Teaching Your Students to Think

21 January 2023 Leave a comment

Dear Teacher,
            You want your students to think for themselves. Try this:

Student actionRequired thinkingExample
Find a question in the world.Engages observation and pattern recognition“Why are so many cooks and bus-people in Minneapolis Latino?”[1]
Consider why it needs an answer?Engages contextualizing[2]“To determine if Minneapolis restaurant hiring practices are discriminatory”
Refine the question.Requires research skills and actions[3]“What is the usual ethnic makeup of Minneapolis restaurant staffs?”
Formalize the question.
(the research question)		Engages observation and pattern recognition. Engages contextualizing and analysis[4]“What are the characteristics of jobs dominantly held by each ethnic group in a variety of Minneapolis Restaurants?”
Answer the “Why ask” question.
(the thesis of the report)		Engages analysis and evaluation[5]“Depending on how one defines discrimination, one may or may not see the ethnic imbalance in Minneapolis restaurant jobs as discriminatory.”
Defining all terms and using the evidence collected, state and explain a “thesis.”Engages composition skillsCarefully and clearly explain the above statement, i.e., write a research report

The examples given in this chart work well with upper class (juniors and seniors) high school students and above, where I have used them, but the process can be adapted to earlier grades. I have used something along these lines with students in what was then junior high school (7 and 8). I can fairly easily imagine it being adapted to younger students, but it would need major reform to be used with students who had only begin using abstract thinking – probably about 8 or 9 years of age. It is the thinking process that is the focus, not the inputs or outputs, which we are usually expected to score as a measure of the students’ learning. Using pre-writing work, we can assess the amount and depth of the thinking, and design activities to strengthen shortcomings.

If one internalizes thoughtful processes in early and frequent use, one may find good thinking becomes automatic. For that reason, it is helpful to begin building students’ thinking-framework early. Thinking may seem threatening to some in a conformist world, but it is necessary, if uncomfortable, to innovation, and that generates forward movement in all fields, as it has in the technical fields. Economic, social, governance, even math and science fields can all benefit from the ideas of those who see, question and postulate change. We must teach the whole person for life in the whole world.

[1] This is by far the hardest part. One must always be observing what is going on around them, noticing and recognizing patterns. In this table, for instance, a pattern is defined by the header row of terms. Look for some more patterns.

[2] Contexts may be wide ranging – economic, ethical, legal, success based, etc.

[3] This will require a range of question situations, in this case restaurants, possibly involving first hand visits, phone calls and letters. Cover different ranges of situations – location, economic, variety – such as cuisine, and other possibly impactful variations. There may be organizations that have already collected some or even all of the information you are seeking. Search the question on the Web.

[4] Keep accurate records of from whom, about what, where, and/or when information was found. These references should be cited in any writing that calls on any of this information. This may be the longest and most complex part of the process. Good research is work. It comes with asking a good research question, and then constantly asking yourself, “am I really getting answers to my research question?”

[5] Analysis is non-judgmental. Evaluation is the comparison of substantiated conclusions with some set of standards. Analysis must be included in a research report, but a value-based conclusion may be included or left clearly open-ended.

Follow-up footnote

It has come to my attention that there is more to the process that I have laid out here. Two areas, in particular, that are not detailed here are process assessment and research journaling have been noted and I would love to discuss them with anyone interested. I realize there are other things to apply here too, action research being but one of them. Action research is a teaching process that parallels this observation-relevance learning process.

I can be emailed at Jay@jaezz.org. For those looking to advance the process, we can talk about how to customize for specific foci. For those who find this process too overwhelming for their students, we can talk about how one might step into the process rather than taking it on whole right out of the box. And I would be more than interested in hearing your ideas to make this more adaptable and richer. My goal is to do something to staunch the bleeding of critical and creative thought from the American educational system.

