Writers who should know better are these — Leigh A. Bortin in his book: “The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education,” Martha C. Nussbaum, in her book: “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” Diane Ravitch in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.”

Then there are the writers of recent op pieces in defense of the liberal arts —Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, in “Coming to the Defense of Liberal Education,”, David Brooks in his piece, “Race to Sanity,” and Stanley Fish writing about his own high school education in “A Classical Education: Back to the Future.”

Instead, these same individuals, and countless others, past and present, ought to be writing about the schools as they are, not as they would like them to be in some ideal world. For if they would really build something better they must build on what’s there. And that means writing about what’s there, and what’s there is not what they’re writing about.

In fact, the liberal arts are no more in our schools, no more in the hearts and minds of our students (there may still be a remnant of the liberal arts in the textbooks, especially in those no longer used), than they are in the life of the country, in the hearts and minds of the citizens.

And they probably have never been in our schools, probably not even in the Classical high school in Providence, RI, that Stanley Fish attended and over which he gushes, other than in the minds of the teachers, the best ones anyway.

Yes of course the liberal arts are threatened, as is the best of all that we possess. The arts have always been threatened, as is now our Western civilization threatened by fundamentalist religions. But the answer to this threat is probably something else entirely from continuing to “teach” the liberal arts to young people who are not ready to learn them.

In any case the greatest threat to the liberal arts is not from what is going on, or not going on, in the schools. For now no less and no more than in the past, the greatest threat comes from the way we live. For bread and circuses, not Socratic questioning and dialogue, are still for most of our people the norm.

In the way we live, more even than in the schools, one finds few of the values that the liberal arts would promote, little of the truth, beauty, and goodness that ought to be the final product distilled and extracted from their proper study.

The writers I refer to, but also many others I have not mentioned, all sensitive and intelligent people who themselves clearly possess a real understanding of the liberal arts and of even what might be the nature of an education therein, have all announced in their books and op-ed pieces that traditional education in the liberal arts is, if not absent in our schools and colleges, in steep decline.

They claim that in our schools a narrow curriculum emphasis on word and number skills has left little room for broad curriculum emphasis on such subjects as history, the humanities, science, foreign languages, and the arts.

No less important, they say, is the fact that an inordinate amount of classroom time given over to testing or measuring whether or not the desired word and number skills have been learned, makes thoughtful classroom discussion (the sine qua non of a liberal arts education) more and more unlikely if not impossible.

There is a lot to say about all of this, and in the recent past Mortimer Adler, who died at age 99 in 2001, has probably said and written more about this than anyone else. He was probably the first to say (that which was not unusual, his being the first to say something) that education is not schooling, or in his words that schooling is not education.

I ask myself if schooling could ever be the same thing as education and usually I answer no. Adler, before anyone else, pointed out that if the schools, and colleges, ever did provide a real education in the liberal arts it would not be today or tomorrow, —why? because of our not being ready, — but only in some distant future, hundreds, if not thousands of years away, at a time when men would have become substantially different from what they are now. Better? I think Adler would say yes.

A controlling insight into Adler’s own educational philosophy was the recognition that “no one has ever been — no one can ever be — educated in school or college.”

I wonder what the writers I mention above would have said in reply to Adler.

In any case they don’t seem to have read Adler, nor do they seem to have ever had similar thoughts of their own. They don’t even seem to be standing on the ground when they write, for they don’t speak of what actually goes on in the schools and colleges, only about what does not go on and, according to their view, what should go on.

They’re really talking about something else, something which I will readily admit is much more important, something that gives gravitas to their words, much as talk about God does to the words of the preacher.

They’re talking about an educational ideal, but one that doesn’t come close to the reality of our schools and what goes on in the schools. They ought to have realized this and again, like the preacher, not confused a wished for and better life with the actual lives of the kids.

In fact, they’re talking about learning, and what learning should be all about. But didn’t it ever occur to them that the kind of learning they are describing is not limited to the school years, and may even be out of place in school. The kind of learning they describe is much more what life itself is all about, or should be. That’s my view anyway.

