If Ivy League law students don’t have a good grasp of the liberal arts, what hope have the rest of us?
I came across this article yesterday in TIME. In it a Columbia Law School Dean laments the previous education of his law students, saying, “there is in this group no common core of knowledge that should be in the firm and quiet possession of every person who lays claim to a liberal education.” This is the top of America’s talent he is talking about here; the best of the education system’s products. It just goes to show that ALL of our students really need better instruction in the liberal arts and sciences. It’s not simply a case of advantaged vs. disadvantaged, though some students do have better odds of coming across rich content than others.
And then I saw the publication date. 1956. Hmm. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. So does this mean things were worse back then? Better? The same? I think that is a pointless question. The only comparison worth examining is where we are compared to where we want to be. And we are not where we want to be. So let’s get to work – for the sake of both the Ivy Leaguer and the high school drop out.
Lauren Prehoda
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You have to wonder what drives policy makers. The door is certainly nailed shut to any view that is not testing driven or based on current ideologies. It feels like the old factory model is applied to public education today, but it does not appear there are the pay offs given the narrow focus of funding. Accountability is important, but no extreme applications are beneficial.
For most of 2007, some individuals in Florida said that teaching reading to native speakers is the same as teaching reading to non-native speakers. They also said that the reading endorsement training was sufficient to teach ELLs. These positions were used as a basis for supporting legislation that reduces
teacher training for those who teach reading to ELLs. Governor Crist vetoed the bill in June 2007.
The same legislators reintroduced the bill without change in September. These legislators represent Northern Florida constituents with small numbers of English Language Learners (ELL). For example, Clay County in North Florida has 414 ELLs, as compared to Orange County in Central Florida that has 32,000 ELLs and Miami-Dade in South Florida with 56,000 ELLs.
Last month, in the Education PreK-12 Senate Appropriations Committee, an invited reading expert testified that teaching reading to native and non-native speakers is not the same and the current reading teacher training did not prepare teachers to serve ELLs. When asked the question if the two were the same, the new DOE Commissioner of Education also stated that they were not. The bill passed the committee anyways and on it goes to the House.
Looks like there is a disconnect between information the policy makers use to make their decisions and facts related to second language acquisition. Same tests and same instruction is not leading students to literacy.
“Things,” by which I assume you mean the core liberal arts were undeniably better than. No “hmm” needed. I graduated from university in 1958 crammed full of cultural content having attended Yale, Minnesota, London University and Fordham (quite a tour, to be recommended, the tour that is, four years at one college is stultifying). Expectations in 1956 were higher, far higher. A recent study found that high school graduates in the 1950′s were better educated than college graduates are today. The general cultural level was higher among the upper middle classes, the only segment at the time who could afford college.A that time. Dwight Macdonald was decrying the products of “mid-cult,” Archibald MacLeish and James Gould Cozzens, for example, hugely popular literary writers of the time. (Oh for the glories of mid-cult now). I have a son in college and perusing the gender-race-class, pseudo psychological socio-economic, post-modern nonsense makes me happy that I was educated at the tail end of Western Civilization. These intensive courses in political propaganda modeled and molded by the Frankfort School are now withering. No one takes them. Psychology is the most popular course study by this solipsistic generation. Or the sciences and economics. And the liberal arts, as they are taught now, should die and will die. There is no reason for their existence. It is better that they die so that perhaps we can start over again once this generation of tenured frauds drift into well-deserved senescence.
Nothing new? Perhaps.
Yet consider this example: Last week on Battle of the Jaywalk All-stars an education major and aspiring teacher gave a fun performance. You can watch edited versions here and here
In a quiz show format, Jessica (who looks over 20):
- Could not identify a picture of John McCain. “Lenti?” “Polenti?” She (and the other two) had never heard the name John McCain.
- Thought “the Italian City famous for its canals” is Paris. Given the clue “Venetian Blind” changed to “Venezuela”
- Could not guess any war that the Invasion of Normandy might have been in. (This for probably the single most significant military event in US experience).
- Thought that Normandy might have been a made up place. Couldn’t remotely guess where it was.
- Thought a portrait of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was of Amerosa, of The Apprentice Fame.
- Knew that a picture of Al Gore was somebody who “talked about the environment”. Thought it was Bush.
- Couldn’t guess who a picture of Nancy Pelosi was, even given a first name. (Came up with Nancy Drew, but dismissed it.)
- No clue, even given the hint “bell”, who invented the telephone.
- Thought Newton discovered relativity.