Filed under Critical thinking, Education Policy, Pedagogy Tagged with , , ,

Dear Commissioners: I need a little help

28 August 2018 Leave a comment

   From top down, I see leadership in this country being interpreted as holding and wielding power rather than working in the service of those being led. This seems a kind of mindless dictatorship, where the most persuasive is put into power, and it defeats true democracy where people choose the leaders who will advance their interests. This dichotomy and its current lopsidedness pervades our institutions and therefore all facets of our lives.

    Since this difference hinges between people’s informed ability to make good decisions for themselves on one side, and their susceptibility to persuasive showmen on the other, the distinction rests on deeply held, early years’ development of individuals’ perception of themselves in their world. I am convinced that the key to restoring any reasonable balance lies in providing good early childhood and family education. Children must learn from early on to be self-directed decision makers not obedient followers. If children are typically told what to do, and seldom told why or how they should do that (e.g., choosing right from wrong, good from bad), they will grow into adults who depend on external direction for their actions, rather than those internally motivated to strive and excel.

   Each generation must understand that it can only build on the previous generation, and each is responsible for passing that understanding along. Only through such building over time will substantial change occur. Consequently we must explore individual’s cultural and familial histories to understand how to support corrective measures in early childhood development, most of which takes place in the family home. I understand that different populations bring different resources and different cultural histories to the situation. Still, I believe the County may have the greatest access to influencing change. The State is too mired in money politics and the schools, beholden as they are to state funding, simply mirror their much more powerful benefactors. I want to help right the ship of reason.

   So to my request: Is there anyone in the county that I could meet with to discuss these ideas, with the possibility of starting a broader discussion? I would hope such a discussion might lead to policies and actions that would begin to understand where people in Hennepin County are “coming from,” and how we might strengthen their efforts to bring their children and their children’s children to a higher level of democratic – not just academic – success. We must get beyond “rearranging the deck chairs” and get about spotting and avoiding icebergs. Yes, it is a Titanic task. It must start, to ever have a hope of finishing.

(Adapted from a recent letter to a county worker of my acquaintance, jcr)

Filed under Community Service, Education Policy, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with ,

Divided We Fall

9 September 2016 Leave a comment

The political expedient of offering a free lunch leads government authorities to make commitments they cannot support in the long term without assessments and tax increases–both political suicide. The get hit in their campaign funds and hit at the polls. The American wealthiest and their corporate empires assume a 19th century uber-privilege, owing nothing to the societies that fed their greed and freely buying the politicians to insure that. American voters meanwhile have been convinced that they deserve to have the amenities but not pay for them.

Then, when the bills come in, the authorities, beholden to their wealthy benefactors, look for excuses and scapegoats rather than biting the bullet, correcting tax law, and convincing tax-payers to pay up or give up the things they’ve come to expect. So the result is that they go after two of their own big expenses–the public workers, who make our society civilized, and the neediest, who don’t pay much tax and often don’t vote. Breaking the life-long promise of a pension to public employees, cutting funding to schools, and reducing the public work force, government chews off its own leg to free itself from the trap of its own design. Cutting off the needy is simply barbaric.

America has been effectively marketed a dream that everyone deserves a life that is fun and feels good. Watch almost any TV ad. Americans are discouraged from thinking about how that could be true when we know that life includes effort and pain. Only when enough of us look around and think will we begin to reverse the seemingly inexorable trend toward a country of 350,000,000 individuals, each at the center of her or his own universe, and start to reestablish America as a united society, who share common needs despite individual differences. If “divided we fall” has not been apparent before, certainly watching the human pieces of our civil society fall away over the years should alert us to the future we will leave our children and grandchildren.

Every thoughtful person must stand up, speak out, help out and vote. 

Filed under Community Service, Education Policy, Politics, Social Commentary Tagged with

The Problem with the “Achievement Gap”

3 June 2016 Leave a comment

Words carry baggage. A gap in a society has a near side and a far side. We put people on one side or the other. “We” are of course on this side and “they” are on the other. So a gap forms groups, absorbing individuals into one group or another. “Gap” and “group” are constructs imposed on reality, not derived from it.

If the separating measure used in creating a gap is achievement, it ignores the fact that achievement occurs on a continuum. So “gap” is a false construct, which not only does not accurately reflect reality, but which must serve some other agenda as well.

