Primary Resources and MLK

A starting place for docs
http://usasearch.gov/search?v%3Aproject=firstgov-web&query=%22martin+luther+King%22

a High School referent to primary resource data
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/

More docs
Yet the GPO had a different set altogether
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html

Video: try and avoid YouTube…
Hulu, Daily Motion, archive.org

http://www.hulu.com/watch/53359/the-legacy-of-mlk-meet-the-press-roy-wilkins-naacp-and-dr-martin-luther-king-jr

audio

http://www.archive.org/details/MLKDream

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speechbank.htm

Texts on line in whole and part

Google book search

and Google Scholar

 

USASearch.gov: “martin luther King”

USASearch.gov: “martin luther King”.

Educational technology 03

In my previous post I got distracted by one of my favorite topics, pop-neuroscience. Noting how robust brains are I pointed out that these organs do some impressive stuff. I can’t yet walk away from this topic. I love the well-known quote by Arthur Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is so, but we dictate the difference between what is magic and what is not magic by that which we expect. Einstein showed how gravity is not magic. But in the same fashion that Columbus proved world is not flat. You just gotta take their word for it. Same is true for brain function. It works and we really don’t understand it. We don’t call this magic in a scientific age. But, it’s magic.

I mentioned that brains are doing all this rather startling work in a fashion that is dictated by necessity. Brains don’t seem to function on an aesthetic level naturally. Oh well, that comment is not even possible to defend nor make understandable. But the idea is that we dump information into these containers in a biologically efficient fashion but not in a logical fashion. By “logical,” I mean in a way that complements data collection and retrieval, as modeled by our own finite taxonomies. Indexing systems allow one to put their hands on the book that they want because the actual arrangement of a library is rearranged dozens of ways in card catalogues so that small versions of books, these cards, can symbolize a place where the book resides in time and space. You can arrange your library by publisher, by author, by genre, by date, by title and so on. It reminds me of John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity who rearranges his entire LP collection in chronological order of where he was in his life when he first heard the record.

What a crazy system. But that is the kind of system that one might have if data streamed in all the time and the receiver was barely conscious of cataloging their data. “This is your brain on reality.” You might not have been raised by wolves, but the point I was making earlier is the natural method for dumping knowledge into the brain is the same if you were or were not. Our data acquisition is rarely organized in a fashion that complements retention or retrieval.

OK here is Kvalvik theory: our brains are wired to note 1.) novelty, 2.) its antonym repetition and 3.) internal importance. We know if we ever saw an elephant in our yard, because we know that novelty is memorable. If you hear the song, Sugar, Sugar by the Archies all day you will know that song. The concept I use of “importance” is cheating, as it is vague. But this ability to assign importance has to resonate with our “attention mechanism” but here’s how I think it works on evolutionary-psychology level. If you are a teen, on average, you are hardwired to note the other gender and procreate. It is this big motivator and so on… Not getting eaten by animals, hit by cars, burned by fires all seems pretty important. Sex and safety, important.

Weird thing is that if one loves Mozart he/she alters the attention mechanism and points it at all things Mozartian as important. Likewise, baseball, ballet, chess and dog shows. I’m not talking about intelligence so much here as I am the way most folks tend to retain and organize their brains. But these guys who love baseball have a framework built to retain runs batted in and pitchers doing pitchy stuff and so on. It is pretty impressive.

OK next the residue of memory…

Educational Technology 02 (not yet near the point)

In the previous entry on this topic I took a bit of time to outline that

1. We all learn
2. We all think

And you are now thankful that you have taken time to read these observations. My point is that thinking and learning must not be seen as activities associated with any type of educational plan. Those activities are not foreign or separate at any level from our breathing, heart beating and so forth. This is no small point. We have this term, “education,” set aside to delineate a structured process that allows this learning stuff to occur. While one might argue that no one feels this way, the entire pre-K industry is founded on this odd notion: Learning is better when conducted by professionals. …or the don’t-try-this–at-home mentality.

For my point it is vital that we see brains as these aggressive gadgets that are not idly humming a little tune as they wait for instructions, but rather they are these fabulous processors, which are being fed whopping amounts of data around 2/3rds of the day. Further they possess appetite or hunger as one of their key features. We may call this curiosity, but these machines are ravenous. Consciousness is defined by learning.

When my daughter asked me what sleep was I told her that sleep is when we are not recording information. Recording information allows our little internal clock to turn. Time passes to our understanding only because we are aware that it passes. If you are day dreaming, that implies that you are disconnected for the time-passing majig right? You were not “in the moment.” We see the pretty pictures and sensations passing by and our linear beings take note. This “note taking” is learning. In normal circumstances one seldom dreams their life away, they rather experience it from every dog bite to every discovery of a new toy. We learn, learn, learn. Learning is breathing.

The cynic may note how the dimmest and least informed in his/her community is distinguished from the brightest and best by the structured education that he/she received. Yes, I get that. Kids who were raised by wolves seem less likely to manage a Chik-Fil-A than those with a high school education. This I too have noted. But kids raised by wolves have still been recording massive amounts of data and are way smart in what Howard Gardner describes as the “wolf intelligence.” (OK, Howard never said that, but you take my point.) We learn all the time. Kids raised by wolves and kids raised in homes devoted to viewing NASCAR and Oprah have learned different things. And it’s not just the kids, we all have a finite amount of time and a finite amount of attention to spend. If we lived to each be 300-years-old ask yourself if we would be 4x smarter at the end of the day? But i cannot go there right now…

Learning can be structured. Sometimes this is a good thing. Wolf children have a hard time fitting in. Kids raised by cave folk probably fit in pretty well, with other cave folk anyway. They learned how to gnaw on bones, how to avoid getting batted around by mom and dad, and how to drag or be dragged off into other caves for long meaningful relationships. The idea is that the things taught then and the things taught now are different in content but not necessarily in scale. The subtleties of advanced hunting 401 may rival the details in anatomy 401, or The History of Europe 401. We have a sense that our great education is so much more complex than just learning to keep the garbage pile a ten minute walk from the camp, but learning how to figure amortization schedules is arbitrary and artificial compared to keeping the garbage ten minutes from camp. And being separate from refuse may the more important lesson.

Next go round I will get to what the artificial structure and mechanisms for learning might look like, and then on to what may assist us in the learning stuff…

Thinking about Educational Technology 01

This has been my field for most of my career thus far, and I have felt a commitment if not a competence about the comings and goings of different gadgets and how they are used to promote and oft times inhibit learning. Educational technology, to my mind, is the use of tools to complement instruction. So, technically, chalk and blackboards are the starting place for this subject, and they should be.

Learning is this thing that happens. The sensory pathways we’ve got that run from ears, eyes and the nerve endings drawn uniformly over our bodies all converge on our brains in a hurricane of activity that cascades en masse for hour after ceaseless hour of data acquisition. Handy for us that we have this complex sorting apparatus at the ready to take this blizzard of blinky white noise and interpret it as discernable information, which we aggregate initially as reasons to cry or coo. This is thinking.

We sit around from birth to death with these little data sorters cooking. Not put too fine a point on it this is learning. We have all of these internal mechanisms that divvy information into visual images. These are sorted into rather arbitrary distinctions of vertical and horizontal forms, and into chromatic and luminescent information. Audible data is piped right into the brain as the frequency it is heard and is written in and we distinguish it by pitch, rhythm and timber. But we also have this capacity to infer language.

We learn and then we think. It comes in and rattles around in there. Plato and Descartes’ old saw about thinking establishing existence’s proof, is certainly true turned around, as “I am, therefore I think.” Would that be “sum ergo cogito?” The fact is that there is vastly too much coming in to reasonably remember, much less consider. If you doubt this read a paragraph out of a book and ask yourself what you just read. Then ask yourself if the page was clean or stained? Then ask yourself what was the noise you heard in the background while you were reading it? Then what the smell was in the room while you were looking at the page” and so on ad infinitum. This is an important point. So I will restate: We can take in more than can be stored, digested or used.