- Obviously, didn’t know who lost at Waterloo.
- Thought Michelangelo’s David was either Eve or Michelangelo’s boyfriend.
- Who lives in Vatican City? “The Vaticans” No, he wears a big hat. “Abraham Lincoln?”
The good news is, the education major won this battle of brains.
It is true: there is nothing new under the sun. It seems that bashing young people for their supposed ignorance is a sport for “educators” as much today as in 1956.
Hypocrisy is also nothing new: Common Core has the audacity to criticize No Child Left Behind for its over-emphasis on standardized testing, but to make your point, you subject 1,200 high school kids to yet another standardized test!
You almost gleefully announce that “ten percent think Hitler was a munitions manufacturer” or “nearly half think the Scarlet Letter was about a witch trial.” But those conclusions are based on a faulty premise: that the answer someone picks on a multiple choice question is actually what they think, and not simply a guess. Your survey is no better than a “push poll” used in a political campaign. Dishonest, inaccurate, and designed to push an agenda.
Worst than that, though, is your condescending and insulting suggestion that the amount of historical and literary facts teenagers store in their brains is actually indicative of their intelligence or chances to lead a happy and healthy life. Relationships are what count — relationships between historical events and current events; relationships between a fact and skills that use that fact for a productive purpose; but most of all, relationships between human beings. (Of course, you can’t measure those things as easily as a bunch of random facts pulled out of one of the textbooks published by Harcourt. Hmm, indeed.)
What your group is offering, sadly, is nothing new. Just more inaccurate, misleading, and insulting statistics, and Ivory Tower solutions that offer young people no help in navigating the real world.
Albert Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. Too bad Common Core is just more in a long line of unimaginative “reforms,” offering more of the same to students who clearly have had enough of it.
A brief reply to Matt:
Of course the answer to the multiple choice question was a guess; the point is, a frighteningly high number did NOT KNOW the answer. As for what they may or may not actually think, the respondents obviously are not thinking of the items being tested at all, as they are patently ignorant of the content. That brings up the necessity to learn facts/details of history and other cultural content before all those nice relationships you mentioned can even begin to be pondered. There are certain cultural touchstones that have offered a continuity of conversation and shared experience among Americans…we are poorer if we lose that. There is nothing “Ivory Tower” about the contents of this test…we clearly are losing our educational way. (And, by the way, No Child Left Behind is a sad joke; most teachers will tell you why.)
Imagination is wonderful, but, alone, it is powerless; knowledge has the power to give substance to imagination. To offer a specific example, as a teacher of English, I saw, as expected, that students deprived of systematic vocabulary and grammar instruction and forced to rely on the vagaries of “whole language” instruction failed to develop anywhere near the writing skills of former students. We need the tools, if you will, to enable us to build the imagined construct. Otherwise, the construct (the written piece, in this case…take your pick, however, of any number of things) falls apart.
Having been an educator for many years I have observed the proliferation of revisionist curriculum. I do not believe there is a lack of liberal arts in the schools; I believe the problem is the content of the liberal arts curriculum in today’s world. Look at your child’s social studies book. You will most likely find broad-based ideas with little or no mention of basic “historical fact” and no timeline for the important events in our country’s history. Is the Jewish Holocaust even mentioned? Does Thomas Paine get more than one sentence (if that)? Back in the fifties I learned about George Washington Carver. Are your children familiar with his genius? In what time period were the Articles of Confederaton written and for what purpose?
The students of today are not lacking in liberal arts but they are sorely lacking in liberal arts education.
One always wonders where the anger of people like Matt comes from, and why they are more intent on bashing people than on constructive criticism or heaven-help-us, providing a solution.
But matt, computer science, cognitive psychology, and plain old common sense tell us that you can’t know the relationship between two things if you don’t know what those two things are.
More importantly, it is those who speak loudest against the learning of names, places, events, dates, and facts who are in fact the most ardently in favor of teaching students What to think and not How to think. By skipping all the stories and recollections of who did what and when and how, and jumping right to the grand strategic why, we daily cheat students of the right to learn those conclusions themselves.
In the thousand page HS and college history texts on my shelve, rarely ever is there a simple, interesting telling of history.
And what about good old fashioned drilling and memorization? Bad? Outdated? Mindless? Hmmph. Memorization was the edge that got me a state award in Geometry–that most logical and deductive of subjects. Memorization allowed me to sit in meetings at Northrop Aircraft and without calculator come up with quick estimates of a line of sight requirement, or a satellite orbit spec. Memorization will save a patients life if you are a doctor. And the benefits go way, way beyond math and science.
Of my teachers and classes, the ones I am most grateful to are those who forced rote memorization. I am grateful that I know 2+2=4, and 6X8=48, sqrt(144)=12, and pi=3.14159. I’m extraordinarily thankful for the teachers who made me learn the entire Gettysburg address, and the Star Spangled Banner, and the Declaration of Independence as far as “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Thank God for Ms. Sarah Jane Hartley, who stood their with her crutches and arm braces and, lifting one arm with the other to point, forced us into memorizing the name and location of every single country on earth. And for the music teachers who led us into learning “America the Beautiful”, and “Roll on Columbia”.
Would that some braver teacher had reached out and forced by rote:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
I’d have been much less silly in my early years.
The poems, speeches, and writings learned by rote remain in mind, ready in a boardroom, factory floor, field of battle, on a bus with pen in hand, or God forbid, celled alone in a prisoner of war camp or cast away at sea.
Jacquelyn:
By no means am I a fan of No Child Left Behind. But for Common Core to criticize NCLB because of its obsession with testing while attempting to prove its points by subjecting students to yet another standardized test is just what I called it — hypocrisy.
And of course it’s only logical that the relationship between a fact and its practical application can only be understood by knowing the fact. But as schools operate now, the only practical application for the facts Common Core finds so important is in the multiple choice question in which the fact is tested.
No matter how much you or I might enjoy the finer points of world history, geography, literature, no matter how smart we may appear when we shout out the answers when we watch Jeopardy, those facts, in a vacuum, mean almost nothing. Drilling them into students is at best a waste of time, at worst the perfect way to turn people off from learning forever.
If you want high school students to turn off American Idol and pick up The Scarlet Letter, you better have a good reason. You have to make the case that there is something in it for the student besides an “A” “B” “C” or “D.” And schools simply don’t make that case—they don’t even try. Perhaps they lack something . . . imagination, perhaps?
Ed:
I’m glad that you are grateful to all the teachers who, as you say, “forced rote memorization.” Unfortunately, most students aren’t grateful for such an “education.” They hate it. And the reason is clear: when they fail at it, they are made to look stupid – just as Common Core is doing with their survey. This just turns them off from learning, often forever.
Rote memorization is fine for someone who needs to memorize something for a specific, identifiable, and immediate purpose. But sorry to break it to you, no one needs to memorize the Gettysburg Address. It’s a neat parlor trick which you could probably force the average five year old to learn, but it means nothing. I think young people deserve better than that. I think they deserve an education that respects the awesome power of each individual’s mind – a power that is constantly whittled away by negative school experiences such as the ones you hold in such high esteem.
Young people are infinitely smarter than they are given credit for. If adults stopped treating young people like programmable machines, to paraphrase your poem learned by rote, perhaps they would be “less silly in their early years.”
Of course, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being silly in your early years. It’s when adults are condescending and irrational in their later years that bothers me.
I am new to this web site. I will continue to read it often and it is now in my favorites. Many things here interest me. I believe along the line of Ed Jones, drilling and memorization!
Many problems are with our children at school. First and foremost, the schools and the classroom are too large. The teaches don’t have the control they once had and sometimes the parents of the child are not so bright. Children have no respect for the teachers or any type of discipline! The kids are burned out by the age of eight. Parents push for their child to the best in sports and activites that will get them a scholarship, forget the basice. That is the underlying problem “the basics”. The students nowadays are frazzled and parents are not letting them just be a kid first. Half the kids grunt and groan when they are spoken to. Teenagers can’t even engage in a half decent converstion with dialog.
The children that will prevail are the ones that can afford private schools and hope that the teacher is genuine about teaching and helping them learn the basics first.
That’s all for now I could go on and on, ther is so much wrong in the school systems today it is pathetic and certainly not fair for our children.
Matt, your ideas have been tried, and disproved. All that remains is for us to sweep their tired, moldy remains from the hide-bound educracy, stultified as it is by a labor model which no other world-class knowledge worker profession embraces.
We all hate the multiple choice tests, there is nothing new in that. What remains is to pry the funds to move to a better model, one that works like the video games kids jump to learn in once they leave the school grounds.
To do that, we must pry the funds from said reactionary educracy. CommonCore is just a babe at this, their pathetic website a shining example of how far they have to go. Yet give the infant a bit of credit for trying. Drop the reactionary BS and join those working to go forward.
Its really is no fun living in the intellectual past, Matt. C’mon, join us!
Ed,
Not sure how I’m the one living in the intellectual past when you’re the one suggesting how wonderful it was when teachers forced kids to learn the Gettysburg adress by rote. But if there is an intellectual past that I’m living in, it’s the past of men like Socrates, who thought that people learn best when given an oppurtunity to actually use their brain for rational thinking, not just memory recall.
I’m also not sure which of my ideas have been tried and disproved. I suggested that education should be based not on abstract facts in a vacuum, but on relationships between ideas and people. I suggested that educators should stop insulting the intelligence of students and start finding ways to help them learn what they need or want to learn, not what a textbook company decides is important. Please tell me where those ideas have been tried and disproved.
Finally, I suppose it is “reactionary” for me to criticize Common Core for their efforts to push a textbook-based, ivory tower education by gloating over the faulty results of a multiple choice test given over the phone. My “reaction” is little different than the reaction most students have to this kind of irrational and counterproductive way of looking at education: disgust.
If I sound angry, I assure you my anger is nothing compared to the feelings of millions of students who have to sit through such garbage every day.
Matt:
I’m curious why you continue to push the notion that Common Core’s agenda so singularly focuses on “[criticizing] NCLB because of its obsession with testing.” I believe you are over-simplifying a more complex position. Rather than identifying testing as the principal point of failure with NCLB, they lament a “test-based accountability system tied only to basic skills” (“Still At Risk” report, p. 3). The report explicitly states that the organization is “certainly not in opposition to testing nor to basic skills” (p. 3), and that educational organizations “should think hard about how we might more regularly and more profoundly measure learning in liberal arts and science subjects at a variety of grade levels” (p. 20). The problem is not simply testing, but testing with an emphasis on basic skills that has grown so strong as to leave liberal arts education in a dismal state, as Carol described in her comment.
You also wrote, “But as schools operate now, the only practical application for the facts Common Core finds so important is in the multiple choice question in which the fact is tested.” While I believe the practical application for such facts goes well beyond any multiple choice test, I think your qualification in that statement emphasizes the central issue that Common Core is trying to address. The problem lies with the way “schools operate now.”
Studies like the one reported last month (and I believe your characterization of the work as “yet another standardized test” reveals a lack of understanding about the history and practice of conducting survey research) provide information about the outcomes of present-day schooling. It is as much (or more) an assessment of schools as an assessment of students. The report shows that in terms of providing students with a foundation of factual knowledge about history and literature, the outcomes are unimpressive. Given that, it is the practice of schooling that needs to be addressed. By addressing how schools operate — with a particular goal of moving past basic skills and providing an integrated exposure to the liberal arts and sciences — it may be possible to establish a “knowledge-rich, coherent curriculum” (report, p. 4) in which students learn the factual knowledge while a developing a deeper appreciation of how those bits of knowledge come together to inform our understanding of the world, our place in it, and the relationships we have with the past, the future, and the global community with which we share the present.
Also, while I agree with you that letting textbook companies determine the content of education is unacceptable, I’m not sure how you’ve concluded that Common Core is promoting a textbook-based education. You seem to be equating facts with textbooks, which I don’t believe is correct. As a side note, if you want some insight into the horrors of the textbook industry, I would suggest reading “The Language Police,” an insightful book by Diane Ravitch, one of the founders of Common Core.
One final comment: You accuse adults of being “condescending and irrational in their later years” because we somehow underestimate the intelligence of students. The same could be said of students, who somehow come to believe that adults have gained no insight into the knowledge that may be useful despite our years of living and working in the world after finishing school. Students may claim that the world has changed since the adults graduated. That’s correct — sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. However, it should be noted that many adults were actually involved in making (and sometimes fixing) those changes. Adults are not nearly as ignorant about the new world as some students are inclined to believe.
Matt, I do understand your frustration. Lets widen the field of view a bit, and see if we can’t understand learning a bit better.
Across the NBA today, grown men earning HUGE salaries and the adolation of millions, practiced throwing free throws. They ran drills, practiced dribbling, worked and worked at the same basics they worked at in middle school.
In the USMC today, men and women fired round after round in succession. Field-grade officers did this. Gunnery sergeants did it. Officer candidates from Princeton and MIT did it. Many drilled too at forced entry and urban search. Some drilled in rubber boats. Some flew carrier landings for the n dozenth time. Why? They knew how to do these things.
In Hollywood, actors of all stripes memorized scenes. So did their counterparts on Broadway. If nothing else, students should do some memorization along the way just to earn an appreciation of the hard task of an actors craft.
But of course it goes beyond that. What if you are John McCain or Jessica Lynch in a POW camp, or Nelson Mandela as a political prisoner. Or just an under-employed college grad stuck in a warehouse or a litter crew or a long air flight. The ability to use the Internet to learn is not enough. Sometimes, life is better if stuff is actually in your head.
Sometimes students sense this on their own; sometimes not. I rebelled much against literature class and memorizing countries. I was young and wrong. The data, though, show us that students love to be pushed. They do not love to be set up to fail, and they hate being spoonfed theory and causality far beyond their abilities to digest.
They will play what seem dull video games, if they are engaged and given freqent feedback and reward, no matter how trivial.
To get a little more into the literature behind this, I’d first recommend–if you can–a bit of study into the Cyc project now at Cycorp, but previously at the MicroComputer and Electronics Center in Austin, and Carnegie Mellon’s CS dept/robotics institute. This is a 15+ year study (and product line) into how to get computing machines to be not quite so stupid–to have real world sense.
A bit more to the immediate case of what kids do and should and can and do not learn, is the conference which begat CommonCore. Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children is available here: http://edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=372
Most especially, follow the links to the videos, and give a listen to Don Hiemstra, Principal, Grayhawk Elementary School, and his Keynote: Real Kids Really Love the Liberal Arts. Its very moving, inspiring, and just plain heartening.
Just a quick follow-up to Ed’s comment about the insufficiency of relying on the Internet to learn things. Aside from Ed’s points, I think there’s a real risk involved with giving up on the teaching and learning of facts in the mediated and social environment of schools. That’s not to say that school should be day-long, non-stop exercises in fact memorization, but rather that students should be expected to learn and retain factual as well as conceptual knowledge as a consequence of their educational experience.
The Internet is certainly filled with information, and I suppose it’s fine if all you want to do is check a quick fact, such as the key dates of the U.S. Civil War. However, the Internet is also filled with content in which opinion and innuendo masquerade as facts while promoting one or another person’s view of the world. I believe it is important that people be in a position to critically judge the information that they find on the web, and that it takes more than just critical thinking skills or an ability to analyze concepts. Having a solid and personal grasp of basic factual knowledge is often the key to detecting when people are building what seem like reasonable arguments on the basis of faulty premises.
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I am thrilled that Common Core has weighed in on the Law that Ate American Education (Diane Ravitch). I have been writing and speaking about its draconian requirements for the community of arts educators. I think I am among the few in that community who downloaded the whole law, read it, then tried to make it intelligible for colleagues. I have also emphasized how the law forwards the economic reasoning of Milton Friedman on choice, while treating public schools as more or less productive units in a “government-run” franchise. If quotas on test scores aren’t produced, on time, etc, close the school and fire the staff, and let the customer go elsewhere.
When not bashing NCLB, I write on policy issues in education, with a special interest in the arts. I have tried to make the case that the gold standard for a curriculum of excellence exists whenever you see some balance in studies among the arts, sciences, and humanities. I like this triad for policy discussions because it also leverages conversation about the complete failure of the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation to collaborate in proposing at least four or five models of excellence and balance in K-12 studies for consideration by policy makers. That failure is also a great opportunity for some one, or some group, who could set that conversation in motion in a way that transcends competitions for time and money.
In any case, thanks to Common Core for trying to turn the discussion toward a broader array of subjects. Even so, please make a mental note that the term “academic” is used 811 times in NCLB and elsewhere as if it should be the all purpose and requisite adjective for discussing policy issues. I think the term should be ditched unless one intends to have all students become academics. There is an academic mission of schools, but schooling that is merely academic is dangerous. In the visual arts, being called an academic artist is recognized as praise only by other academic artists, and their numbers have been declining for more than a century. Academic art persists but is rarely praised or prized as the be-all of achievement in the arts.
When Common Core refers to specific subjects (e.g., civics, geography, history, literature, the arts) I think it proposes reforms more attuned to secondary than elementary education. I think there is a need to position skills in reading, math, and technology as tools for learning in all subjects. I hope Common Core does not become a rehash of Cultural Literacy.
If proponents of a common core want to insist on assessment in the arts, they should look at the Dutch national exam for high school which requires students to link their knowledge in the arts and in the humanities and to find connections between contemporary arts and antecedents. And a lot of the assessment is done online, with video clips and other cost-effective, content relevant strategies. Cheers from an old-timer who earned her undergraduate degree in the late 1950s
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