When we align the achievement-gapped construct with the long-standing race construct, we simply reinforce the notion of racial difference. In addition to focusing our attention on achievement, one very impersonal aspect of education’s many acculturating functions, it turns our attention away from the broader cultural and institutional aspects of a society that so stubbornly exclude individuals from opportunity and access to full and equitable participation based on superficial characteristics, such as skin color.

The achievement gap is only a glimpse of the vastly larger culture gap from which we suffer, and for which there is no self-elevated committee, council or cause resourceful enough to correct us, it seems. Even the good news is bad: we are not the only ones. Almost every culture on this planet suffers the same twisted, albeit self-serving, perspective on reality. Markers of “group” difference are plentiful—race, religion, ethnicity—all social constructs that have no basis in essential reality.

The problem, as I see it, is that there may be no solution to a “gapped” world. In the absence of the motivation of six billion plus individuals, there may only be resignation or eternal angst. Given how many of the world’s people will read this article, what are the chances?

Meanwhile of course, we can use “achievement gap” as a political tool for funding and policy decisions, the other agenda.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Politics, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with

The More Things Change…

3 May 2016 Leave a comment

Dickens’ Spirit of Christmas Present said it 170 years ago: if nothing is done to correct it, discrimination and poverty will remain the doom of humanity:

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Some may blame the poor and oppressed for their condition, and thereby justify punishing them further. Or some may use that condition to their benefit, manipulating politics and economics to further separate the victims of poverty and discrimination from resource and power. In just such a way some blame the schools, the teachers and the unions for the outcome of such conditions in education.

We’ve long known of the persistent and troublesome academic gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers in public schools.

We’ve long understood the primary reason, too: A higher proportion of black and Hispanic children come from poor families. A new analysis of reading and math test score data from across the country confirms just how much socioeconomic conditions matter.

Children in the school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty score an average of more than four grade levels below children in the richest districts.

“Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares,” Motoko Rich, Amanda Cox and Matthew Bloch, New York Times, April 29, 20162

In reality, we have all inherited these poisons to our civilization, and we must all—from the meek and humble to the rich and powerful—join together to rid ourselves from them. We could be the generation of Americans who are truly great enough to face our doom and beat the odds. Yet too often we blame the victims and beat the scapegoats. Meanwhile American’s soul is festering.

_________________________________

1 The online text: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm#link11 <

2 The interactive graphics show systems that were studied. Find yours. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html <

Filed under Education Policy, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with

Education in a Post-Modern World

3 August 2015 Leave a comment

I was struck recently by an article by Terri Seddon (2015) from Australian Catholic University in which she presents a description of a shift in contemporary in education, from an emphasis of teaching to a whole population to one of learning as individuals. I would characterize this as a shift toward a post-modern paradigm, deconstructing the old world. Seddon certainly details a framework of deconstruction of traditional education in Australia, which largely parallels American education.

Seddon uses the following quotation in her summary:

“… teachers are neither ‘gamekeepers’ that protect the balance of nature in a national territory, nor ‘gardeners’ who intervene to redesign a natural order. Rather, the 21st century space of education locates worlds where ‘hunters’ aim to fill their own hunting bag with kill irrespective of others. The hunt, the project-by-project achievement of success, becomes the end in view.” (Bauman, 2005)

This quotation aptly summarizes Seddon’s deconstructed educational institution, and aptly casts a doubt across teachers’ influence over empowering students as independent, free-ranging, life-long learners. There are outriders on this trajectory that cloud the underlying philosophy of contemporary education, in Seddon’s writing and in our observations of the quotation above.

First, learning is becoming a largely outside-in process. While successfully accessing sources of content is vital to learning, the process and purpose of learning itself are at least equally important as simple acquisition. Education is not just loading learners up with tools, techniques and the assumption that they should be used. Determining what content Bauman’s “hunter” should seek and how to use it effectively and appropriately, even civilly, seem critical understandings for learners to acquire, and here Seddon concurs.