They have these simple tests where they will say a series of nonsense words in sequence, and after varying pause lengths ask you to repeat them back. Folks can repeat back like five to nine words, or numbers or colors if they are wholly random to the hearer. Centering on about seven items. This is where the myth that we can only think about seven things at a time comes from. Really this is how much a person can take into short term memory. We also have long-term memory of course, as you can remember that particularly wonderful elementary school teacher, or that devastatingly embarrassing outfit mom made you wear to that party in middle school…

My point is that we can, at will store some information with varying success. We are experts in this as you know what you do not know. I will explain. I say the word “know” to mean that I know it happened. I remember it being so. If I asked you if you had ever seen an elephant in your front yard, you would say “no” with resolve. Now that is a fascinating. We know for certain what we do not know, and have never known. You have never recorded in your brain’s existence an elephant in the front yard. It is sufficiently novel that you are certain that is a thing that you do not know.

We also know things that we do not know. I will explain. I regularly ask groups if they know what Play-Doh tastes like. One must be of a certain age, but the positive response is about 80%. That is equally amazing that we store data secretly away from our internal inventory appliance—the part that notes what we know and that which we do not know—and that some things are universally and verifiably stored away never to be retrieved. (The answer is “salty.”)

The point here is that our brains are tricky and they don’t take in all information, and they are organized by some evolutionary hand that makes sense if one only needs to eat, sleep, and procreate. The information that they tend to acquire is often unmoved by our urgent desire to remember all of the bones in the human body for a anatomy test, but instead our brains use that needed real-estate to remember every word to the Gilligan’s Island theme song.

I will follow up tomorrow with what any of this has to do with educational technology.

Ways of Thinking about Things 02: Patterns and Rythms

Ways of Thinking about Things 02

So the Nabokov piece is this story that alludes to its point, rather than just saying it. It is a veil over a meaning. Those who don’t look close see a veil. But I wonder if this is a way to trick combined understanding. I call that combined understanding, or comprehensive understanding where you see the whole not the parts. Can you trick understanding to not come until the end of a story? Is this the same as making every story a mystery?

OK now back to “ways of knowing” from yesterday. When I balance my checkbook or consider bills I think differently than I do when I am making dinner or even writing these words down. It is not different thoughts, it is a different way of thinking. It takes me about 30 minutes to change the tire of my mind and find the part that thinks in the terms of dollars and cents. It just does.

I like to sketch, but I don’t draw with regularity. It takes me hours to remember how to think to sketch. I was raised in Alaska and have rock climbed most of my life. When I climb it takes days to get the feel of it. This is a way of thinking. I love poetry. I like to write in that cryptic fashion and express subtly heartfelt truths in the compressed language of verse. I like the feeling of that way of thinking more than anyone enjoys reading it I suppose. But it takes awhile to think that way. Unless, of course, I am heartbroken or furious of impassioned. This way of thinking is tied to that affective gadget in heads, at least it is for me.

I ordered a drink last night in a club we had not been to in weeks or months where we don’t really know the staff but the bartender knew what we had ordered weeks previous. There is a way of thinking that allows that kind of retention too. And many may say that this is like multiple intelligences. You know like Howard Gardner described years ago. Where we have verbal and mathematical and kinesthetic and all these artsy-to-serious smarts… He got a lot of press awhile back, and Howard describes these as intelligences because he feel that they are compartmentalized abilities.

Howard did his initial observations in a veteran’s hospital. He noticed that if a person had lost (quite literally) a part of his brain then he lost with it the ability to do, let’s say, math or like Phineas Gage, lost his morality or some such. The point for Gardner was that certain sections of the brain in different folks allowed them great or not-so-great mental acuity. And like spelling bee champs, it is because they had a great spelling-bee gadget in their heads. This is not what I mean.

Well first, yeah some folks are smarter than others and our innate talents vary. OK. But that is not my point. I think that we have arrangements, maybe like adjusting the circuit layouts to allow some kind of function. Anyway the physical or electro-chemical reasons notwithstanding, we think not in different subjects but in different way. As I say this it seems that the distinction is lost on everyone, including me.

