Sultan Knish
Everyone knows that America's education system is broken. It's the one
thing that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Committees are
convened, grants are dispensed and new studies are rolled off the
educational assembly line every few months that purport to change
everything by showing that the entire process of educating children from
medieval to modern times was wrong.
Education has come to be a science of its own with a jargon full of nebulous pseudo-scientific
terminology
impenetrable to the ordinary person. The majority of public school
teachers now have master's degrees because it takes more than some
ignorant BA to tell little Johnny to shut the hell up and pay attention
in class or he'll never amount to anything in life.
Unfortunately the majority of teachers were also so busy getting their graduate degrees that they didn't actually put in any classroom time.
The students of tomorrow are being taught by other students who have an
MA and papers on educational unleveling through cognitive
disequilibrium across multiple modalities but very little actual
experience with students.
Educational reform has become a
ridiculously popular topic. Documentaries like "Waiting for Superman"
have convinced everyone that they have what it takes to reform
education. Everyone includes M. Night Shyamalan (the director of that
movie where Bruce Willis was really dead all along) who has his own book
out claiming to have the five strategies that can save education.
Only one of them involves ghosts and aliens.
But
what if the surprise twist ending for education reform is that
education doesn't actually need reforming? What if it doesn't require
teachers with graduate degrees, a billion dollars worth of studies and
endless hand-wringing and helicopter reforming by liberal tycoons?
What
if Bill Gates can stay home in his mansion and M. Night Shyamalan can
go back to making bad movies? What if the American educational system is
doing about as well as can be expected considering the social
conditions that it has to work with.
Most educational reformers
would agree that’s a dangerous heresy right up there with not believing
that the planet is about to go up in smoke because of cow flatulence.
They point to how much better children in Japan or Finland are doing at
math and warn that if we don’t spend billions more on studies that will
tell us how to improve education, America will fall behind.
We’ll
no longer be the country that invents things. Instead before long we’ll
be ignorant savages fighting over scraps of raw meat in the back alley
behind a Taco Bell. That is if we can’t put enough teachers with
graduate degrees and mad text scaffolding skills into the classroom.
But
after decades of these warnings, America is still the country that
invents things; even if one of those things is an obsession with turning
the little schoolhouse into a nightmarish blend of experimental
psychology, sociology experiment, diet club, police state and TSA line
at the airport.
It's an article of faith that our schools are
failing our children. But most educational reformers don't mean that
schools are failing their children. They mean that urban schools are
failing minority children. Like gun violence, failing schools are
largely an urban problem being passed off as a national crisis. And it's
not the schools that are failing. It's the students.
The gap in
test scores between America and other countries goes away when broken
down by race. White American students top those of most European
countries. Asian students come out ahead of them. It’s not that Asian
students somehow have access to better schools. Often they go to the
same urban multicultural schools that are “failing” everyone else.
The difference is that they are determined to succeed because their parents want them to.
Our
schools are badly run and awash in ridiculous theories and worse
budgets. But they aren't failing our children. They are functioning
about as well as any part of government can and they are for the most
part doing their core job. Any student who makes it through twelve
grades without achieving basic math and literacy skills hasn't been
failed by the school. He has made a choice not to learn. More often the
choice has been made for him.
A school cannot take the place of
the family. It isn't meant to. Nor are educational theories the
determinant of whether a child learns or doesn't learn. Learning does
not begin in the classroom. It begins at home. The first explorations
of language and space take place in the nursery. And they determine
more about the child's future than all the synergistic educational
strategies for 21st century learners.
The school is not the most
vital element in education just as the government is not the most
vital element in the economy. Systems don't take the place of human
relationships. Governments cannot replace families. Schools aren't
failing children in Detroit or Chicago. Families are failing their
children and the schools by not holding together.
Children from single parent homes are at double the risk of dropping out. That is a simple fact that no amount of educational jargon can plug.
Children with never-married mothers score worse than children with divorced mothers. Across the world, regardless of race or creed, children living in a normal household with a father and mother performed better in school than their counterparts.
It
doesn't matter whether the MA's in their twenties who have spent more
time being students than doing anything else manage to agendize their
dynamic action plans or not. It does matter whether there is a father in
the house. And that father can't be Uncle Sam.
It does not
take a village or four administrators and three teachers, two school
psychologists and an educational theorist to raise a child. It takes a
family.
If the American school system is a mess, it's because it
has been reformed to death until it has stopped being a system for
educating children and become a system for educating teachers and
administrators about all the latest trends in educational theory. The
classroom has become an ER where all the children are assumed to be
coming in with fatal educational traumas and can only be saved by using
the latest techniques developed by a study funded by Bill and Melinda
Gates.
Like so much of the nonsense that bedevils America,
educational reform is based on the progressive assumption that students
are static objects and that government education is a dynamic system.
With enough research, the code to teaching students will be cracked and
every student in the country can then be educated to become a
supergenius leaving the People's Republic of China in the dust.
Progressive
educational policies have as little to do with real life education as
their economic policies have to do with math and human affairs.
Progressive policies fail by ignoring human choices. They try to
centrally plan everything and discover belatedly that they aren't in
control because their plans are undermined by individual choices.
Education
is not a science. It is a relationship. And like all relationships, it
works best with a healthy beginning. In its truest sense it is not
something that is inflicted from outside on a child, but is the
expansion of that child's worldview.
Learning is not something
that someone does to us. It is not the mere acceptance of teaching which
is, for the most part all that schools can do for students, but applied
curiosity.
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright
Brothers invented the modern world as we know it. They have one other
thing in common. None of them actually finished their schooling. To the
extent that they did attend, their grades were poor and their behavior
would have landed them in Special Ed in any modern school.
Orville
Wright was once expelled from elementary school and dropped out of high
school to start his own printing business. Alexander Graham Bell was a
bored and bad student. Thomas Edison hardly saw the inside of a school.
The education of all three men came from a combination of self-directed
learning and family homeschooling.
Any number of tech titans
today were college dropouts who spent their high school years avoiding
class and playing around with computers. Our educational system didn't
fail them. They chose to accomplish their education in different ways.
Bill
Gates has sunk a fortune into educational reform and yet he's a college
dropout who by his own admission barely did enough work in school to
get by. Does Gates really believe that Harvard and his upscale prep
school failed him? Doubtful. When he talks about educational reform, he
assumes that other children are machines who can be educated with a
combination of new theories, but that his own experience is unique
because he is an individual and everyone else is an interchangeable
robot.
Big
schools or small schools. Large class sizes or small class sizes.
Recontextualize the paradigm or don't. These things don't matter very
much.
Education is not a system. It is not a technique. It is a
culture. The medium of education matters much less than the message. The
content matters much more than the techniques used to teach it.
Education teaches techniques, but it need not be a technique. And when
it becomes a rigid set of techniques then it has already failed.
American
education is only as strong as American culture. American culture isn't
a technique. It's a way of seeing the world. It's an attitude, a sense
of confidence and optimism, and a determination to tackle the difficult
things. It's an art, a history and a literature that comes from these
qualities.
Systematizing educational techniques cannot take the
place of the family values that make for a healthy child and the
national values that make for a healthy adult.
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