We are well aware of the enormous amount of material available to anyone via the Web, a relatively small amount of which is useful or even accurate, and much of which is purely subjective. What is more, we have seen the sour consequences of gathering large quantities of data and then determining what to do with them—occasionally inventing uses well after the gathering. Marketers seem particularly good at framing gleanings from random data into essential everyday consumer “needs.” The shift in learning is a reality to which educators must adapt or become irrelevant. Education could perhaps provide a framework for thinking about a better world in which students learn to become well adapted personally and socially, valuing themselves and others while functionally independent.

Teaching as coaching is an insufficient model. As such, pointing out good grounds to hunters encourages the food hunter, the trophy hunter and the ivory hunter equally. Such a model on its own does not limit the decimating harvest of whales or the choking consumption of gasoline. Reasonable choices in what and where to hunt, and how much to leave for other hunters or other generations are survival decisions beyond the individual. Even fully autonomous individuals must share the planet in some way. And while the individual constructs a world of his own experience and conditions, others are constructing walls and bridges that shape those experiences and conditions. Who creates the choices of hunting grounds, who stocks the game, and who sets the limits? Will not production competitors shape the hunting landscape to their own purposes? Who plants the lures in the Apple orchard or the oil field? How is the hunter to judge? How to respond?

Who coaches the coaches? If educators are not developing a sense of prudent choices and reasonable limits, are they abdicating their role as mediators of the renewal of a culture? Such a question also asks what culture we wish to conserve. On a scale beyond education, we might need to assess and revise what we call culture, perhaps or perhaps not a culture rooted in religiously founded nationhood. Seddon seems to say educators are facilitating access to a landscape that is as much outside teachers themselves as it is outside the students, and because this globalized landscape dismisses a moral common core, it contributes to the deconstruction of a moral common culture, a civil community, resulting in an ever more fractious and contentious set of sects.

We know that learning is not just an outside-in process, an acquisition process. It is also a personal development process. And it is inside that the moral world exists. What growth occurs inside is critical to how the tools and techniques can be used, abused or just set aside. Additionally, learning is, or has been, a social development process. How we develop in a world with others as a part of a greater whole has been at the very heart of acculturation, the Titanic mother of education. The resulting atomization of our society is evidence of a partial failure of our binding social fabric, at least. Without question, we are becoming an increasingly global, our boundaries erased by monetary transactions, trade routes, and satellite signals. Even educational institutions serve local and international student bodies. How will we socialize students for such a global society?

The 19th century not only gave us broad public education fit to its times and places; it gave us the Romantic sense of unity, loyalty to the greater good and a belief that that greater good binds us with a self-correcting power. The natural order would always prevail. The more realistic Modernists response half a century later could see that this binding moral center was not holding us together. Greedy exploitation, brutal colonization and a Great War made that clear, but the notion that there was a universal center that morally binds us to one another and our world remained a real if abandoned thing. Now the Post-Modern world simply denies even that belief. It finds no evidence to support a unified universe, which is simply random and without purpose, a universe in which we must wend through a here and now as painlessly and perhaps enjoyably as possible, a world in which the only constant is self. “Cogito ergo sum.” Period. If each of us defines “the” world as we encounter it, then I must construct my teachers. They don’t construct my world; they don’t construct me.

Seddon begins her paper with a quotation that raises a fundamental questions:

What is the point today of the institutions and systems built in the 19th century to provide various forms of education: the schools, the working man’s colleges, the universities? In the world of the information society is education better left as an unfettered relationship between a consenting individual and their smart phone? (Yates, 2012)

What is the purpose of education, and what the role of teachers? Are we adapting knowingly into a world that has no center, or are we simply being drawn blindly into a vortex of post-modern deconstruction of anything outside our microcosmic selves? The only thing that remains the same is change; anything else that remains the same becomes history.

References:

Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid Life. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Seddon, Terri. Learning, politics and globalisation: Why have education? [Das Argument_Submission draft_June 2015.docx, Complied: 20/6/15} academia.edu, viewed 30 July 2015.

