Although it was difficult at times, Horace Mann succeeded in persuading a majority of his contemporaries that free schools with trained teachers could inculcate desirable social values and simultaneously provide a practical education leading to prosperous and constructive citizenship. Today’s educators are limited to a hope that their proposals might bring about a slight improvement on next year’s state achievement tests or raise their district’s high school graduation rate. The possibility of achieving consensus about the content and promise of education is a fading dream.
(Sybil Eakin, Giants of American Education: Horace Mann, from the Quarterly for Education and Technology, Vol. 9, Summer 2000. )
Archive for February 2009
Horace Mann’s vision “a fading dream.”
February 26, 2009Ian McEwan on John Updike
February 26, 2009In his autobiography Self-Consciousness, a “big-bellied Lutheran God” within the young John Updike looked on in contempt as he struggled to give up cigarettes. Many years later the older Updike, now giving up on alcohol, coffee, and salt, put into the mouth of that God the words of Frederick the Great excoriating his battle-shy soldiers—”Dogs, would you live forever?” But all the life-enhancing substances were set aside, and writing became Updike’s “sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality.” In the mornings, he could write “breezily” of what he could not “contemplae in the dark without turning in panic to God.” The plain facts of life were (from the NY Review of Books, March 12, 2009)
unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light —in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it—approaches blasphemy.
The Dead Tree Theory, Gail Collins in the NYTimes
February 26, 2009The Republicans can’t try to convince the country their ideas are better because of that intellectual bankruptcy problem. All they can do is make Barack Obama’s programs look feckless, plunging everyone into so much despair that by next summer the public will be ready to go live in caves and eat squirrel stew.
The waste argument is a perpetual winner because there will always be some. Years ago, when I was a reporter, I remember getting a call from a woman in the Bronx who was screaming: “They’re over on Moshulu Parkway planting dead trees!”
Sure enough, a city work crew was digging holes along the side of the street and carefully sticking in brown and dried-up pieces of foliage. The men claimed the trees had simply lost their leaves for the winter — an explanation somewhat undermined by the fact that they were evergreens.
I’m telling you this because on Tuesday I was talking with a high-ranking Obama administration official about the stimulus plan. “There will be a dead tree planted, figuratively speaking,” he said somberly. “That will happen.”
(By GAIL COLLINS, Op Ed piece, NYTimes, February 25, 2009)
Nine Truths about the Public Schools
February 22, 2009There are truths about public school education that need to be said. The endless debate about the schools, the equally endless series of reform efforts mostly ignore these truths
Truth number one. Public, as in public school, doesn’t mean public. The word, a poor choice from the beginning (common was better but not much) probably should be banned.
Why? Because the word is divisive, it sets up a false opposition between public and private, rich and poor, town and gown… A false opposition because learning, when it does occur, is exactly the same in private or public circumstances. The word school by itself would have been better.
Truth number two. Schooling is not education. The assumption is made that it’s enough to go to school, and to eventually complete the school’s program, to become educated.
Everyone who has been to school (now this means just about everyone) knows that this is not true. One’s education or learning is always the result of one’s own efforts, wherever they are made, and not necessarily while in school and in class.
Truth number three. Virtue can’t be taught. From a reading of the mission statements of public and private schools alike (which, by the way are not all that different) Plato was evidently never taken seriously in this regard.
But even someone who surely had read Plato’s Meno, in this case Thomas Jefferson, could make a statement like the following: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
I don’t think Jefferson meant that without school civilization was not possible but his words have too often been interpreted by educators ever since to mean that school, by dispelling the natural ignorance of the people, would thereby create the proper basis for an enlightened American civilization.
Does anyone seriously believe that the citizenry today, after nearly 200 years of compulsory schooling, is somehow better, say, than the citizenry of 200 years ago? Or even that people today are more knowledgeable than people at the time of Horace Mann and the first Common School? There is absolutely no evidence that this is so.
