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I’ve just read teacherken’s EducationPolicyBlog piece on the film, “The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System.” I haven’t seen the film, and I probably won’t go out of my way to do so now that I’ve read teacherken’s account.

Ken first lists what he takes away with him from the film. Then following some discussion of the take-aways, he goes on to share with us thoughts and opinions of his own sparked by the film, that which for me was the most interesting part of his piece.

Ken liked or at least was drawn to what he learned about the Finnish students working in groups to solve real world problems, and he especially seemed attracted to what he saw as a Montessori connection, where a key emphasis is placed on the interest of the student, the teacher being more a facilitator and learner right along with her students.

Ken tells us that the Finns, beginning in the 1970s over a period of several decades, totally and successfully reformed their own educational system. Whereas, as we, as he reminds us, by a nearly endless series of reforms, going back at least to A Nation at Risk in 1983, have done little or nothing to improve our schools, with too many of our students not learning to swim and barely able to tread water during all that time.

Overall, Ken likes what the Finns have done. Education in Finland, is, as he tells us, much more conducive to producing the citizenry necessary for the sustaining of a democratic government than what we are currently doing in the United States.

I often wonder if we’re doing anything at all in this regard. I question just how much in our schools, not to mention in our homes, with notable exceptions of course, we’re sustaining, let alone promoting and strengthening democratic government.

Among his conclusions :  If we learn nothing else from the Finns it ought to be the importance of giving students the opportunity to explore their own interests. I guess I already knew this. There is little in my own writing on education that doesn’t speak to this.

If we learn nothing else from the Finns it ought to be the sheer wongheadedness of mandating sameness from the top down, a national social studies curriculum for example. And that our predominantly test-based accountability system, rejected by the Finns, is no less wrong-headed.

We’re acting, our national government is acting, as if there were no other meaningful measure or validation of student learning.

Actually for most of what Ken tells us the Finns are doing we know the rightness of it. But we don’t know how to transfer to our own schools the good practices we observe in theirs. For example, we know, as Ken points out, the importance of properly selecting and preparing teachers. “Yet for all our verbiage on the importance of teachers, somehow the policies we implement seem to work contrary to that stated goal.”

In Ken’s own words, “Is what Finland has accomplished really all that surprising? It shouldn’t be. That the word ‘surprising’ is part of the title of the film speaks more to what is wrong in our approach to education than it does to what is outstanding in Finland.”

The single most important truth confronting the teacher in respect to her students just has to be the differences between them. The teacher who ignores these differences is destined to lose most of her students as the school year progresses. The teacher who gives the differences too much attention, who tries to give time and place to all of them, is destined to lose herself in the enormity and complexity of the task.

In order to avoid doing either one or the other the teacher has to compromise her goals, the greatest compromise being to somehow establish a middle ground, a kind of public classroom working space in which she can keep all her students, including those at both ends of the ability spectrum, those who are able to meet the highest demands of the program and those who are not.

A pipe dream? It does seem that way. And in the past I have often said so myself. Yet that is what continues to go on in those classrooms, perhaps most of them, where ability tracking is not the rule. Tracking, of course, has been around a long time, going back at least to the one room schoolhouse of the 19th. century.

Tracking remains the most common solution to the dilemma of having to teach in the same physical space the gifted and the less gifted.

Why indeed do we resist tracking, because we do. Principally for two reasons. First, how do we know that this or that child is not up to the work, say algebra, or American history? How can we be sure? Well in many cases, if not most, we can’t.

Also we resist, perhaps even more, because many of us would not agree that the goal for our children in school is an academic education, you know, critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, writing, mathematics, all that sort of thing, that which is supposed to lead, eventually, to college and further education.

Many of us would say instead that the primary goal of schooling is to develop and foster, if not instill in our students democratic values.