Yates, L. (2012). “My School, My University, My Country, My World, My Google, Myself…: What is education for now?” Australian Educational Researcher 39: 259–274.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Social Commentary Tagged with

I Learned Everything I Know from Wily Coyote

25 March 2015 Leave a comment

We may not like it, and we may not understand where it is leading us as human beings, but this is what is happening.
I sit here at a computer screen and I feel nothing for it, for it is a soulless and uncaring thing. I had teachers I loved and teachers I hated. With more maturity, of the thousands of students who passed through my classrooms, I had hundreds I truly loved as if they were my children–and some I was glad were someone else’s children, and I made a personal effort to do something good for even those. I never wanted to be rich or famous, but I wanted to be appreciated, and even loved a little. And I think maybe I was loved, a little. I am a human being, after all.

What is this brave new world we live in? And how is it that, in creating this new world, those I once cherished, now sitting on the other side of a computer screen, will blindly abandon their own children to the sterility and isolation of such an education? I at least lament their loss.
I retired with tears. And society may leave me beside the road to die at some point. Still, I am so thankful to have gotten out when I did. I did my teaching with passion and dignity. And I am rich beyond the wildest dreams of any plutocrat or their science and technology minions.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Social Commentary

Where are the Unions Going?

28 February 2015 Leave a comment

                As I was going through my email this morning, I saw an announcement for a speaker from the Food Chain Workers Alliance. I have been thinking, off and on, for some time about alternatives to the traditional labor union structure that we are currently saddled with, and which is being driven into the ground by the relentless forces of greed. I see the FCWA as a model for organized labor to examine as a possible alternative to the across the table model in which we are bemired.

                It is a labor counterpart to the “wellhead to gas pump,” production chain control. AFT/NEA and others could evolve into parts of a Human Development Professionals Alliance, dealing with all those involved with the development of every child from prenatal medicine to college graduation. Think how this would align the development of citizens by democratically and largely locally organized engagement.

                It would of course take a much smarter and more knowledgeable mind than mine, but the overall concept seems positive, and unifies the development of American children into true American citizens. Of course, such a design works counter to corporate efforts to atomize society allowing them to more easily fleece their sheep. It shifts its emphasis from workers’ rights and wages to the tasks and quality of work; it negotiates how to get the job done for the benefit of all. Such an alliance would set its performance goals based on the needs of the employers and the desires of the people to become a society of their own making. And, oh, it would be tough to implement. The rich and powerful will not want to give up control of the peasant masses to use as cannon fodder in their global “econowars.” Many workers would not want to give up the petty monetary or seeming autonomy benefits of their patronized niche. There would be sacrifice and discomfort, maybe even real pain along the way, but then people have died in the labor movement of the past. And sycophants should have no immunity.

                Additionally, those who do the work, functioning as a whole, help to restore our corroded democracy. It has the potential of monitoring and developing its members into a cadre of the most desirable and qualified "workers," rather than the cheapest. Workers of the past negotiated for their muscle and bone. HDPA members would negotiate for skills and competencies, brains and commitment. Incumbent upon the alliance then would be the capacity development and quality warrantee of its members. Consumers, employers and institutions could have the best or the cheapest, but if they could have the best at a fair wage, these work providers would come to the Alliance. There they would get the performance skills necessary to maximize their job needs.

                This guild model combined with the end-to-end industry model is but one alternative unions must consider. We need only look at the numbers to see that the unions and the middle class that they generated is deeply eroded. In twenty or thirty years without real change, unions will be the “Jamestown Settlements” objects of the future, historically significant and quaint. We will, by then, be beyond class warfare; we will have become an economically occupied nation.

Filed under Education Policy, Politics, Social Commentary Tagged with

Why they are called the humanities

13 October 2014 3 Comments

Well, the study of humans seems fairly hopeless. Doesn’t it? I mean first of all, knowing what humans are is the domain of physiology. Isn’t it? Humans are giant amoebas. Vast colonies of smaller organisms and microbes collaborating to achieve one thing—to continue. You know—to survive, to beat off competitors and to reproduce, hence to survive, etc. The current collective is only of value if it procreates; it’s the simplest of evolutionary principles. This iteration is insignificant; only replication counts.