On the contrary, the schools may have, if anything, by defending the status quo, retarded the real progress our country has made in many areas, in regard for example to women’s rights, the rights of African Americans, Native Americans and other minorities, the improved conditions of the work places etc.
It’s simply not true that we can look to the schools to make us better people. We should stop doing so. Perhaps by recognizing this simple truth we would do a better job with what the schools should be all about, the transferal of skills and knowledge to a new generation of young people. We wouldn’t expect that to necessarily dispel their ignorance, for probably only real life experiences can do that.
Truth number four. Parents and teachers, the adults in children’s lives, have only so much influence, and in the now too many cases when they are absent, almost no influence at all, on the lives of children.
Parents (and probably teachers also) would do much better to give their children some space, get to know them from a little distance, find out what their children’s interests and talents are, and then support what they see, not what they would like their children to be.
For in regard to the latter they will inevitably fail, and in the very worst cases bring the children down with them.
Judith Rich Harris, in an article published in the Psychological Review in 1995 (Vol. 102, no 3) asks the question whether parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality and concludes that no, they don’t. From my own experience I would agree.
Truth number five. Not everyone should go to college. This truth flies in the face of today’s political correctness in regard to public education. Correctness tells us that everyone should, or at least should have the opportunity to go to college.
And when faced with the young people before us in the classroom, and when we know that their future chances, in particular their earning power, will be significantly improved by college attendance, how could we not allow them that opportunity?
The conservative Charles Murray, and the progressive Howard Gardner, for widely different reasons, would both agree, I think, with my conclusion that not everyone should go to college.
Murray makes it clear that college preparatory schools emphasize word and number proficiencies and that achievement in these areas is not evenly spread among the school population, and that only those registering on the right side of a normal or Bell Curve representing their test scores would be able to satisfy the academic demands of college.
Gardner persuades us that all kids are intelligent and should have the opportunity if they want of following their particular talents and interests, their own brand of intelligence, into a higher education environment.
But to say that all should have the opportunity to go on learning is not at all to say that all should go on to a traditional liberal arts college, what we usually mean by the word college. The artists, musicians, athletes, the craftsmen, even some of the technicians, and many others representing other interests and talents, should not be pushed onto a traditional college prep track.
Truth number six. Testing, and especially the debate over testing has taken on much too much importance. This debate is, I believe, a Red herring or attempt, perhaps in too many instances deliberate, to change the subject and thereby place other and more important educational issues on the back burner.
Those who take up arms against testing would divert attention, it seems to me, from how and what children learn, that which any educational debate should be mostly about, and instead make the testers their target, the tests the object of debate.
Too bad, for testing does have its legitimate place, and should be allowed that place without undue discussion. It should never have become, as now, the main issue that separates progressive and conservative thinkers on the subject of children and the schools.
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So much for what I call the negative truths about education, those things about education that should not be. On the positive side are these other truths, truths that ought to get the lion’s share of our time and money, but, helas!, do not.
Truth number seven. Learning is always by doing. John Dewey was right. In fact, there is no other way to learn. The irony is that, in spite of Dewey’s real insights into how we learn best, for most kids activities in school mostly tax their powers of memory, not their powers of thinking.
From one day to the next while in school kids do much too little in respect to exercising what they are asked to learn, be it reading or speaking a foreign language, researching a topic in science or history, applying mathematics to problem solving. For them and the teacher remembering is easier than doing.
Truth number eight. The circumstances of the child’s life, the big example being poverty, need not be destiny. But they need to be addressed, for otherwise the school and the teacher will have little chance to undue the unfavorable life circumstances the child has brought with him into the school and classroom.
In the so-called “no-excuses” schools, those mostly “public charter” schools where the kids are not allowed to make excuses for not being on time, for not having done the homework, for not paying attention in class, the “circumstances” are left at the door to the school, and as a result the child is able to listen and learn. His circumstances will not determine his destiny.
