A colleague just forwarded me a blog posted on the School Library Journal website. It mentions Common Core so he didn’t want me to miss it. But this post was far more interesting than just that. It is from a blog written by Marc Aronson, who I learned (from linking to his website www.marcaronson.com) is an award-winning author of nonfiction books for young adults. He mentions CC’s survey of 17-year-olds (thanks, Marc) and our criticism of NCLB, and then adds this:”We adults have allowed NCLB to have its way, in part, because we’re not sure which content matters. And since we can’t discern what’s important for youngsters to know, we can’t make a coherent case for what schools should be teaching.”This strikes me as right on. It is also part of the reason we created CC–to give some coherence to the fight for a comprehensive core and to amplify that message. But its Aronson’s next point that gave me reason to pause:“During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, traditionalists insisted that everyone needed to read the works of significant Dead White Men—from the ancient Greeks to our Founding Fathers down to, say, Ernest Hemingway. Opponents of that approach thought that students should learn about what the late Virginia Hamilton called “parallel cultures”—works that aren’t in the official canon, but are important precisely because they offer a fresh perspective. Although both camps greatly disagreed on the essentials, they each had a strong sense of what mattered. Nowadays, we no longer yell at each other over issues like these—mainly because we’re indifferent.”Well, I know many people who are not indifferent. I have to admit I share a bit of Aronson’s nostalgia for the culture war clashes of the 90s. High-profile debates over whether a student who earns a BA in English should’ve studied Shakespeare, or whether proposed national history standards should include mention of George Washington as President put the liberal arts in headlines and on op-ed pages. There might not be as many of those clashes on the national stage today, but CC has heard from parents and teachers who are fighting for the liberal arts in their schools and classrooms right now. Yes, they’re fighting less about precisely what books/heroes/events should be studied than they are about the importance of studying history, literature, etc. period. Maybe this debate hasn’t gone away so much as evolved. What do you think?Read Aronson’s full post at: http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6545429.html?industryid=47057
Lynne Munson
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Lynn: I feel that the world of books for younger readers (not textbooks, but trade books) ignores the important debates going on in the adult world, and, in turn, we do not make ourselves visible to you. I hope this initial contact leads to further discussions on our mutual concerns.
“Since we can’t discern what’s important for youngsters to know, we can’t make a coherent case for what schools should be teaching.”
It’s true, educators cannot discern what’s important for students to learn, much less agree upon it.
If educators can’t decide or agree, why not let someone more qualified to decide what students should learn –
The students themselves.
Believe it or not, young people are extraordinarily intelligent, even if they don’t know the capital of North Dakota or who won the War of the Roses.
They may even be more intelligent than adults, whose thinking patterns often become rigid and closed to new ideas.
We need to stop keeping students locked up in classrooms day after day, and instead give them opportunities to explore the world. They might actually learn what sorts of things truly interest them, and what sorts of skills are economically or socially valuable.
Give them a full range of choices, give them encouragment and support, throw out the confidence-destroying system of testing and grading, and maybe they’ll suprise you by both the depth of their learning and their desire to learn.
Maybe you won’t always agree with what they decide to learn, or how, or when they decide to learn it. But by giving them the power to choose, you allow them to learn how to teach themselves.
A self-taught student is in an infinitely better position than the unmotivated, passive students who depend on bickering educators to hand them the “knowledge they need.”
Mother birds may regurgitate their food and shove it down the baby bird’s throat, but sooner or later the baby bird needs to learn how to feed itself.
I would respectfully disagree with the premise that subjects beyond math and reading are short changed because educators cannot decide on the proper content. I give teachers, and text book publishers, more credit than that.
Rather, I think there are several factors influencing this, only one of which is NCLB. There has indeed been a strong emphasis on math and reading. Yet my daughter’s 8th grade math class is no longer than her science class or her social studies class. True, she is not given the state test on these yet, though social studies is coming soon.
Part of the problem, in my opinion, lies in the way we teach these subjects. And we teach these subjects poorly because we have stopped making a sufficient investment in our public schools. During the school day, my daughter sits in a classroom much as I did 40 years ago, listening to a teacher talk, answering a few questions, taking some notes, and reviewing photocopied excerpts. Contrast this to when she comes home, where she multitasks on her computer, exchanges homework help via IM with her classmates, downloads music to listen to while she studies … in short, she immerses herself in the kind of world that we can only dream about for her classroom.
How many science classes have suitable lab facilities? How much technology or interactivity have we integrated into our teaching methods? How much training do we allow for our teachers to improve their own skills? We live in an era where the citizenry wants to pay the absolute minimum in taxes, yet wonders why our educational system, our infrastructure, and our public services are at, or past, the breaking point. The social compact whereby older generations insured that the coming generation would have a good education seems to have eroded.
There is no doubt that the volume of knowledge we require of our school kids increases, as much through expanding what they learn beyond our European influenced culture as from new discoveries in every possible discipline. We can’t possibly teach everything of value, and it is of course difficult to winnow down the universe of knowledge into a year’s worth of classroom content. All we can hope to do is make our best decisions as to what should be taught, and more importantly, instill a curiosity and interest learn more outside the classroom.
Matt Valenti’s argument takes up the progressive education position that has been with us for more than a hundred years, and that has created the educational crisis. Objecting today is as difficult as it always has been, because progressive theories have little basis in fact and are as difficult to address as is walking on water. Children are indeed intelligent and can–eventually–decide for themselves what they want to learn, but this is no justification for the progressive refusal to directly tell children those things about the world that they do not know innately. Progressive theory, for example, equates bad teaching with content, so that in throwing out bad teaching content also is thrown out. And this progressive rejection ignores the reality that the world has known a share of good teaching.
The points that need debating are those that make up a basis for education: the relationship between school education and total education, the nature of knowledge, and human nature. Can school provide all of the education that children need? Does having a broad and general foundation of facts and information truly prevent people from learning those specific things that make up their personal interests and talents? Is human nature such that human beings really need only freedom and “a broad range of choices” to fulfill their potential?
These are the questions that have been passed over by progressive education. Unless we begin to address them, we will not be able to make enough progress toward finding a way out of the crisis.
Susan,
I don’t claim to speak for “progressive” education or even to be able to define it.
But I do find it strange that you would accuse progressive education — whatever that may be — of creating the “educational crisis.”
I’m not sure what the “crisis” you speak of is. “Crisis” implies a problem that has only recently occurred. The problems I see in the traditional education model have been around since its inception in the Middle Ages. Whatever current “crisis” you refer to can hardly be blamed on a few voices in the wilderness calling for children to be given more say in their own learning, or asking that schools allow learners to learn in their own way, rather than shoving a pre-packaged, coercive curriculum down their throat.
There is a reason why the school dropout rate is so high, and why the teacher dropout rate is even higher — but I assure you, that reason is NOT because students are being given a broad range of choices, or because their innate intelligence is being respected.
There is no doubt there are many good teachers. But how much better is a good teacher in a bad system, than a bad teacher in a good system?
I believe that the current system, which is obsessed with grading, ranking, and “evaluating,” is a system that destroys confidence, inhibits true learning, and causes students to despise what they could very easily be shown how to love.
Dumping more coercice curriculum on top of them, as Common Core advocates, just makes matters worse.
But then again, its so much easier and more politically expediant to demand more of the young people stuck in their assigned seats, and cry crocodile tears when they don’t “succeed,” than it is to demand more of the people standing in front of them with the piece of chalk (and grade book) in hand.
Its a crisis if you happen to be one of the 50-75% who drop out at 1200 of the nation’s schools.
Its a crisis if you are on of the 80% reading below grade level at many schools.
Its a crisis if you are a minority in the US and you aren’t being given the basic understanding of our common legacy, as it was given to every minority group before you.
If you’re not in one of those groups, crisis may be the wrong word. However, lack of agility and progress accumulates, sometimes to criticality.
I have taught English and Social Studies in every grade from 7 through 12 and at every level from remedial to AP in both public and private schools. I, too, believe that humanities are given short shrift in this day of pressing for standards. I also believe that this problem stems from the basic lack of understanding in the average educator of how the brain works, how skills are a PART of — not the sum of — education, and how to best address the new digital natives. I am totally dismayed to enter teachers’ rooms in which no one talks about the books they are reading, the news of the day (not celebrity trash), the questions of politics and human rights and global understanding. The majority of the teachers and administrators I have known in four states have degrees in Education. Education courses, for the most part, are “dumbed down,” low in critical thinking, and lacking in specific subject knowledge. We need to value those teachers who are also scholars, who study their fields fully through the Masters level before they even begin to contemplate courses in how to teach. If y’all think young adults don’t know the basics of culture, then give the same test to teachers. Most will not do any better.
Jude, love your point of view; but some implementation details:
1) The term “Critical thinking”. This is much at the root of the problems. Critical thinking comes out of the Professors of English, who, unable to write anything readable on their own, made an art of criticizing the work of others. Literary criticism somehow spread from where it was doing damage enough (College English) to most of the university level humanities, and now on down to the secondary and primary schools. Literary criticism, or its child critical thinking, are not the constructive analysis learned through truly rigorous training.
2) There’s little evidence that masters level education helps any child, and in fact some good evidence that it hurts. I would qualify that, though, in that anyone who could get, say an masters degree in business after studying science or humanities, or a humanities masters after undergrad math and technology might make a better teacher.
3) The evidence didn’t show that time is being taken from the humanities for studying for tests. Its been a trend for 40 years, especially in removing history and biography from the reading material presented at the lower grade levels, and the western and world history required at the upper levels.
Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children
Ed,
You’re right — it IS a crisis if you’re a young person who can barely read, or if your lack of a high school diploma affects your economic prospects.
But the school sytem itself isn’t in crisis — it’s simply doing business as usual.
It still uses the same old failed methods, still creates the same condenscending, confidence-killing atmosphere that causes young people to hate school.
Business as usual in schools means crisis for the people who are forced to attend, no doubt.
But it also means crisis in the general community. It’s a crisis when America has the highest incarceration rate of any country; when we have skyrocketing rates of obesity, depression, anxiety. It’s a crisis when families break apart because people don’t know how to communicate; it’s a crisis when parents don’t know how to be parents.
Yet the ivory tower academics, the standardized testing industry, and the politicians sit like the three monkeys, seeing nothing wrong, hearing nothing wrong, and only speaking of something wrong if its something they can blame on the students.
“Let them eat cake” they say to students who are starving for truth, for healthy relationships, for real answers to the real world.
“Let them eat cake.”
Matt,
If you think schools are doing “Business as Usual” you haven’t been in many schools recently. I wouldn’t judge how cars are assembled because I don’t work in a car factory and its mind boggling to me how everyone has an opinion about schools but has little or no real knowledge of what goes on in most of today’s classrooms.
In the middle school where I work students use the web on a routine basis to gather info, present multimedia presentations that are interdisciplinary and relate to real life and use current technology like podcasting, garage band and e-mail to do work. And we are not a school with big bucks. This all comes natural to our students and will help them in this century where communications through technology is important.
However there is a serious lack of study of the sciences and the social sciences because we are all forced to work and teach to those tests. That is why Common Core’s beliefs interest me. We are only required to test in Math and Reading and I left teaching a 5th grade class in a school I enjoyed with fellow teachers I loved partly because we had little or no time for science or social studies, though we do have art and music in both schools.
Students check out for a variety of reasons and in many cases, regardless of the socioeconomic status of the community these can be drugs/alcohol-use by the students and or the adults, parents who are not there for them-sometimes the poorest families support their child the most while the wealthiest are too busy and abuse of all sorts. The pervasive culture that says “entertain me,” “what do I get for for it” and “no accountability” doesn’t help either. We fight all these factors on a daily basis which are out of the schools control and they are getting worse. The list could go on and on. Its not the worksheets, we all need to use those once in awhile, there are lots of creative, innovative things going on in schools under mounting pressure to meet “the grade.”
Make informed remarks, my own son wants out of school at 17 but he’s still excited about college. He loves many of his teachers, thinks much of what they do is cool (right now he’s playing the stock market with $200,00 in mock money and he’s got a great portfolio) but he’d still rather be out hanging with his friends, playing guitar hero and just going outside. Wouldn’t we all rather have lives or work where we could do that on a regular basis? If you work in an office all day with only 20 minutes for lunch wouldn’t you rather be doing something else? Any normal person would.
Sey,
First, my remarks are informed by many years in school — both as a student and a teacher.
Second, I’m glad to hear that your school allows students to do something besides sit behind a desk and fill out worksheets and scan-tron bubbles.
I stand by my remarks that most schools are engaged in business as usual most of the time. Your own words are evidence of it: “drugs/alcohol-use by the students and or the adults, parents who are not there for them-sometimes the poorest families support their child the most while the wealthiest are too busy and abuse of all sorts. The pervasive culture that says ‘entertain me,’ ‘what do I get for for it’ and ‘no accountability.”
Accountability? Let’s talk about accountability.
If only schools would consider themselves accountable to more than just the same litany of English, Math, Science, History. You perfectly state the business as usual attitude — the central tenant, in fact, of the schools’ accountability-avoidance: that the problems our society faces, such as the ones you describe above, “are out of the schools control.”
Such problems are NOT out of the control of schools. In fact, with the modern disintegration of families and communities, there is no other institution in our society that is in a better position to solve pervasive social problems than schools. Schools have the bodies and minds of impressionable young people in their hands for most of their waking lives. To ignore the moral responsibility to help young people overcome the challenges they face in the real world is a sin, but again, its business as usual to the schools.
Schools ignore the fact that young people aren’t learning how to master their thoughts, control their emotions, or develop healthy relationships with the people in their lives. Instead, they’d rather argue about which Ivory Tower academic model is better, or blame the young people for the schools’ own failings.
If what you call “social studies” was not just a euphamism for “history,” if it was in fact a true study — and practice — of the social life of human beings, then I would be all for “more social studies in schools.” Unfortunatley, though, what should be the central focus of every school — social relationships — is most often relegated to a week’s worth of embarassing lectures in health class.
Kids are dropping out of school, getting hooked on drugs, becoming parents with no parenting skills, taking pills by the handful for depression and anxiety, even murdering each other in school. And the response from educators such as Common Core: “they need to know more about the War of 1812, they need to read more classics, they need to have a ‘well-rounded’ curriculum.” In other words, “let them eat cake.”
That’s not good enough for me. Schools have a moral obligation and they’re turning their back on it. That’s what I call business as usual.
Hello, I’m just a parent who “surfed in” to this compelling site. Teachers and schools have no mandate to act as social workers, although I can’t say it is a bad idea. How the relentless degeneration of public education began I know not, but I know that if all my classmates in the mid 60s memorized certain key facts about History, Civics,culture, “classic” literature and the like, then the children of this millennium can do it too, if only it is demanded of them; admittedly, the appropriate carrot and stick may be needed to ensure success. Further, I concur with the previous comments about the benefits of the culture wars, adding that it were better that kids learn anything about culture than nothing at all. (I like DWMs myself, but learning obscure extra-cultural folk tales is better than those demoralizing blank stares on the faces of young people on the Jay Leno’s show!)
Kevin,
What do you and your classmates form the mid 60s have to show for all the “key facts” you were forced to memorize?
An aptitude for shouting out answers during “Jeopardy”?
Naturally it’s true that children of any generation can be compelled to memorize just about anything you “demand” of them — provided you use the “appropriate carrot and stick.”
But before schools “demand” anything of students, the students have a right to “demand” a reasonable answer to a reasonable question: Why?
Why are these supposed “key facts” so imortant? How will they help students be more helathy, happy, or able to earn a living? And most of all, even if some of these “key facts” are indeed relevant to the needs of young people, isn’t there a better way for students to learn them than through the same old “carrot and stick” approach?
The “carrot and stick” is a telling metaphor, as it describes the method a person might use to force a beast of burden to pull a load.
I think young people deserve better than to be treated as the beast of burden for the ivory tower academics, the politicians, test makers, and textbook publishers.
Maybe teachers shouldn’t be expected to be social workers. But the present system often makes them “anti-social” workers who churn out generations of kids who hate school.
The “demoralizing blank stares” you speak of (kind of like the ones on the kids in the pictures on this website) are the stares of people (yes, people) who have been told in no uncertain terms that their social needs won’t be met, that their personal dreams are irrelevant, and that their education should be whatever it is that their teachers tell them it should be.
That “demoralizing blank stare” is the stare of a beast of burden, whose carrots are rotten and whose stick hurts more than you can imagine.
Interesting point – but I am not sure that really explains the situation. With gas over $4 a gallon that changes everything.