So, what’s to study? If all we are, are self-replicating biomechanical devices, engendered by the quadrillionth roll of the carbon-based slime dice, the only thing to pin down are the genomic odds of any one of us happening. Of course we might want to study ways to make humans better at surviving the odds, sacrificing ourselves in the interest of assuring that there are children and children’s children. Logically, we should have as many children as we can produce, preferably of superior quality. Our off-spring will have to compete against all competitors for our available resources after all. Then we should bury our own future in the economic compost to contribute to the resources for our children, who must be competitive in an arena with neighbor children, so they can do the same for their more competitive children. – Oh, wait…we do that now!

Anyone who sees this existence as other than a seriously grim reality would, I believe, be someone who would neatly fit this definition, which is not humanity at all. This reality would be ours with all of our humanity stripped away, and that is not who we are. But it is all too much who we are becoming.

The study of the humanities is the study of who we have been able to become, well beyond the biomechanics of evolution. Yet, there is a close tie in the humanities to the physical human as well. The humanities appeal through our senses beyond food, fighting and sex. Free-marketeers, however, have certainly seen the economic advantage of mimicking the humanities to tap into these basic impulses, and this has not been lost on the purveyors of the humanities themselves. The arts use the visual and auditory to catch our attention and stimulate responses unnecessary for and not contributing to our continued existence, yet we come back to them over and over—Mona Lisa—Beethoven’s 5th—Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet. Literature pulls us out of our reproductive cycling by using our sensory imaginations not just as a preparation for the hunt, but being transported into an alternative existence—Morrison’s Beloved—Homer’s Ulysses. And for what? None of these assure our great-grandchildren’s fecund existence.

The humanities help us build a context for who we are, as a species, as a people, as an individual. Among the humanities, history seems to hold a unique place. All that we have been is who we have become, and this story is what history tells us. Even how our history is presented—Euripides or Doris Kearns Goodwin—informs our minds eye, human voices sounding human voices from the past.

With a foot in two boats, philosophy has, for millennia, achieved something that the sciences have not yet satisfactorily achieved—seeing outside the solidity of the mundane. It is in this contested frontera between the lands of theoretical physics (a form of math) and religious exegesis, in this transcendent reality that philosophy carries us into an existence beyond all else, genuinely room into which to move as only humans can.

The arts, literature, history and philosophy are only unimportant if our world has not humanity, if humans are competitive rather than compassionate animals, if we are self-serving rather than self-aware beings. Who we are as humans cannot be gleaned from gathering food, fighting off raiders and producing children. An amoeba does that. We must see a much broader horizon, glimpse distant, misty peaks, be stirred by the striving songs of others, and to care and wonder why. The sciences may seek the answers, while the humanities will ask the questions for which there may be no answers.

If the humanities are allowed to dim into obscurity, how will we even know what we have lost? If that which lets us be human is gone, what will it mean to be human? Yet the sad truth is that we are not choosing to shed our humanity; we are offered new clothes which will let us appear as emperors of our domains, and we are allowing that, even inviting it. In whose interest is it that we discredit the humanities and embrace the sciences? Who benefits if we don’t ask why? How will we be served by diluting the uniqueness of ourselves in the engineered seas of progress? How will we know how best to move forward? And what is the price of our wealth, after all?

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Social Commentary Tagged with

Philosophy tells us who we are

1 November 2013 Leave a comment

While I have not read widely on the subject of the Common Core State Standards and their implementation, I have read enough to see what appears to be a common core of arguments.

  1. We need national standards to be competitive in the global economy; vs. we need local control to assure our national character and integrity.

  2. We need the content and levels, specified in the CCSS, to assure quality in education across the whole country; vs. we need to honor choice, and regional and local values that are nurtured through our education system.

And my favorite:

  1. We need to be able to compare schools on a consistent scale; vs. we need to support every child in every school to maximize every individual’s innate potential.