And how can such values be best learned? Well perhaps by throwing everyone into the mix together, the melting pot, the classroom where students of all levels of abilities, needs, and interests will learn to get along, and to help one another, will learn that in a democracy one accepts the differences among people, one does what one can to overlook them, to make sure there is room and a place for everyone.

To separate, if only in a classroom, those with great gifts from those with lesser gifts is not to foster democratic values. So should we not do it?

Of course there are good arguments on both sides. If we don’t take the differences between children into account, pretend they’re not there, if we don’t allow the differences to come to the fore, insuring that each and every one will fully develop his or her abilities and talents, well the country’s real wealth may cease to grow because the latter has always depended more on our differences than on what we have in common.

In other words somehow meritocratic, aristocratic values have to have a large place within any democracy, including ours.

On the other hand, school may be the very best time for the kids themselves to learn about others not like themselves. Why don’t we try to make the schools resemble the population in regard to origins, social and economic conditions, racial and ethnic variety, the full range of abilities and talents, all the enormous differences that there are between our peoples?

Well this also is a pipe dream. It can’t be done, because people, our people don’t live this way. Tracking in cities and towns, in our living arrangements, may be even more pronounced that in our schools. And as a result there may be little or no possibility of our schools taking on democratic values. For where are these values in the communities and neighborhoods where the people live? They’re mostly absent.

In place of a conclusion isn’t it reasonable to say that the schools ought to be pursuing, to varying degrees, three essential tasks? — One, be sure that those with special gifts and talents are able to develop those gifts. Two, be sure that democratic values are the glue that binds students, teachers and curriculum together. And three, be sure that not anyone leaves school without having acquired the skills necessary to get and hold a job.

In the 1950s James Bryant Conant’s comprehensive high school tried to do all three, but we don’t see this happening very much anymore, perhaps only in some of our largest suburban schools, that have multiple tracts, some leading to further education, some to the workplace.

Based on the evidence of our elite colleges and universities, we do extremely well with number one. Based on our choice of representatives in Washington as well as our failure to vote in large numbers or get behind democratic initiatives, we don’t do well at all in regard to number two. And as for number three, well we just don’t do it, that is, insure that kids who drop out will have the skills they will need in the work place.

Why is this so? Why do the elite prosper, at the expense it often seems of everyone else?

In a recent TED talk titled “Freedom to Learn,” Sam Chaltain named three questions that he thought should be at the heart of every conversation about fixing the schools: 1) How do people learn best? 2) What are the skills of a free people? and 3) What in the end does it mean to be free?

My first reaction was that these questions were much too general, and while not trivial, indeed quite substantial, probably had little or nothing to do with a possible fix for what ails the schools.

Actually these questions might much better be asked by legislators in Washington. For perhaps any discussion proceeding therefrom would favorably influence what they do. For what they do, or are not doing, certainly needs a lot of fixing.

If I were asked to come up with my own questions the very first one I would ask would be, Who are the kids attending the school we would “fix?” For whatever fix we come up with has to start with the kids in that school, who they are, and what they most need.

By the way all schools need fixing, Phillips Academy no less than a failing, minority, impoverished, no-name school in the South Bronx. All schools can be much improved, as can all individuals. Given the different student bodies in these two schools the fixes would have to be at least as different.

Like everything else in life what we call education is horribly imperfect.

So I would change the “people” in Chaltain’s first question, to “kids,” for that’s whom we teach in the schools, and I would stress that the answers to the question how do kids learn best would not only be completely different for the kids in both schools, but would have to reflect the enormous differences among them, the kids, even among those who share as they do many social and economic characteristics.

So Chaltain’s first question while much fun, as his whole Ted Talk, is not very helpful to the end of fixing the schools.

By the way, one might ask are the schools something we can fix, like a car, a machine, something lifeless? Or are they more like something alive, and therefore not easily modified or fixed? The latter I would say.

In any case, the nearly endless series of school reforms initiated if not completed, many of which I’ve witnessed during my own lifetime, don’t seem to have ever accomplished what they set out to do. The problems of the schools are, if anything more with us today than they were 50 years or more ago.

What about Chaltain’s second question, that which asks what are the skills of a free people? While not laughing outright at the appalling naiveté of this question, I do smile just at the thought that someone might seriously believe that real answers to this question, if there are any, would be somehow helpful in fixing the schools.

What if we were anyway to try to list the skills of a free people? What would we come up with? This would be great fun of course, but could we even begin to do it?

How many such skills are there? Perhaps not as many as we are, not 300 million, but almost. For just as all people are different so are their skills, what they’re good at. The fact of the widespread and substantial individual differences among us is that which reformers of all stripes always seem to forget.

And in fact do we even know the skills or essential traits of a free people? Are they those of Andrei Sakharov and friends about a kitchen table in Moscow during the time of Stalin? Are they those of the Chinese or Egyptian young men and women assembling peacefully in Beijing’s Tiananmen or Cairo’s Tahrir Squares under the eyes of ruling tyrants? Are they?

I wonder how many people, among the people I know, have exactly the same skills? I can’t think of any. Perhaps Sam Chaltain is thinking about those people working on an assembly line, but then again I’m sure he would say that the skills of the assembly line worker are not those of a free people.

OK, but how many of the jobs that people do in order to earn their living represent the “skills of a free people?” Probably very few. Probably the majority of positions out there, and especially those positions still available, in this time of high unemployment, to the large numbers of unemployed dropouts from our schools, do not.

One might just as well say that most of the jobs that people do exhibit rather the skills of an enslaved people. And if this is so, and these positions are the future for so many of our young people how appropriate or relevant is it to even talk about the skills of a free people?

For the most part people have yet to discover in their own lives what it is that free people do. And while it is our wish that at some point in their lives they all do make this discovery we would do much better to help them, especially while in the schools, to obtain what they need in order to just survive, let alone be free men and women, that which will probably not be within the power of most of them, and certainly not within the power of the schools to confer.

What if we did anyway try to answer the question, what are the skills of a free people? How might we begin? Are playing chess, the violin, point guard on a basketball team, all of these and myriad other examples, are these examples of the skills of a free people?

Again great fun these thoughts and this discussion, but does it have anything to do with how we might improve what goes on, say, in our schools and classrooms?

Shall we even go on to consider Chaltain’s third question? You probably agree that trying to answer his questions is a lot of fun, kind of like the brainstorming we used to do as kids. The questions are certainly good discussion topics, perhaps best to have among yourselves and your friends, perhaps at a social gathering while holding a glass of something in your hand.

About the third question Chaltain himself has this to say: “The question, what in the end does it mean to be free, has to be at the heart of a conversation about fixing the schools.” While I’m sure he was serious, isn’t this again a kind of joke? Perhaps he wanted to see if anyone out there would take him seriously?

He must have known this was the very same question that the wisest men who have ever lived have been asking since the beginning of our species’ time on earth.

It is a good question, no doubt about that, something we all should think about, kind of like Socrates’s dictum that we start by knowing ourselves.

But does this question, or any of the many like it, have any relevance to whatever it might take to “fix the schools?” I don’t think so.

In fact, if fixing the schools did have to wait for the answer to this question the schools would never get fixed, for the question will never be answered, at least in any definitive fashion.

To this question there are as many answers as there are free men. How many people do you know whose freedom is the same as yours? To say it yet once again, to fix the schools we do have to start with the great differences there are between kids, between people.

What would be three questions of my own if I were to play this game? The first would be, as I’ve said, how do kids, not Chaltain’s “people,” learn best? My second, would be to ask about the skills that kids, and people need in order to get and hold a job. And my third would be not what it means to be free, but what it means to work.

This is what kids most need. And how can kids best learn to love and respect work? If freedom is ever to be had it will come rather through working.

The skills of a free people, whatever they are, the meaning of what it is to be free, and even how do we learn best, are not things for which we have ready if any answers, and they are certainly not preliminary discussion subjects by engaging in which we might somehow improve what goes on in the schools.

In a NYTimes article of June 1 (subsequently altered to eliminate the reference to religion) the writer quotes the newly named executive editor of the Times, Jill Abramson, as saying that her becoming editor of the Times was “ascending to Valhalla,” and that while growing up in her house, “the Times substituted for religion.”

Now many Blogsters have jumped on both the Times and Ms. Abramson (in particular see James Taranto in the WSJ), Ms. Abramson for envisioning the Times as a substitute for religion, and the Times itself for scrubbing out the reference to religion when doing a second posting of the original Jill Abramson article on the Web.

The Times was clearly wrong to alter the original quotation, but in regard to Ms. Abramson and what she said I find her words refreshing, definitely containing the ring of truth, at least the truth about her own and her family’s long devotion to the newspaper.

I see nothing wrong with that, and certainly nothing wrong with her frank admission of her family’s admiration for the Times, by which she herself was bitten as a child.

I myself turn much more to the Times, as well as to a number of other national and international information sources, than to any church or religion in order to find out about what’s happening in the world.

The irony is that the Times is anything but a religion, in fact, not at all like a religion especially in that the Times does not constantly try to hide the truth about itself, as, say the Catholic Church, or Islam, to give just two examples among many, of those religions that seem to go on living in the past, adhering to positions that ought to be confined to the past, who reject the world and the people as they are today, that world that the Times as much or more than any publication brings to our attention.

I suppose those who put down the Times, those who most denigrate the paper, do so in many instances because of their own “religion,” their own system of Gods, rewards, and punishments. They do so because of their personal and political belief systems, and in particular because of their being afraid for the survival of those systems if they were ever to “know too much,” themselves, to bite the apple as it were.

As a rule the judgments of those who judge the Times are not based on any objective analysis of the positions of the paper, nor do they, in whatever thinking they may display, demonstrate any remarkable faculties or powers of thought of their own, any reason or justice or fairness in their conclusions.

But now when I think about it, they’re probably “right” to put down the Times because through a regular and thorough reading of this publication (as well as that of other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, where for some ten years Jill Abramson herself worked as a reporter at the Journal’s Washington D C desk) many of their own beliefs and positions would lose their standing, and they would risk losing their own adherence to them.

What’s wrong with our schools is much like what’s wrong with our American democracy. For we are blinded by the ideals we have for both, ideals of how we would like things to be that clearly do not correspond with the reality of the way things are.

Wasn’t it, for example, our veneration for Jefferson’s words in the Declaration that for a hundred years or more prevented us from seeing the reality of our country, in particular the reality of the lives of our native Americans, our blacks and our women, and many others, and much else besides?

Just as it is now, and has been for some time, our wish for a college education for all that prevents us from seeing and addressing the real abilities, talents, and needs of our young people. The reality that we continue to avoid is that college, at a meaningful level, no less than calculus, chess, and violin lessons, is not for all.

This is so, just as the fact that people are not equal. So far, however, these two ideals, traced to two of the most admired figures of our past, to Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, have seriously impaired both our democracy and our schools, and have prevented both from being what they might have been in a different less ideal beclouded world.

What is it that commonly results when we are taken up by appearances, by what we would like things to be, rather than by what things are? Isn’t it hypocrisy, pretending things are not what they are?

And it’s the pretense, the hypocrisy that has created so many of our problems. To what else is due our government’s unsustainable entitlement spending, and what else is responsible for huge numbers of young people finding themselves terribly unprepared and dropping out before finishing college?

Governing large numbers of people is always hard. And as we well know democracies are extremely messy, and only partial solutions to the problem. Also, educating large numbers of young people, especially when the parents have been much, if not completely, taken out of the equation, is no less difficult.

But things might have been easier, and we might have succeeded more if we had rejected the ideals of a few at the very beginning, and then kept them out of sight all along the way.