Education ‘Reform,’ From the Top Down
My goodness, it's just one favor after another the U.S. government wants to do for us.
By week's end, the president and his minions hope to have bought, embarrassed or intimidated enough fellow Democrats into passing, at long last, health care "reform." In the meantime, the White House lets us know it wants action on new national approaches to educational improvement. It just never seems to stop, this business of bringing the whole business of the United States under federal supervision.
Given President Obama's habit of imputing to George W. Bush responsibility for most of what's wrong today, it's interesting to note how Obama deals with the No Child Left Behind Act, whose approval Bush procured. He sees the act's impending expiration not as goodbye to a political delusion but rather as an opportunity to put his personal stamp on that delusion. One can hardly wait.
What Obama wants is, by his lights, more creative approaches to educational "improvement." Specifically, he calls for new ways of measuring academic improvement in America's public schools. States would be ordered to categorize their schools as high-performing, failing or in-between, with emphasis moved from the testing of math and reading to the shaping of incentives and rewards for schools that turn out college- or career-ready graduates.
It is not that many would call the original, now-expiring, No Child Left Behind Act a pearl beyond price, gleaming and untouchable by mortal hands. The act seems to have resulted in, among other things, a philosophy among educators of "teaching to the test" in math and reading, to the impairment of such disciplines as art and music. Nor does its stated goal of boosting every child to proficiency in math and reading seem remotely in sight: not when tests can be dumbed down and results manipulated.
Couldn't we, in consequence, as children used to say on the playground swing, just "let the cat die"—let NCLB just go away? Not with the political appetite for top-down control continuing to build under Obama. We're not about to try not letting the federal government try anymore. We're getting ready, if the administration has its way, to devise better top-down methods.
Can such methods work? The health care fracas should have given us some sense of how many obstacles stand in the way of getting one top-down program just right for the needs of 300 million-plus Americans. Even with T-shirts, one size never fits all. As government says, shut up and put the thing on anyway, doubts rightly multiply as to the possibility of even Harvard Law School graduates' figuring out what the rest of us need.
Time was when the states, which theoretically own the public schools and theoretically scratch statewide educational itches, addressed on their own the requirements of educational excellence. Then, starting in 1965 with the Great Society, came the era of federal "aid" and No Child Left Behind. Former President Bush's own state of Texas could no longer do what it wanted, having drunk with everyone else the Kool-Aid of top-downism.
Most of the Founding Fathers would gaze in horror at the idea of the central government's telling states how to run their schools, but no one today seems much to care for what a bunch of dead white men in wigs would have thought. Not with all that money rolling in from Washington!
I predict that on the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, the U.S. government will still be focused on how to get a handle on the problem of education quality and how to make sure, by gum, everybody gets the same share, whatever it costs.
The founders, being wiser, knew that Big Government was less likely to make things happen than were ordinary people, plugged into their own understandings of means and ends. The necessity of strengthening communities and families to encourage motivation and performance—what White House adviser would think of such a thing? I can certainly think of a few who should.
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The latest "solution" to the problem of poorly performing schools is to fire the teachers. I'm no fan of the NEA/AFT but it seems to me that it's more likely it's the students who need to be "fired" rather than the teachers. No methodology or sum of money can overcome a lack of ability or motivation.
re#1
And right you are, although I would add that the problem is mostly motivational. Spoon feeding is expected by students as a God-given [today, nature-given] right, and when spoon feeding happens, many students tend to decry plastic spoons and demand silver ones.
High school and bachelor's level education has never been rocket science, but the best of it is work, and the nature of the work is that it is a struggle. Thanks to modern parenting, today's students don't want a struggle, and they reject education by default.
While we are all born with that which eventually shows itself as personality. One is,howeve, not born with character. One must acquire character through training: first, in the home; then, in the church and local commonwealth, of which the school - public, private or parochial - is but one component.
Character is the aquiring, internalizing and confessing of the cardinal, capital and theological virtues. This process of acquiring, internalizing and confessing is not an exercise in abstraction, although it can be a part of a school curriculum, but a part of living in and experiencing the habits, traditions and customs of the local commonwealth(s). (Character building in public schools does not reflect the great virtues in their local context but is a set of abstractions reflecting a social agenda and is, therefore, worthless.)
Referring to the Bible, William Gilmore Simms states in his A Sense of the Beautiful, an address delivered to the Charleston County Agricultural and Horticultural Association in May of 1870, in the midst of Reconstruction the following:
"In brief, 'trains' the child in the way he should go. Train, you will remember is the word. The Bible does not say teach. There is the greatest difference between the two. We have quite too muh teaching in the world - vulgarly misnamed education - and too little training, and this is one of the greatest sources of the sorrows and miseries of humanity!"
Simms continues:
"And how very simple and how very gratefu, once understood, is this task to train. You take the child as you take the vine or flower. You twine about the delicate tendrils of his mind and heart, about his sensibilities and susceptibilities of taste and fancy, a little thread of blended love and authority, just as you would the vine which you thus train to dart up from earth, to share in those bursts of sunlight wish are gushing through your lattice."
