Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. [. . . .]This to me seems a productive way of re-conceptualizing the problem. What kinds of student-subjects are these institutions mass-producing and why? Why are the student I deal with as college freshman not only completely ignorant of almost anything beyond the basic skills necessary to hold a service economy job and participate in a consumer economy, but (and far more disturbingly) so pathetically lacking in hope, curiosity, independence of mind, intellectual playfulness, moral imagination, and community spirit? Why, to put a fine point on it, are so many of them worn out and cynical at 18 or 19? Why have so many closed the door definitively to the spirit of growth, change, adventure, challenge, possibility itself?
By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Why are students so Alienated?
I'd like to begin by offering an essay by education critic John Taylor Gatto, posted here in its entirety. With 30 years of experience teaching throughout the New York City public school system, Gatto comes to a startling conclusion---that we should stop asking 'why don't our schools work?' and consider the possibility that they are working all-too-well indeed:
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Re: the Gatto quote about giving children plenty of solitude: Blaise Pascal (17th century French Philosopher)would disagree [in his Pensee on 'le divertissement'...he explains the necessity for distractions in life that take away from one reflecting back on his .. or her...life]...or at least find long stretches of solitude difficult for he believed that one cannot remain alone with oneself for 24 hours. In doing so,one would be forced to delve deep inside and reflect on his/her own being -- something he believed to be 'insupportable' for a human being. I do not diasgree with Giato, but his comment immediately made me think of dear old Pascal!
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this essay, we must ask to what extent our children’s curriculum enlarges their curiosity and cultivates their initiative, and how much of it serves the opposite purpose, that of teaching them that the structures that govern their lives—classroom, church, government, capitalism, social class, consumerism—are so powerful and rigid that resistance is futile. A look at my daughters’ homework—memorizing state capitals and hagiography—gives us a glimpse of the monstrous puppeteers.
ReplyDeleteBut the indoctrination of children into the “virtual herd of mindless consumers,” that Gatto describes goes beyond academic curricula. The daily classroom distribution of junk food to children to mark every birthday and holiday teaches kids the equation that happiness = sugar, and community = vulgar consumption. We conscript birthday parties and children’s play into the service of consumerism, bowing to the latest corporate marketing of toys, and, for fun, big-box venues with enough programmed din and maelstrom to preclude any chance of developing authentic friendship. Children’s exercise requires obedience to yet another institution: youth sports leagues. Questioning why one’s child must pay “dues” and be driven across state lines to play a game when there are more than enough kids on the home block, or why one must purchase yet another “uniform,” or the “official” team picture, is taken as an act of anti-social defiance. The very vocabulary is our cue: official/officialdom, uniform/uniformity/conformity, dues/duty.
Gatto proposes a way out. “Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.” I would add that the pursuit of excellence, in anything, exercises that same inner resource, that resilient independence. Gatto calls us toward liberation from the unreflective orthodoxies of our culture, challenging us, as parents and teachers, to cultivate, and practice, authentic, meaningful dissidence.
On the flight in to town yesterday, I was reading Rosemary Bailey describe her son’s schooling in Mosset (Catalonian France) based, she writes, “on the theories of the progressive French educationalist Célestin Freinet to instill a sense of self-determination and responsibility in the children. Every week they had to make their own plan de travaile (work-plan), scheduling the work they proposed to accomplish.” School texts include the villagers themselves, whom the children visit “to hear and tape their memories, and [discuss] the war from the perspective of their own families’ involvement.” Theo’s first-grade homework consisted of “identifying different types of bread—baguette, brioche, ficelle, épi, and pain de campagne—from the shapes on the page alone.” Then Theo was to write his favorite recipe, which meant, of course, preparing the dish with Dad to get it right: “frying the chopped tentacles with garlic and parsley, adding breadcrumbs, then stuffing it all back into the squid—the bit Theo like best—and securing the ends with wooden skewers.”
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that assignments like these go a long way toward engaging children’s physical energy and appetites, bridging learning and family life, and cultivating a meaningful sense of community, tradition, and place
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ReplyDeleteEducation, Does it work anymore? [Burden of Dreams]
Lee Rife
The questions posed for the Institute's March 26th meeting on Education are not clear, perhaps by their profusion. In my systems (two or more elements working together) experience I've come to believe that at the core of all systems is a simplicity which when found allows access into the system's meaning or requisite design. But until that simplicity is found, that system in all it's elements will not appear to work, the meaning will remain obscure, and any design out of balance [which is why we have so many crappy computer systems]. Take the Judeo-Christian ethic (please... no, joking aside...) or, more succinctly, the Hebrew and New Testaments. The unifying simplicity there is "God is love." (1 John 4:8). But until that simplicity is found, the thing will remain a metaphorical confusion, right for agnostic fortification and Freud describing The Exodus in terms of sexual motivation.
But to grasp that core simplicity in system design is usually, if not always (acceptive belief aside), to ask the core question which the core simplicity answers. Problem solution comes with the right question asked. When that is asked, the solution or core simplicity is revealed.
The question of education, "Does it work anymore?" only leads into more questioning descriptions of the problem and is not key to the solution. I don't know what the right question is for education. But I do have strong opinions about education's limits and delusions.
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In Guatemala I've seen blatant poverty. There, the hope of the parents, as for all parents, is that their own children may be educated so they won't also have to suffer poverty (there half the children don't make it to fifth grade where families are charged for their own children's education). To gain an education there, however, aside from then being able to make better choices, is when lucky, glib, and attractively appealing, to be employed by the very forces of exploitation already in place. Or then to be tolerated as more presentable service workers, purveyors of goods, and better organized tourism color.
Education's Enlightenment argument for munificent sharing continues to be daunted with few exceptions when resources are spare and held
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ReplyDeleteEducation, Does it work anymore? [Burden of Dreams]
Lee Rife
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Education's Enlightenment argument for munificent sharing continues to be daunted with few exceptions when resources are spare and held by the few. Mexico's emigration north can be sourced to the billionaire acquisitions of 22 behind the scenes families. Made between the educated here and the educated there, NAFTA's argument to stem the emigratory tide by a rising vigor of local capitalization was only a mask hiding the desire for the exploitation of cheaper Mexican manufacturing labor. NAFTA's failure in breadth of mutual benefit is its proof.
But what of the success of education propelling our own country? That projection is liken heir to the hope of The Enlightenment which foresaw, along with mechanical advances, a maturing of the generosity of the human spirit. The latter which eventually frittered away into Romanticism. True believers Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, et al., however, took their chance opening to help codify that hope into a nation of public schools. Then free land enforced their dream of progress with revolutionary victory breaking through the old British restriction against populating west of the Appalachians. Which, then casting aside the earlier Indian settlers, pushing out the Spanish, and buying off the French and Russians schooled the rage of belief in nineteenth century progressive success - Education's accompaniment the promotion into myth of the rightness of the thing beginning with the little ones, ours the master language. U.S. twentieth century success is commonly accounted to our better educated work force. Losing note of our luck in great mineral and agricultural wealth protected by two oceans, weaker nations north and south, and a true believer, conquering population. And for economic ascent, there's nothing better than coming out on top of a world war when everyone else is down.
The ascent and descent of a nation's education systems may be traced as a sine curve lagging only slightly the economic inspiration of its residency. The rise of the British colonial empire allowed for more studied home refinements, Oxford University accelerated. Newton, Boyle, and Darwin did not advance from without the British school system (but not because of it either, breaking away from incestuous imitation). Then it took but one man's vision in Mahatma Gandhi to activate the precepts of Jesus Christ and break the British Empire, already, hardly admitting, on its way out. Then the footnote of economic pinch was soon enough manifested by Margaret Thatcher reducing their try for a classic education for all into something more "practical," as reflected in California by governor Reagan. Earlier, conquering Islam, levering up Arabic-Persian thought, founded the West's greatest university schools of contemplation, but which then could not withstand the factional dismantling of their sponsor and fell away from Western memory. And who can discredit NAZI Germany from turning a nation of the educated with it into dust?
The history of nations disputes education's efficacy.
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Back home now with our economy dimming, the grasping hope for
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ReplyDeleteEducation, Does it work anymore? [Burden of Dreams]
Lee Rife
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Back home now with our economy dimming, the grasping hope for salvation through education is seen in increasing college applications. The popular belief in it pushed into law by both dumb, then smart ass Presidents. But our general deflation resists correction. Sustaining the look-away of society from our decline in family and individual moral integrity following the economic, are such devices as grade inflation now approaching the endemic in our High Schools where the excuse of projected intent to perform substitutes for performing. Then there's those clever Texas schools making their grade averages by simply transferring out the underachievers. But that's Texas.
Education has been a wonderful enabler for many, the lessons to be learned of better ways to do and habits of mind not to be gained by the individual working alone. Even self proud China knows best to turn west to learn scientific method. But the role of education as discriminator, winnowing out the incapable, has slipped far behind the gain of making contacts to which learning the affectations of knowledgeable authority is invaluable, mighty Harvard first among equals. [ref. Bierce: Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.]
In their bubble of remove, university students are hardly unaware of their temporary suspension from the real life struggle to survive. School hardly distracts them from the terrible street realization that they aren't needed, too many for too few places in a land of dumbed down consolidation, the engines of industry gone to export, and agriculture to collective, machine efficiency.
But what of the university promoting moral inspiration? That moral sanction has been overcome by rationality, extended even to teaching the accrual of money when the only morality is care for others.
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I think the problem is that we hope too much for education.
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I think the problem has a lot to do with the concept that Gatto and Stewart both touch on - "mass production". A far more dynamic and flexible and child-centered approach works for the few kids who can attend programs like private Montessori schools, but the rest must make do with a program designed to handle tens of millions of kids and hundreds of thousands of teachers; the scale is mind-boggling, and so the reach for a mass-produced, assembly-line structure is understandable, if regrettable. Even if education is a state affair in America, even the smallest or least populous state is too big to carefully recruit creative and brilliant teachers in enough numbers, and pay them enough, to ensure that they are engaging kids' child-like minds, and ultimately learning what they need to. (Stewart, you seem to sneer a tiny bit at the minimum standards needed to work in the service economy, but I'd say those standards are both pretty low and pretty vital; my view is that we should make sure every kid has basically vocational-technical knowledge like this so at the very least they can hold down a lame white-collar job; *after that* we should encourage kids to specialize and choose more, so they are more engaged what they end up studying...)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, many thoughts on this, more than I can fit into a blog comment, but that's my quick $.02.
Alan Ciesielczyk... I've read the above comments and they are a bit 'heady' for me! I'm just a high school special ed/math teacher who is more used to words like 'the' and 'gone' etc. I do, however, have a burning desire to help/motivate students to learn. I have been reading BOYS ADRIFT by Leonard Sax. It reminds me a lot of my childhood. I just turned 64 years of age so I can clearly remember not having a television. Us boys constantly played outside. In the summer we organized our own baseball games. All the boys played - age didn't matter. This was passed down generation after generation. In the fall we played football. We didn't have helmets or shoulder pads, but we played hard. In the winter we skated, skied, and snowshoed. We did all of this without any adult supervision. In school, we learned. I would say that our math education in middle school especially, was inferior to today. We did endless similar problems when we could have discovered more advanced concepts instead. One other important point, when you graduated from high school back then (1964), you had a plan to leave! For many of us it was college. There wasn't extra money in the family for a high school graduate to just 'sit around' and do nothing. I think today that it is much different. There is at least a subset of students who upon graduating from high school do not have the inner strength or the skills to confidently leave the 'nest'. I tell my students that one of the most important outcomes of their high school education is to gain confidence in themselves. Alas, confidence requires overcoming challenges. I question today whether we are truly challenging ALL of our students. more later...
ReplyDelete[Lane wrote: Stewart, you seem to sneer a tiny bit at the minimum standards needed to work in the service economy...]
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, Lane. A clarification: If you're referring to my words about asking French Catalonian children to know their tradition forms of bread, I assure you I endorse that assignment without any irony whatsoever. I've always argued that food should figure into the core curriculum: how it has spawned civilization, how it bonds and affirms community, the economy and corruption of it, how to cultivate, glean, and prepare it, how to converse over it, how to delight in it.
Alan Ciesielczyk
ReplyDeleteThe whole process of public education can be very difficult today. Each student is in a different place socio-economically, academically, morally. There is also a much greater ethnic diversity in our public schools today (a positive thing). Finally, students are at different levels of maturity. Enter the teacher - is he or she enthusiastic? Is he or she confident? Does he or she have a solid knowledge base of the curriculum? Does he or she have a skill set for the new technologies entering the classroom? Does he or she really enjoy teaching and genuinely like the students? Then, what about the course material. Is it interesting?
more later...
Interesting article, added his blog to Favorites
ReplyDelete