Once again, what we know as school and schooling are something else entirely.

I wonder what it would mean for the rest of us, and for the schools, if these writers about the liberal arts were to come down from their high perches and talk about what actually goes on in the schools? That might be a first and giant step in changing the schools into something that actually helps the kids. For at the present time the schools are not doing that.

Sometimes I pass my time reading articles stored on my laptop. The most recent one was: “Where is American Education Going, Report on a Convocation.”  If you skim over it a bit yourself  you will recognize most of the voices and be already quite familiar with most all of what is being said.

Many of the participants are still with us, still saying pretty much the the same things they said at the 1995 Convocation (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, Merseth, Elmore, Darling-Hammond, Linda Nathan et al. And many others have passed on (Shanker, Sizer, Howe et al.), although perhaps still repeating the same things from up there somewhere.

As I read Holton’s (my Harvard Physics teacher of over 50 years ago!) and Goroff’s admirable summary report of the Convocation I said to myself that nothing has really changed, — plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Educators today are saying today pretty much what they were saying some 15 years ago, and probably, even, many years before that, going back at least to the time of James Bryant Conant and the comprehensive high school of the 1950s.

I also thought of my writing, and yours. Do you ever get the impression that you’re speaking, writing primarily to and for  yourself? For that’s the impression I have when I write, and also I’m pretty much convinced that what I write has zero influence on anything out there. (That, of course, may not be your impression.)

And even when you are someone with influence, or at least someone who is read, and even more important listened to, someone like the Times’s Paul Krugman or Thomas Friedman, does anything really change, anyone’s thinking, as a result of what these two, or any of the other tens of thousands of Blog and op-ed writers, have said?

Anyway, most of what is summarized in the Holton/Goroff Report could have been said today, with few if any changes.

So what’s going on? Is it that the whole education elephant while out there somewhere, for it has to be, is never seen in its entirety by those looking? Also, perhaps what is being said by the  Convocation participants is so divorced from reality that it has no effect on reality?

Sure, we have to agree with Madeleine Kunin, that “We are dealing with the most important responsibility of any society—of any species for that matter. The primary responsibility is the education and rearing of the young in order to continue the life of the species.”

But this “rearing of the young” is happening in spite of us, going its own way, almost regardless of those of us who think we’re instrumental in shaping it. We’re not. The interesting question is who, what is…

Philip

If you’re not convinced read what Mr. Finnegan writes in the New Yorker of May 31:

“…the dismembered body of a young man was left in the middle of the main intersection. It was an instance of what people call corpse messaging. Usually it involves a mutilated body and a handwritten sign. “Talked too much.” “You get what you deserve.” The corpse’s message—terror—was clear enough and everybody knew who left it: La Familia Michoacana, a crime syndicate whose depredations pervade the life of the region….

“Although large-scale trafficking had been around for decades, the violence associated with the drug trade had begun to spiral out of control. More than twenty-three thousand people have died since President Calderón’s declaration [in 12/09 of a war against the drug traffickers]. La Inseguridad, as Mexicans call it, has become engulfing, with drugs sliding far down the list of public concerns, below kidnapping, extortion, torture, unemployment, and simple fear of leaving the house.”

We ought to forget about trying to stop  them from coming here. Their wanting to leave is a sign of their mental health. And why would we want to stop them? They are right to want to come here at any cost.

And they come here to work. We should rather turn our efforts to making sure that what’s here for them makes their coming here worth it to them, and to us.

It’s really unimportant how they come here (just as it always was in the history of this American nation), legally or illegally. It’s what they do when they do come, it’s what they’re able to do when they do come, it’s their coming here and being able to work and make a life for themselves and their families.

What’s important today, no less than in the past, is our making sure that the American dream is still alive for them. This is what has been all but forgotten in the mean and childish debate that we’re having, actually mostly not having over immigration.

And this non-debate is analogous to the just as irrelevant, non-debate over the continued failure of our public schools to substantially educate, help, and propel forward into positions of strength and leadership the majority of the children who attend these schools.

And just as it’s only important what the immigrants do when they get here, so it’s only important what the students do in school. As things are too many of them are doing little or nothing while the educators do little or nothing but talk, talking incessantly about standards and choice and teacher preparation, indulging themselves in one toothless reform initiative after the other.

The educators ought to be talking about the kids, and how to motivate them. Here the immigrants are at a great advantage, being for the most part motivated when they arrive. Not true of too many of the kids who attend our public schools.

Furthermore, it’s probably true that the percentages of immigrants, even illegal immigrants from Mexico, who succeed here are higher than the percentages of impoverished and disadvantaged children who succeed in the classroom and school.

Again, we seem to have forgotten what’s important. That the immigrants who come here want to work, and we should help them to do so, and that the kids in our innercity schools by and large don’t want to be there, or at least don’t know why they’re there, and we ought to be most of all in the business of motivating them.

The irony is that in regard to the motivated immigrants to our shores, we would throw them out, and/or put a wall between them and us.

And in regard to the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of unmotivated kids we would hold onto them no matter what they do, or rather don’t do, keep them there in school while almost never making them fully realize that they, no less than the immigrants to our shores, have to work and earn a place for themselves.

Instead, what works, say Jaime Escalante’s calculus class as Coulson describes it, is going to remain isolated from other educators, even as it was at the time from those sharing the same school building with him.

What works is going to remain enclosed in its own niche until whatever original life force that brought it into being dies out, taking along with it into oblivion even the memory, as in this example, the memory of Jaime Escalante’s calculus class.

Coulson understands this, but he (I too) would like to believe otherwise, to say it ain’t so, that the system, and not just a part here and there, can be changed.

If it can’t perhaps it’s because public education is too much like a piece of the country’s infrastructure, and infrastructure, without experiencing a war or other destructive juggernaut, cannot be changed except piece by piece over lifetimes.

New bridges don’t make the old ones disappear. In fact, most of us for most of our lives go on using and crossing the old ones.

And new schools don’t do away with old schools, always in the majority, and in spite of the endless reforms that come along most kids continue to still spend their school time in the old schools.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Didn’t you know this, Andrew?

And successful schools, be they KIPP or Achieve, or any number of selective and high performing public schools, have never much influenced, let alone done away with the majority of our public schools, still unsuccessful, still uninspired and, helas, still uninspiring.

But you knew all that, Andrew, when you wrote today in the Wall Street Journal about Jaime Escalante, didn’t you? I wonder why we don’t tire of saying the same thing over and over again?

You note that Bill Clinton in 1993 didn’t hesitate to say it (yet once again): “People in this room who have devoted their lives to education, are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can’t seem to replicate it everywhere else.”

And of course it’s true as you say while writing about Jaime Escalante who recently passed away, “America not only needs more teachers like Jaime Escalante, it needs an education system that recognizes them and helps them to reach a mass audience.”

But again I cite the bridge comparison —there’s just too much concrete out there to move. It can’t be done. And this must be the reason, there’s just too much, what, “dead wood,” inertia in the present system for us to move it.

This is the reason why (tell Bill Clinton) we’re not able to bring to scale the things that do work, such as Escalante’s successfully teaching calculus to poorly prepared and thoroughly disadvantage kids at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles in the 1980s.

The reason why we haven’t been able to reach by this example the kids in the hundreds of failing school systems throughout the country.

This is especially troubling when we have before us one example after another of successful technological innovations, Facebook, the iPod, the iPhone, and now perhaps the iPad, and many others, all bringing successful innovations up to scale almost effortlessly and in the process reaching, if not bettering the lives of, hundreds of millions.

One of these writers whom I admire (and maybe even love for his words, words being the only contact I’ve ever had with him) and whose books are now on my library shelves was Neil Postman. He is no more, that which saddens me. We are almost of the same birth year, and we should still be here together. We’re not, although I still have what he wrote. My regret is that there will be no more writing from him, unless uncovered in up until now hidden manuscripts.

Earlier today I stumbled (my word for the happy meetings on the internet while surfing) upon an interview with Neil Postman appearing in the publication, Aurora, in 1989. One more example of wise people saying the right things about education, but who are rarely listened to, and more rarely heard by the establishment. One more example of how little things have changed. Here is the passage from the interview that got my attention:

“Now, it’s very easy to say we need to teach students how to think, but it is not entirely clear how we can get students to learn to think…. One possible way of doing that is to abandon the whole idea of trying to make students intelligent and focus on the idea of making them less dumb.

This is not just some semantic razzle-dazzle but is exactly the procedure that physicians and lawyers follow, which is one of the reasons I would guess they make so much money. Doctors do not generally concern themselves with what is good health; they concentrate on what is sickness. And lawyers don’t think too much about what is justice; they think about what is injustice. Using this model in teaching would imply identifying and understanding various forms of stupidity and then working to eliminate as many of those as we could.”

Santayana in the passage quoted, says this: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement.

Isn’t this, in just two sentences, what Ravitch took 11 chapters and some 300 pages to say? Santayana’s words suggest that the schools will improve if we retain, or hold onto what’s there already (the good within them?). For too many reforms (changes) mean too little retention, or attention to what’s there. Too many reforms mean going in too many directions at once, and as a result going nowhere at all, which, as Ravitch says, has been the dismal outcome of our seemingly endless series of school reform movements up until now.

In particular, the school choice movement of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush junior presidencies, charter schools during the Bush senior, Clinton, Bush junior, and now Obama years, and the push, primarily by means of testing, towards higher standards and greater school, teacher, and student accountability, as in the Ted Kennedy and Bush junior No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Now Ravitch has this to say:

“As I flipped through the yellowing pages in my scrapbooks [containing articles accumulated over a lifetime's reading in education], I started to understand the recent redirection of my thnking, my growing doubt regarding popular proposals for choice and accountability. Once again, I realized, I was turning skeptical in response to panaceas and miracle cures. The only difference was that in this case, I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures; I too had drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems. I too had jumped aboard a bandwagon, one festooned with banners celebrating the power of accountability, incentives, and markets. I too was captivated by these ideas.

They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools, and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for bettter schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evicence, just pormise and hope. I wanted to share the promise and the hope. I wanted to believe that choice and accountability would produce great results. But over time, I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost the faith.”

Her new position regarding the schools is certainly understandable. Recent school reform movements have done little if anything to change things fundamentally for the better in our public schools. Too many children are still either dropping out of school altogether or graduating with few useful skills and little useful knowledge of themselves and the world. Many too many of those who do receive a high school diploma cannot demonstrate having achieved even 8th. grade, let alone 12th. grade, proficiency levels in English language, mathematics, history, or science.

What now is Ravitch’s position? For the schools still need help. Having all her life been a reformer, having always sought to improve the schools, she is not now about to turn her back on public education. I’m pretty sure that the problems of the schools are no less her concern today than during the past 30 years while a major player in the school reform movements.

But now, rather than get behind new fads and fashions, her terms for reforms that won’t change a thing, she is going after the whole nine yards of public school education, addressing the problem globally rather than piecemeal as in the past. And she is correct to say there is no silver bullet, no one approach, be it school choice, national standards, accountability, or as the Unions would have it, additional monies, now called “stimulus,” or anything else that will  do the trick.

Ravitch would have us look clearly at what we’re doing, not to fundamentally change or reform what we’re doing, but just to do what we’re now doing a lot better. According to Ravitch there are any number of things that we might do to improve our schools and we should get at it. And in her book that’s what she does.

We need to fix the school buildings, educate the parents, involve them in the education of their children, train the teachers, make sure they have the resources they need to teach, standardize and improve the curriculum, motivate the kids, make sure they are well provided for in regard to all their needs, make everyone in the entire process accountable…

The list, and her list, goes on and on, and Ravitch is once again correct in arriving at the realization that there are not single items on the list, silver bullets as represented by the successive reform movements of her own lifetime, that by themselves are going to fix our schools.

Again, everything she says is not unreasonable. However, I think she is mistaken in her most fundamental assumptions about the schools, and about how kids best learn. She assumes, I conclude from what she says, that there is something there at the very heart of our system of public school education that is precious, that should be held onto, and yes, where broken, fixed, and helped to grow and prosper. This is the idea of the public school, probably dating from Horace Mann, and perhaps even before that, from Thomas Jefferson.

Both Mann and Jefferson believed that political stability and social harmony depended on universal, public education. Mann believed that nonsectarian common schools should be open to all children, for “education,” he said,  “is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery,…” and in addition “education was the absolute right of every human being that comes into the world.”

The mistake that Jefferson, Mann, and Ravitch make, and that we as a country continue to make, is not to think that all children should be give the opportunity to learn, to be given free public schooling. Their mistake is to believe that the country’s political stability and social harmony depends on “universal, public education.”

And that mistake may be why so many things seem to be going wrong in the country today. We have put off on the schools probably the most important responsibility of a liberal democracy, that of making of our rapidly growing population of people citizens who are willing and able, and ready, to take on the full responsibility of governing themselves.

The role of the schools ought never to have been this, to make good citizens. Children are not ready for that. Classes will no more impart citizenship than temples of worship good behavior. The schools ought to have confined themselves to reading, writing, and arithmetic. And in fact, when they did as in the early one room school houses there were few or no school problems.

That’s one incorrect assumption that Ravitch and too many school leaders make. Although it may very well be true that as she says, and as Thomas Jefferson said earlier, “a democratic society cannot long sustain itself if its citizens are uninformed and indifferent about its history, its government, and the workings of its economy,” it is not true, not borne out by our experience, that our school graduates through their time in school have become caring and knowledgeable citizens.

The other major, incorrect assumption that Ravitch and other school leaders make is that the present structure of our schools is the right one.

It’s not. We gave the schools the wrong structure from the very beginning. And in the years since we have not been willing to change that structure, only reform it. That’s the biggest reason why reforms have failed. For the problems of the schools lie in its structure, in the how of it, in how we have tried to realize Mann’s vision.

Opening the schools to everyone, based on our belief that education is the absolute right of every one coming into the world, was not the mistake. The mistake was putting all children at age 5 or 6 into a single classroom with a single teacher and keeping them there for some 9 months, and then moving them all together into another classroom with another teacher and so on with a few adjustments along the way through 10 years or more of mostly compulsory schooling.

Why wasn’t it, why isn’t it now, obvious that with everyone of the same age in the same classroom there would be winners and losers, those who would be far ahead of everyone else, those in the middle, and those far behind, and that nothing the teacher could do would change that situation for the better.

From the beginning we should have adopted a different school structure, one that didn’t make winners of some and losers of others. Imagine that we were to place every five year old at the starting line of a running race, blow the whistle, and then watch the five year olds race one another, some falling way behind the others.

Well that’s what we’ve done, and what we’re still doing. And at the finish line the child’s place there, the order of the finish, will do much to determine his or her place in life from then on. And of course there will be many who don’t even finish, who drop out along the way, not being able to keep up.

To change this school structure much more than reform is needed. Vision and attitudes have to change. Right away there should be as many races as there are kids. For kids, 5 year olds and up, and people too, should only be racing against themselves. That’s the only race that counts.

We should be asking ourselves the question whether there is a school structure that would allow everyone at the starting line a real possibility of being “ahead” at the finish line. Is there such a structure?

Well, yes, there is, but only if being ahead means being ahead of oneself, and ultimately being measured by what one can do with what one has, no longer being measured by what one can’t do with what one doesn’t have, as is too often the case today in our schools….

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?

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.

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.