This "training" is outside the domain of formal education, although schools, to the extent that they represent the habits, customs and traditions, should participate in this endeavor as a part of the local community. (In my experience, view schools, public or private, reflect the local community. This is further complicated in that far too often, there is no local community, including families and churches, with any real influence.)
If there is to be success in "formal" education, in public or private schools, students must enter the formal setting with the first rudiments of character already acquired and these must be reenforced in the school.
Students without character are difficult to instruct. Without a sense of oughtness, without prudence, without fortitude, without temperance, without the balance to the virtues over the vices, and without faith, hope and love, students do not have the discipline, the sense of awe or the emerging vision to learn.
In my forty-year experience, the problem lies with an ever-diminishing presence of character in students, reflecting the lack of character and training in the home and in the church and regrettably reflecting the "untraining" which they are getting through the media from Madison Avenue and Hollywood.
We, however, continue to fight the good fight wherever we can.
#3
And right you are. I wonder how strong the correlation is of latch-key children (whatever their demographics) to poor academic performance. I suppose we may never know, because Public Ed and the Fed doesn't want to find out.
Mr. Peters,
One of the finest teachers I have known once remarked to me that teachers should attempt to love their students because teaching is a species of friendship. He also said that students were becoming more unlovable for him near the end of his career because "Students without character are difficult to instruct. Without a sense of oughtness, without fortitude, without temperance, without the balance to the virtues over the vices,... , the sense of awe or wonder or the emerging urge to learn was more and more difficult to inspire." He had great success during the late sixties and early seventies with certain kids who were honestly interested in whether truth or beauty existed, could it be known and where it might be found. But towards the end of his career he was teaching minor poets and anything the students might actually read because he thought the first principle of bad teaching was answering questions students had not yet raised or incapable of asking. Quite a descent from Homer,Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero,St. Augustine, Albert the Great, to James Joyce, e.e.cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay. But as cummings once wrote: "The boys I mean are not refined, they like girls that buck and bite." Sometimes you must start where the questions are and then try to move "up, up and away." I always thought his first book, The Way Down and Out, was his best because it assured me he knew exactly what he was doing as a teacher and could see the whole wave of and decadence and despair coming long before it actually arrived at places like Cornell and Columbia. I am glad to see there are still some good ones like you left.
robertll @ 5
I instruct in three different environments: a high school, a college and a military unit. Of those environments, the only one in which the majority of students have personal discipline, curiosity and a sense of awe is that of the military.
Not only do most students lack fundamental character, even in its most nascent stages, but they also lack basic knowledge which they should have acquired in the home, in the church and in the local community. They bring few reference points which a teacher can use to orient them as they encounter the subjects.
As the sun sets on my years of teaching, I have opted to spend most of my class time just helping the better students acquire, very belatedly, the reference points, points they should have acquired as young children.
I do, as you suggest, attempt to begin where the questions are; however, far too often, there are simply not questions, even when prompted. Where there is no objective correlative to the past and where this is no hope for eternity, there can be few meaningful questions.
In post-modernity, the majority of students have no sense of leaving a legacy for kith and kin and no sense of claiming an eternal inheritance as joint heirs with Christ. At the heart of it is death, for it is at death that our legacy is left and our inheritance is claimed. Post-modernity is about avoiding death with health schemes which will make us live longer and plastic surgery which will hide the natural markers of the march to the grave. Post-modern man wishes to escape the limits placed on him by the created order, including death.
Perhaps that is why post-modern education is essentially meaningless: next to God Himself, death is the great mysterium tremendum. It and God have been banished from the learning experience.
Robert M. Peters @3 & 6:
The sun sets also on my years probably more advanced than yours,
and your comments are well-taken. The secular theological terms
appended to these times are exactly that and get attention by
many literary giants in the human arts. However, Old & New
Testament always brings back the firm foundation. Said by a
Man with a name above any other name, Be not afraid, only believe.
Reminder to us all, There was Resurrection and the tomb was empty.
He did appear to disciples and Apostles with a body and did what
He promised, sent a Living Spirit for us all.
Thank you William Murchison for your essay also.
The Dems have this thing called national health care/
It's a great thing on paper, I know it./
You should be able to go to a doctor/
And not be crippled by the costs.
They're pushing it hard, a "historic vote."/
But in the rush to get it done/
They haven't thought about the true cost/
Of this big-government legislation.
Chorus:
Big-government legislation./
Who pays for it? What does it cost?/
What's the hurry on this big-government legislation?
The Dems say we've gotta have it now/
Just as they've designed it/
It's now or never/
Federally-funded abortion and all.
Pardon me for saying this/
But I beg to differ./
Don't force abortion down our throats./
We shouldn't have to pay with our conscience.
Chorus
There's no need to rush this huge government program./
The order of priority should be jobs first, everything else second./
First things first, as they say/
But try telling that to the Dems.
Try telling it, telling it, try telling it to the Dems.
Chorus X2
Lyrics for "Big-Government Legislation,"
KDZ Copyright 2010.