Put another way, these might line up as:

  1. Globalism v. parochialism

  2. Uniformity v. individuality

  3. Free-market competition v. Marxist socialism

This analysis is based on a cursory examination of the commentary, to be sure. I would say “the literature,” but that would suggest a higher level of academic study on the part of the commenters. After all, implementing a nation-wide formula for education based on presumed outcomes is implementing a strictly probability-based inductive rationale. It’s a bit unrealistic for anyone to speak with grounded authority on the outcomes, though many might assume such a posture.

Something that I see in my analysis is a similarity to other arguments afoot across the world. All these argued positions are similar to positions taken in economics and corresponding social structures. And while this might be a loose relationship, it bears some consideration, because it invites the question, “What underlies the discourse on the Common Core State Standards?” In other words, why are we having these debates in education, economics, ethnic identities, and religious beliefs? Isn’t what’s best for the most over the longest time the goal? Apparently not.

I would say we spend far too much energy arguing the road to take and far too little energy trying to discover a goal upon which we can share consensus. In the CCSS debate, little seems to be said about what we agree on as the goal of a public education system: assimilation of diverse peoples into a single national identity? (1890-1910) The development of the human psyche as a spiritual being? (1920’s) The creation of a core of technical elite to direct and manage cadres of practical crafts and labor? (1920-1940) To establish an informed electorate to form a true democracy? (1940-1960) All right, these are rough, broad strokes, but they certainly represent raison d’État in public and, concordantly, private education in the U.S. in the last 150 years or so. And how unlike the gymnasia of Athens 2,500 years ago.

Thirty years ago, I puzzled over what was really expected of me in the classroom. Think for a moment about all the voices, many quite demanding and even threatening, If education is anything, I think, it is the institutionalized effort to acculturate and socialize emerging generations—to bring the rising population into the culture and society of a people. If that’s the case, then the problem seems pretty clear; The United States, by its design and history, is not a single people. At least not in the 21st century. We don’t have a common culture or a common society.

The debate, it seems to me, that we need to resolve is where we want to be on several spectrums. Where do we want to be, for instance, between absolute conformity – very efficacious, e.g. the Nazi war machine – or total individuality – apocalyptic anarchy where feudal war lords rise and fall trampling the masses. Please don’t be naïve; there are a few who would happily embrace the extremes. But there are deeper questions that we avoid even mentioning in practical arenas such as education. What is success? What is the balance between reality and fairness? What should determine what is right and what is wrong? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean that we can even ask such questions?

Philosophical (and religious) questions have plagued, entertained and elevated human beings throughout recorded history. Only physical conflict can compete for longevity, but cannot be said to elevate humanity; although it has elevated science and engineering. While STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) might suggest preparation in the field of conflict, though certainly very many other more humane fields as well, there seems to be little in the CCSS to promote the idea of questioning—the mean by which we clarify and understand—the philosophical puzzles. The world of science tells us what we are, but the world of philosophy tells us who we are. It is the philosophical that raises humans above the rest of the physical world, and leads us to ask “Why?” – the little child’s question that seems hardwired into humans.

So here’s what’s going to happen with the CCSS. It will be implemented poorly and unevenly and even incompletely across the states over the next five or six years, and will be overtaken by the next reform effort. During that time, it will spawn a sea of books, articles, research efforts and college programs—in their own reformed shapes—that will become an exhausted source of profit in the end. The new reform debate will generate a new wave of the same sorts of profitable sources in its turn. Cycles happen. The linden tree has a heart shaped leaf and, when viewed from a little distance, has a heart shaped profile as well. Patterns result from underlying, often mysterious, causes. Education reform cycles, and repetitions, I imagine, are in the underlying gene structure of society.

I gave up listening to all the voices (not in my head as it happens) telling me what education should be doing. Now that my career in the classroom is over, I feel satisfied that as the years passed, I was more and more able to get my students to ask why, in effect,  returning one starfish at a time to its home in the sea. I put my energy into starfish these days. I don’t see much point in trying to STEM the tide.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

%d bloggers like this: