Cappy

Continuing my series on public schools, I want to talk about the practice of using grades and report cards, not to mention standard testing methods, and how it effects the growing minds and personalities of children. This time let’s jump straight to the argument from effect, since the argument from intimidation, coming up right after, might be a little harder to swallow right off the bat.

What They Don’t Accomplish

Grades and report cards are a near-universally accepted method in public schools (and most private schools) of gaging a student’s progress in a particular subject, and are a means of highlighting their strengths and pointing out the areas where more focus is needed. Children are often scored on things like class participation and homework, but the majority of their grades comes from tests following each section of a subject (say, after each chapter of a history book), with a much larger test ending the semester and counting for a significant portion of their grade.

Do they succeed? Not at all:

• Grades emphasize arbitrary goals over the learning experience: The point becomes the A, or the Check+, or the high SAT score, rather than the subject matter itself. Learning is no longer about the joy of exploration and discovery, but is just the means to an end.
• Tests emphasize data memorization over subject immersion: The fact that “cramming” is such a well-known term in our public school should be enough to send a shudder down any parent’s back. If a child is given a four-page multiple choice test on Civil War dates, he will do his grudging best to accomplish just that, do well on the test of Friday, forget everything by 3 o’clock that afternoon, and have nothing to show for it afterwards except a distaste for history. Students are force-fed minutia without context or relevance, rather than experiencing and implementing the subject they are studying.
• It is more profitable for schools to post good test scores than it is to engender intelligence and creativity: When a school’s test scores go up, their funding increases. And the opposite is also true. When a school’s funding goes up, it must take on more students and generalize the testing process even more. When a school’s funding goes down, it must lower the intellectual rigor and challenge of its classes.

What Do They Accomplish?

I believe that people may be dishonest in their words, but will show their honesty in their actions. So if a person claims that his goal is one thing, but all of his efforts consistently produce a different, even opposite, result, then it seems logical that either he is not in touch with reality, or that his goal is in fact the thing which he accomplishes.

Schools claim that their purpose is to teach children, to prepare them for life, to interest them in a wide-variety of subjects and academic endeavors. But they do not accomplish this, despite decades of trying, mounds of research and tons of taxpayer dollars. Are schools out of touch with reality? Most definitely! But the fact remains that they are accomplishing their goals, unstated though they may be.

• Bad grades promote a sense of failure: If a student does badly in a class, for whatever reason (he doesn’t enjoy it, the teacher is horrible, the view through the window is distracting, etc), he is punished with a bad grade. Their is no curiosity in his predicament, no interest in why, only the punishment for his “failure” to test well.
• Good grades create dependence: Most children who make good grades cannot conceive of doing badly. Their grades become their standard of value - to their teachers and parents, as well as themselves - rather than the knowledge and experience they might have gained. It becomes then more important to do well than it is to pursue your own interests or enjoy the learning process.
• Grades create unhealthy competition: Generally I am all for competition as the best means of producing the best result. But two girls fighting over one guy isn’t healthy competition, and neither are grades. Students often become obsessed with one-upmanship, again focusing on their grades rather than content. Or the opposite occurs, and grades become an unchosen authority that they fully reject, along with any activity that smacks of learning.

Teachers alone cannot control students. They cannot stand in front of them each day spewing the same boring, disconnected diatribe and expect to keep a calm house. It becomes imperative then, in order to manage kids (this is, after all, the school’s highest goal), to create an environment where students will manage each other. Fear drives some do to better on the next test, while jealousy drive others to do as well as their neighbor.

Kept in herds with children your same age, all of whom move at the same pace, you are left with very, very little choice in what you can look for in a friend. Grades become a means of categorizing ourselves, and finding others like us. And then those grades become a point of pride, a source of personal value. More than anything, they a means of keeping you calm and quiet, sitting at your desk and doing your work.

Education

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Ideas

I’ve often heard that kids cannot choose their own courses in school because they have no idea what they want to do or where their interests truly lie, and therefore must have a “well-rounded” education. After all, if left to their own devices won’t children focus solely on the subjects they enjoy and damn the rest? Won’t little Susie just attend four straight hours of art classes followed by a spattering of math (which she only likes because it helps her know how to draw better)? Won’t Billy surround himself with chemistry books and bunson burners, never to read a lick of poetry? Or far more likely, won’t they all just do nothing at all? Therefore it must be practical to herd children from one classroom to another, bringing them to a mediocre level at everything in hopes that they will succeed at something. School must prepare children to succeed in society, in the “Real World,” and must provide with as many fundamentals as possible in order to do so.

While my tone might be a bit more confrontational (I wonder why?), I think this sums up the argument most people would provide for supporting the Well-Rounded Education concept. And it sounds like common sense. Children are ignorant of the world and, we can assume by this argument, of their own long-term interests, and need exposure to a wide-array of subjects in order to insure their success. But I would like to point out the issues that I have with this argument, and the assumptions it makes about children. And if you have a different view that shows mine as false, I would love to hear it. The last thing I want to do is promote a learning methodology that does not best serve children.

The explicit end goal is assimilation and gainful employment

Proponents of this system make it clear that learning in and of itself is not at all a justifiable action. John Dewey (the father of the modern education system) went so far as to call learning a selfish endeavor for which “there is no obvious social motive” and “there is no clear social gain.” In order to be useful, then, we must learn the things that our society needs us to know, and not necessarily the subjects we wish to pursue.

But if the purpose of life is happiness on earth, as I truly believe, then the sole purpose of learning is to achieve happiness, or at very least to assist in its achievement. And if you wish to make the argument that one cannot be happy unless accepted into society and gainfully employeed, not only is that simply not true, but a well-rounded education is not even the best means to achieve such an end.

Most people are not virtuosos. We enjoy a handful of things. And it is from that handful that our life’s work should grow, naturally, like an extracurriculur activity. If instead the common mind is made to be common at all things, never allowed to focus and therefore excel at the few things that he truly loves, how have we helped that child? He will spend his life pursuing goals that are not his own, and moving in a circle of society without his peers. And while I do not enjoy making the practical point, the fact is that the best possible thing for everyone is for everyone to pursue his own passions. The world is built on the shoulders of the few men and women who actually do it, and I can imagine the incredible results as more and more do as well.

Children cannot be trusted

This portion of the myth is predominantly psychological, having to do with our own twisted concepts of authority and trust that are inevitably thrust upon our innocent children. As John Holt writes in How Children Learn:

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words - Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple - or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves - and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

We are convinced as children that we are dependent, primitive and too new to the world to make any choices or know our own interests and personalities. Somehow all of our desires are generalized as whims and our paths an unpredictable digressions. And so we live in a world of authority where every grownup knows better. And our personalities, distinctive nearly from the day we are born, are either beaten down the moment we cause an adult anxiety, or simply trivialized as childish silliness.

In school the assumptions made about us become justified. We don’t like some or all of our classes, we become easily bored or aggitated. We read when we should be listening, or talk when we should be reading. So it’s true, we’re just little ignorant bastards that want to cause trouble, and we definitely cannot be trusted with our own education. Nevermind that most of the classes seem so useless to us, that the one class you love moves so slowly when you want to know more and more, that the teaching methods - which need to appeal to the lowest common demoninator - are driving you mad with boredom. No, that can’t be it… it must be you.

Again, quoting John Holt:

Of two ways of looking at children now growing in fashion - seeing them as monsters of evil who must be beaten into submission, or as little two-legged walking computers whom we can program into geniuses, it is hard to know which is worse, and will do more harm.

The worst harm of course is that we grow up, we have children, and begin the cycle again. And it is a violent, debilitating and often humiliating cycle of degredation and totalitarianism. Grace Llewellyn writes in The Teenage Liberation Handbook:

Most of what teachers know about teaching has to do with classroom management (a.k.a. “discipline”)… But schools push you beyond intimidation; they shame you into believing you need them… It boils down to something called “blaming the victim”: school [and parents] blames you instead of itself for your intellectual influenza. When they tell you the reason you don’t do your schoolwork well enough is that you have no drive, curiosity, or love of learning, you start believing them… Once they convince you of this, through intimidation and shame, it’s over; you submit without much argument to twelve years of it. [Brackets mine]

No one actually has a well-rounded education

This particular point is ex post facto, but I think it’s worth pointing out. After all, if the entire system of well-roundedness does not produce a well-rounded adult, we can assume two things: it doesn’t work, and the world still hasn’t blown up without everyone knowing Algebra and 18th century poets.

Now, there are of course people who are very knowledgeable in multiple, if not several subjects. And I can assure you that 99% of those people chose to pursue every single one of them. The rest of the adults in the world stick to the stuff they love, and always have. Every test they took from 1st grade to 12th in a subject that they didn’t enjoy has been long forgotten, probably within an hour of completing it. And this is because you simply cannot force learning. In fact, when you attempt to force the mind to do anything, you generally get the opposite of your desired result. And in the case of schools, you get generation after generation of kids who hate learning, because they have been convinced that learning is about doing everything you hate instead of pursuing the few things you love.

Learning is selfish, just like Dewey said. And that’s a good thing. School is coercion, just like Holt and Llewellyn said. And that is a terrible, terrible thing. Children can be and should be trusted with their own minds, just like us adults should learn to trust ourselves with our own minds.

Education

Today I heard about something called “Unschooling,” a method of learning based around the child rather than a prepackaged curriculum. I’m going to research it much further, but on the surface it reads like an expansion of the Montessori method, but taken beyond the classroom and made to suit a particular child.

The personalities of individual children become quickly evident even as infants. One might climb trees while another inspects the sap. One might dabble in paints while another orders blocks. Preferences, interests and even the suggestion of goals rise to the surface before long. Why, then, should we all the learn the same thing in our schools? I have long thought that a well-rounded education was completely nonsensical. Children’s minds are not given the respect they deserve, and I’m sure that with a methodology that promoted their own natural curiosity and interests they will quickly reveal the areas that best suit their particular minds. That is why I like the Montessori method, and further why the Unschooling articles I read interest me as well.

An “unschooled” child, as I understand it thus far, would be free to pursue their own interests indoors and out, with parents or another teacher acting as a sort of guide that would provide context and relevant knowledge about any particular activity or subject. Here’s a quick example.

Johnny likes dinosaurs. Therefore, see if he would be interested in:

• Books on the lives of prehistoric animals
• Trips to dinosaur museums or an actual archeological dig
• Other rare and wild animals, past and present
• Descendants of dinosaurs, and the theory of evolution

Or a real-life example, from an article I read today, tells us about Jacky who played on a swingset, a tree swing and a tire swing for a while, and then walked back inside to declare to her mother:

• It is impossible to swing in a square or a triangle.
• When you go real high you hang in the air for a second until you start down.
• Legs outstretched make you go slow (when spinning on a tire swing)- bent goes faster. She thinks this may be due to the fact that with legs bent, your middle [center] is closer to your body and you are smaller so you can go around more times in one “twist”.
• When you spin in the tire swing it must be like how it feels to the earth spinning. It’s hard to stretch out your arms but easy to hold them to your side. This must be why we don’t fly off the world.
• Poodles do not like to swing.

Jacky I think is a really good example, as it shows the intuitive inverse of the “unschooling” method. In the first example, a guide provides a context for Johnny’s interest in dinosaurs. Jacky, on the other hand, already familiar with the concept of garnering knowledge from her interests, is eager and capable of doing so herself.

I need to do more research, and once I do I’ll share more. But I think the point is this: if the free market is the best way to acheive wealth, wouldn’t it make sense to apply the same principles to education? I certainly think so.

Education

WaMu failed, sold to J.P. Morgan, which as of last week is mostly owned by the government.

Wachovia failed (though the FDIC stepped in a little early so it didn’t look like a takeover, ha!).

And the bailout didn’t pass! Because it wasn’t big enough and didn’t pay off the right people! If it doesn’t pass by next Monday I’ll eat my hat.

The Fed’s budget is being doubled. The FDIC will most likely raise it’s 100,000 insurance limit to 250,000. Temporarily?! Chuckle, chuckle…

Once you get past all the Partisan BS, this video is pretty helpful as far as historical info:

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