interests and abilities among them there is also the difference between the culture of their home and community, and the new learning culture of the school. The situation although present is less pronounced in the private schools, or in schools where the students are selected, because in these instances there is a better match between the culture of the home and that of the school.

So what is to be done? As early in the learning process as possible, certainly by age 8 or 9, that infamous fourth grade, we need to have fashioned for each child individualized learning environments, not tracks, but sets of expectations and opportunities, that take into account each child’s inherent talents and interests. I admit that what I am proposing can’t be done without fundamental changes in our outlook. First and foremost learning has to be taken out of the school, and put back into our lives.

If we continue to do nothing, if we don’t “reach” the child at an early age, when he is still ready to listen, we are probably going to lose him for whatever number of years he does remain in school. This is what is happening now. While gaining the few who take well to the age graded classroom we are losing the many who don’t. You can see this clearly if you follow closely a group of middle school students (that time when most kids are lost to their education), say, in any one of their subject area classes such as math or foreign language. How many children in the class will clearly have no interest in, let alone achieve evident mastery of, either one?

The mantra that you hear everywhere among school people is that every child can learn, every child succeed, that every child can go to college. I too believe that every child can succeed, that every child can go on to higher education, but not, as now, by following the same track. We need many different tracks to success for our kids and now we don’t have them. We have only the one with the result that everyone is required to get over the same obstacles, such as state requirements for high school graduation and college entrance examinations. And of course it’s not going to happen. Everyone doesn’t get over these obstacles. A third of our young people nation wide will drop out of high school, a third or more of our college students will not finish. And to this situation so far we have only one answer, more and better test prep.

Now our educational system awards with first good grades and then good jobs those young people who are particularly endowed with either math of language abilities. When they have both they gain admittance to our most prestigious universities. But these abilities are just a part of what we are as human beings. That is, they are not what we are, as sometimes our tests would seem to be saying, but just a part. Together they represent just two of Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences, the logical-mathematical and the linguistic. We know that if we tested those fourth graders for mathematical ability that the result would be a Bell curve for student performance. There would be those on the left showing little ability in the area tested, those on the right with great ability, and the many with average ability in between.

We know all this about our students (and about ourselves) and yet we go on year after year insisting that our students go on year after year being painfully made aware of their respective positions in relation to the logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences. Why should either one, or both these particular abilities, have such great power over the individual without them? Once it was asked of high school dropouts just why they had dropped out of school. The most common response was math class, algebra, something year after year they were required to fail at. For many of us who were only average we can understand their dropping out for that reason.

If we really do believe that all children can succeed we ought to make sure that whatever each child has in the way of a gift, be it one of the two mentioned, or one of the other of Gardner’s seven (now eight?) intelligences, the musical, the bodily-kinesthetic, the special, the inter- and the intra-personal, that this gift be recognized and given a favored place in the child’s home and school learning environment. Because it will only be through this “intelligence” or particular gift that the child will ultimately learn and be successful.

The learning environment of the school ought to directly reflect the interests and abilities of the children, not as now their ages. When children are in fact doing what they most like to do, acting in a play, playing on a team, being a part of a musical ensemble, staffing a computer clubhouse the age differences are disregarded. Isn’t this fact telling us that the school itself needs to structure its activities not on age, but on what the child most wants to do, and through which activity the child will most learn? A no-brainer, yet look at what we are now doing.

Finally, to expect that all kids can become proficient in math and language, if proficient does represent a real standard of excellence, is as ridiculous as expecting that all kids can reach the master lever of chess playing. It won’t happen. But to expect that all kids want to learn, that all kids have within them a spark that once identified will fire up their school years and take them right on into meaningful and successful lives, that may happen if we change the way we’re doing things in our schools.