Truth number nine. In life the readiness is all. In learning especially is this so. And in school being ready means being interested, being motivated. And it follows from this that motivating kids ought to be every educator’s number one priority.
Helas! It is not. In the current discussion raging about how the education stimulus money should be spent I haven’t heard the word readiness mentioned.
The discussion, instead, is all about societal funded “paths” to education (new school buildings, better equipped libraries, smaller class sizes, not to mention testing and accountability and all the rest) not about the kids themselves, about their motivation level and how any new monies might, if at all, favorably influence that motivation. For without that there will be no learning.
Paris Walk
February 21, 2009Today, we walked down la rue Bonaparte from the Jardin du Luxembourg 
and stopped before the Fontaine in la Place St. Sulpice. “L’église Saint-Sulpice,” a Google search tells us,” est l’un des lieux de l’action du roman Da Vinci Code, qui fait passer à tort le méridien de Paris par le gnomon et l’obélisque.”
and we took pictures of the lions. Here’s one of them:
The day was cold, especially for us haven’t left Tampa just two days earlier, but the water in the Fontaine was running strong.
France and California, Ungovernable
February 21, 2009History tells us that there is nothing inherent in human nature that brings the peoples of one nation together and enables them to act in concert. For populations within countries, no more and no less than the members of a single family, will never be of a single mind but will always represent opposing points of view.
History also tells us that only elections (in democracies) or superior physical force (in totalitarian states) will enable the one or the other point of view to triumph. The opposing points of view, of course, will remain, out in the open in democracies, hidden in totalitarian states. Rarely, if ever, do elections do away with the entrenched disagreements among peoples.
In the 20th. century the failure of democracies (and monarchies) to govern, in several overwhelming instances, effectively permitted totalitarian ideologues to seize power. The whole world became threatened for its continued existence by the handful of totalitarian states born in the collapse of earlier more representative, if not more democratic or republican governing structures.
Only this deadly threat to their well being enabled the Western democracies to come together as one and defeat those threatening them. But, the threat once removed, the opposing forces within these countries immediately resurfaced and once again made fully effective government, that we saw during the war, a thing of the past.
And this, right up until today, when we are faced once again with the possible failure, in this case our own, of democratic governing structures. Things may be even worse today than they were nearly 100 years ago because today the so-called leaders of the free world, including the leaders of France, the United States, and California, seem unable to make the tough restructuring decisions that are necessary if they would now lead their countries or states into a viable future.
The threat today is that in too many places too many lives, especially those of the young, are becoming fixed in place, too many are no longer able to improve their lives by their own actions. Now, perhaps for the first time in the history of our country, although not of the world, inequalities of opportunity are threatening to become permanent.
Why? Again, because governments seem unable to act.
I began to think about all this as I read Matthew Kaminski in today’s Wall Street Journal. He was writing about France and California, about Nicholas Sarkozy and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In both “states” reasonable actions by political leaders to improve things were no longer likely, in fact were highly unlikely, because entrenched interests, those opposing points of view that are always there, were in nearly every case powerful enough to prevent it.
In Kaminski’s own words:
“Now there’s much to recommend the Old World. California brings to mind my last home, France — God’s country blessed with fertile soil for wines, sun-blanched beaches, and a well-educated populace. Amusingly, both states are led by bling-bling immigrants married to glamorous women and elected to shake up the status quo. In both departments, the governator got a head start on Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.”
“The parallels are also disquieting. The French have long experienced the unintended consequences of a large public sector. Ask them about it. As the number of people who get money from government grows, so does the power of constituencies dedicated to keep this honey dripping. Even when voters recognize the model carries drawbacks, such as subpar growth, high taxes, an uncompetitive business climate and above-average unemployment, their elected leaders find it near impossible to tweak the system. This has been the story of France for decades, and lately of California.”
Learning, a Bell or normal curve
February 20, 2009Learning is no longer an exchange between the student and a mentor or tutor. Instead, we have made learning (or at least schooling because it’s highly questionable whether it’s mostly learning that goes on in the schools) an exchange between some number of students, as many as 30 or more in some inner city public school classrooms, as few as 10 or 15 in some suburban, private, independent schools, and a teacher (not a mentor or tutor because the many-to-one ration rules out that possibility).
Most if not all of the problems of our educational system stem from this many-to-one student teacher ratio. For whatever is the subject to be learned the student achievement in regard to that subject matter or skill will fall somewhere on a normal or Bell curve intended to measure the amount of learning that has taken place. The result is, of course, that there will be winners and losers, high and low achievers and everything in between.
Furthermore, no amount of trafficking with this situation, as long as the many-to-one ratio holds, will change things. Reformers beware. For no reforms have up until now changed the fact that in this situation individual differences, individual strengths and weaknesses, inevitably become subservient to something else.
The something else is most often (and at best because there are much worse things that go on in the classroom) a teacher devised and directed activity such as solving a word problem, writing an essay, expressing oneself in another language, carrying out a science experiment etc., activities that never arouse substantial interest or effort on the part of the students for whom they were intended.
When school does work, for it does work in some situations, that which accounts for its longevity, its now nearly 200 year life, when nearly all the students in the classroom do learn, as in the early grades, it’s because what students do have in common, that which is in the early years a shared ignorance of the alphabet and of numbers, trumps their differences.
However, and most of all, after the early years of school, the differences, especially in regard to talents and interests, will trump everything else, and the teacher will rarely if ever, in any meaningful manner, reach all her students during the classroom lesson. And for too many students it’s all downhill from there on.
Why? Well there is simply no way that the multi-varied individual lives of the students can be kept alive and thrive within a large classroom situation. Instead, the students are made to go along with certain widely held assumptions, for example that what is important for all of them, as well as for each one of them individually, is achieving literacy, or growth in the ability to use words and numbers.
And of course they will achieve quite differently as represented by the Bell curve. Some students will fall at one end of the curve, and will never, at least while in class, learn to read or use numbers proficiently. And others will fall at the other end of the curve, reaching, even within the very first years of school, adult literacy levels. Most, of course, will fall somewhere in between.
Our school people will go on thinking that by their efforts, by in many cases their increasing their school budgets, they can alter this situation, have everyone become word and number proficient. Of course this won’t and doesn’t happen, and nation-wide a quarter or more of the students in our high-schools will not graduate with their classes.
People bemoan the so-called dropout situation in our schools. How can we allow this to go on, and for several generations now, since we first became aware of it in the seventies? How can we allow tens of thousands of our young people to go without high school diplomas and therefore not qualify for the job situations and salaries, and the resulting good things, that high school diplomas (and even more college diplomas) promise?
For me school dropout numbers mean something else entirely. They are rather witness to the toughness of our species. For kids, who learned in elementary school that they were not able to successfully compete with their classmates in the word and number skill games, mostly what was played in the schools, these kids hung in there for years, through elementary and middle school, right on up into the first years of high school, and didn’t dropout, but hung tough and resisted, went on going to school, going to class, without for the most part rebelling when they had more than ample cause to do so.
These reflections are not, of course, original with me. People, writers on education in particular, have for a long time known all this. The even more devastating reflection is that we’ve even known for an even longer time the solution.
And that is to restore the one-on-one learning situation, the only learning situation that works for everyone. But up until now, of course, we’ve never been able to find a way, other than outside of the schools, in our families perhaps, and in our work places, of bringing this about.
Plus Ça Change
February 17, 2009I voted for him. I still like him. And I’m very happy that he, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha, and Michelle’s mother, are now living in the White House, and that the Bush family has returned to Texas, from where they should never have left.
But under our new president weren’t things supposed to be different? These three headlines from today’s NYTimes are telling me what I don’t want to hear, that things really haven’t changed all that much.
Putting Stamp on Afghan War, Obama Will Send 17,000 Troops
GM Raises Loan Request by $12 Billion and Plans to Cut 47,000 Jobs While Chrysler Will Slash 3,000
Dow Plumbs the Depths of Last Fall
OK, it’s only a month since the inauguration, but for how long will it be that we have more war, more unemployment, more bailout money to the automobile companies, and more selling on Wall Street?
Yes, Barack, things will get worse (are getting worse) before they get better (when will they get better?). For now it appears that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The cities where Americans most want to live
February 17, 2009Well we’re not alone in wanting to live in Tampa. We learn from researchers at the Pew Center that Americans want to go South and West, that the top ten places where they want to live are Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Sacramento in the West, and Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio in the South. And that Eastern cities were down the list and Midwestern cities at the bottom.
David Brooks in an op ed piece in today’s NYTimes writes that,
“If you jumble together the five most popular American metro areas — Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa — you get an image of the American Dream circa 2009. These are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage — filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.”
“These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect. These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A. These places are car-dependent and spread out, but they also have strong cultural identities and pedestrian meeting places.”
These places “offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl. They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red. They offer the dream, so characteristic on this continent, of having it all: the machine and the garden. The wide-open space and the casual wardrobes.”
I live in Tampa. I’ll have to think about what David says. I know already that my son’s garage is stuffed with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots, boating equipment and other such stuff. And that the social structures are loose, that there is visible social equality among people of different races and classes, that the neighborhoods are friendly, the life style leisured…,
Stimulus Money for the Schools
February 17, 2009There is much talk, and gloating among the members of the education (read school) establishment about the $100 billion in new money for the schools now made available by the stimulus bill just passed by the Congress.
The talk, however, is all about getting the horse to water, about changes to the paths to learning, not about getting the horse to drink or the kid to learn, not about what it would take to get the kid to learn.
And there is this assumption, widely held I believe, and wrong, that the more money spent the more learning that goes on. (Actually, in an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Jay Mathews makes it clear just how much kids’ learning may be enhanced without spending one dime.)
The irony is that our country ought to have “learned” a long time ago that this is not the case, that the amount of real learning that does go on anywhere has little to do with the amount of money spent.
To go back a minute to my image of the horse and the water, it’s probably not the right one because the “water” or learning for the kid, unlike for the horse, is everywhere. And learning can and does take place anywhere. One doesn’t have to bring the kids somewhere, such as to a school.
Learning may even occur more outside the places of learning, the schools, than inside. And furthermore, the supply of learning, unlike water, or of situations from which one might learn, is limitless.
So the problem for us and for the kids is different from that of our horse and the water. Our problem, and the kid’s problem of which he is probably not even aware, lies entirely with his state of readiness for learning, and that’s what most of all we should be trying to influence. Yes, William, the readiness is all.
All the billions of dollars of new money just made available to the new Department of Ed head, Arne Duncan, may do little or nothing to influence that readiness and so far neither Duncan nor anyone else is even talking about that.
Again, is one’s readiness for learning ever related to the amount of money spent? to the cost of schooling? Ask the parents about their own experiences with their own children.
Parents “learn” very quickly that any additional expenditures on their children do not necessarily increase their children’s learning. Would that our educational establishment had learned the same thing, not to be expected, however, since that money is also their livelihood.
In fact, additional monies spent on improving education may even have the opposite result. Witness the number of wealthy parents the learning of whose children may even vary inversely with the money spent on them.
So what does it all mean, the $100 billion in new money for the schools and colleges, aside from our going still further into debt? That is, what does it all mean if it doesn’t mean that our kids will be better educated as a result? I don’t like to think about it. I certainly don’t like the answer.
Wouldn’t we be better off if we concentrated, not on the difficulty of first coming up with money we don’t have, and then on the almost insuperable difficulty of spending that money, as in the present instance, effectively and efficiently, but rather on what it takes, often not money, to “make” kids drink, or get them to learn?