I will wrap by returning to point #2. We have complex colors and patterns in our cerebrum that do not translate terribly well to marching letters and words. I feel that our thinking is patterns and not patterns of words. Words and linguistic patterns are formed by the brain in the patterns the brain allows and the brain paints with the only palette it has been given, itself. OK, as I read that it makes no sense at all. Try to imagine one of those three-dimensional diagrams of brain synapses that the Discovery channel uses. Then overlay colors and gradients on random strands. Then as one subtracts all those without a certain color one would see various patterns and different gradations. The shape of these patterns, the color of these patterns are part of the meaning that they possess. The information in our heads is color and shape and rhythm, as well as the series of letters and words we convey.

As we reconnect sets and levels and gradations of concepts and synapse we construct patterns that enable types of thought.

This may or may not be in keeping with current thought on physiological brain science but it’s what I got right now.

 

 

My Kid is Smarter than your Honors School

Prodigies.

Meanwhile, we have that other kind of precocity. Not the disturbing anachronism of tweens dressing like Christine Aguilera, but the intellectual facility that makes one assume maturity because little Tiffany has memorized the all the planets and the major constellations all by herself. Well, technically, it was not completely by herself, because you did buy her the book and start the process with her sitting down and showing her how delighted you were each time she coughed up a word or two. But still, this is a whole lot better than her peers who are eating the sand out of the sandbox. It is sadly true that you derive a bit of pleasure when you note these little “average” kiddos seem incapable of combining any two words together in a meaningful sentence, who, at almost three, are still running around in pull ups. But your benign respect for delayed development prevents you from smiling openly. Yet, you are still enjoying this a little more than you should.

So how do you know if you have a Mensa candidate? Well you don’t. As a matter of fact even the folks in Mensa are not Mensa material. At four or five or twelve you are a kid. Kids should not be put in the awkward position of keeping up the family honor, or being impossibly smart, or impossibly talented. Neither should they become world-class gymnasts, nor should they appear on child-Jeopardy. At this point you may ask, “What will the world do without world-class child gymnasts, without the next Macaulay Culkin, without Avril Lavigne?” My thinking is that it will do just fine. Children are given an opportunity to be children and this does not recur every ten years.

Some other family can bring their own kid forward to be the bread winner for their family while mom and dad sit by and console themselves with the fact that this is the best thing for them. OK, I am confusing being a star of song, and stage with the truly important stuff of being way smart. But there is little difference. I use one to make a point about the other. The whole when-they-were-stars reference is helpful because we all know that the young and exploited grow old and are rarely well balanced after they are done being young prodigies. While I do not have the stats, many of the kids who seemed to have talent do not possess lasting talent.

Your young genius should be asked to learn. He or she should be asked to play. They should be encouraged to read, and to think about stuff. If you have academic programs and violin lessons and rhythmic gymnastics lessons, great. But let the world’s next prodigy come from someone else’s family. As for you and for me, I say we let our kids try and do all of the childhood stuff that they possibly can. If there are ten out of eighty years devoted to childhood, let that be devoted to something like imagination, and pretending and scraping knees and figuring out childish society.

This then leads us to ask when/why a kid should go to school at all? Well if the parent is a crack addict and tends towards violence then the kid should be there prenatally. If you are the leader in the field of home schooling and you quit touring to stay home with the kids because you are so fabulously wealthy, then maybe school is out altogether. For everyone else there are the questions of when, how much, and what?

There is a great book out there by Hirsch-Pasek et al called Einstein Never Used Flash Cards. It is a super indictment of the preloading frenzy that rules many families in America. I get the drive. I know that colleges want kids who are gifted, who were constructed from high-achieving high schools, which are fed by the gifted masses from advanced elementary schools, which are equipped with brilliance by the bright light of vigilant families. Colleges want more than high SAT scores. (This does not mean they do not demand that also.)They want community servants, violin experts, football stars, swimmers, debate champions, and kids who were driven hard. No school is asking if you played enough as a kid.

Precocious as a Lifestyle

Precocious as a Lifestyle

So you have this little tike and you have noticed consistently that if you say words like, escalator, and the little one repeats it back like nobody’s business. Then if you bring out your picture book of dinosaurs, the little genius can gobble this stuff up and repeat it back to you with only a single viewing. So you ask yourself if you could say Iychtiathorousus through your own Flintstones-addled brain when you were that age? Well, er, uh, it is hard to say because your first really concrete memory, except for being mad at a third grader who took your lunchbox was your high school prom. Nonetheless, there is part of you that feels that since you know this little prodigy is soooo amazing it is your obligation to make the “brilliante’ enfant” into something special. What to do?

The word, “precocious,” that we generally apply to the irritating kids in family television shows, means to develop early. It comes from a Latin term for plants or cooking, no kidding, like “cooked too soon” or “to be ready early,” like fast food. Precocious is a word for when other people’s kids interrupt dinner and look alarmingly like Jon Binet Ramsey. While I have read any number of books on this topic I always feel that language means what we use it to mean. So “precocious” is a good thing only if you are the grand parent of the darling little nymph. I will use the distinction between this word and the word “prodigy” to draw a separate comparison. The way a child looks and behaves socially, is a different thing from the behavior of memorizing the paleontological names of course. But it is easy to confuse these would-be endearing or disturbing qualities.

Before talking about the “brainy” or “cognitive” aspects of the average wunderkind, let me just share my bias about appearances and social maturation. Childhood is no longer the idyllic place of playing in cornfields in overalls with Tom and Huck, and little scamps white washing fences. Of course, I only know of those ideal days through seeing the movie of it on TV while staying home by myself because my mom had to work Saturdays at the beauty shop. Nope childhood is now not the realm of children at all. What happened, while we were all watching, was that kids stopped hanging out with just kids. While I do not believe in a mythic and better past for all youngsters, I see clearly, that kids used to be sent out of the room to play with other kids. There was no television programming made to “sell to kids” in the slick and (I am tempted to use the word “insidious” here) clever fashion it is today.

Now when young Judy goes off with her friends they might play in a room with the TV as wallpaper and in the background are seeing/hearing all the ads for all the stuff for the teens and for the college age kids etc. They are not being spoken to by other kids so much as by a group of really sad, and desperate fresh-out-of-college writers, who may or may not care about society in general, much less about a bunch of kids. They are just trying to sell product and keep the attention of the Adderall set. Think of a young Paul Reubens or the parents of Britney Spears and whatever the name of her sister is, or Miley-marketing-machine Cyrus, and how they troubled over whether this or that was appropriate for youngsters. The only questions seem to go to the concepts of marketing and monetizing.

This brings me back around to point one. Precocious is not a unique state for kids. They are all “done too early” these days. They are given little choice. Kids are wearing clothes to imply that they are what they see. In theory, parents are in charge of these costume acquisitions, and whether or not we know it they are still playing, and pretending and doing all of the stuff that they are programmed to do, we just have to be aware that they have all of these adults whispering things to them through the media all of the time, and most of these things have to do with buying stuff and growing up too fast. Even if you are the kind of parent who actually knows how to program your Tivo for parental control, the kids are still embedded in this culture.

If a kid is five it may seem clever and charming for them to act 13. But if you encourage this it will not be nearly so charming when they are 13 and are acting like “College Sophomores Going Wild at Mardis Gras.” When it comes to being precocious, it is rarely about being little Shirley Temples but like little Lindsey Lohan. Humans become sentient at around three or four-years old. Before this you exist, but it’s like being asleep at a movie. Then they have till sixteen or so to still be children, and honestly that is more like thirteen or fourteen for most kids. To my mind this all very sad. It is not the secularization of society, that I will cover later, but it is the truly beautiful stuff that makes childhood a time without the kind of worries that unsettle the balance of our lives. A person can argue that life has always been tough, and that it is way easier now, and I will not dispute that. Still, I feel that it is vital to protect the handful of years that kids have to actually know less of the sad, competitive and sordid. This is not about being smarter earlier, this is about some other human value, that allows kids to be kids as long as they can.

Tomorrow: Prodigious

What did you learn today?

Being good at school: What Did You Learn at School Today?

As parents we want our child to succeed. The definitions of success vary somewhat depending on the, parent of course. There are social challenges, physical competitions, class/work obligations, and examination scores that may be the unspoken or spoken priority of the home. The majority of kids come into school with some level of parental expectation as their academic landscape. Kids wear these family-assigned identities like they wear their clothing. These vary as much as the definitions for success. They are being prodded to run faster than the other kids, or win the spelling bee, or never drop an assignment, or to be on time, and to always follow the rules. The parent’s expectations form the first layer of pressure for the student.

Families that do not provide this layer of “external motivation” are perceived as dysfunctional. Little Bobby walks into class with no compunction about doing what the teacher says. These “undriven” students may represent the biggest irritant for the instructor and the school alike. If Bobby hits another kid in the lunch line, or if Bobby refuses to take the test, or if he will not stand in line with the other kids, classroom management goes to heck in a hand basket. Calls home offer some commiseration but no action on the part of the parent. At a session that I was conducting with a room full of teachers some time ago, I asked how many of them had students who were both academically and behaviorally disruptive and also had a fully engaged parents? No hands went up. The perception is that the front line is at home. If that war is not being fought then students are not prepared for school.

The expectations, the reinforcements, and the rewards all stem from the home. If you have disengaged parents I believe that you will have usually unhappy teachers. Of course some kids are the antithesis of their home situation, but all too often a kid who is not adequately prepared to operate in a school environment, and by this I mean does not value the opinion and direction of the instructor over his or her own, will prove disruptive and cause the mechanism of school to cease working smoothly.

Students are also pressured to behave in a certain way by their peers of course. Most of us are painfully aware of the peer-pressure lectures replete with metaphors of jumping off of bridges from which our pals invite us to leap. On one level the message is to ignore the collective will of our fellows and do the right thing. But for students the selection of who their peers are is made for them. I will not belabor this dynamic because the point of about kids swimming in a collective world of others and finding their own identity along the way is cliché, and also serves as a microcosm for what we as adults face every day.

It is worth stating that for the average student the idea of “going to school” and the social interactions inherent in that activity are one in the same. In script writing there is a process of decorating conversation with background noise and slipping in content along the way. This way the lawyers in the law show talk very lawyerly about case X or Y, about which the viewer may care very little, and then they work in the relational stuff about lawyer A wanting a divorce from lawyer B and the true plot of the story becomes evident. One type of language is window dressing for the relational stuff that drives the program. Schools too seem to work this way. The course work, the instructors, the assignments all become part of the background noise to the feeling and the emoting a kid does while in tha environment. We could be sending them off to work in the looms or to pick pockets in the streets of London and still this would all serve as window dressing to what seems authentic, or important to the average student.

So while “peer pressure” may be seen as a concept about students confronted in commercials to smoke dope with their pals, the truth is that peer pressure is the sea in which they swim. Just as young gazelle (or gnu’s or whatever) spend all of their time charging around smashing into the horns of the other gazelle, so students in school are biologically predisposed to spend their time dashing around smacking into the emotions and opinions and of their fellows. There is that expression that you can’t ask a fish what water is like, because they know nothing else, their opinion would be the most informed and the least useful. So when a parent asks what school was like today, the answer usually means, “uh it was like reality, Mom. What’s to say?”

School: Why Bother Anyway?

LearnAnyway often speaks about school and what is great about it or not. So it makes sense to look at why we bother at all. I mean, there is a great deal of time when we could have these would-be students, these little people out being productive, selling newspapers or working the looms or something. Well, I suppose that we all agree that this is a bad thing. Well a bad thing except for those in middle school. We know that child-labor is bad on a scale that makes the Watergate break ins, and Enron and Martha Stewart innocent by contrast. With this said, it is important to acknowledge that we have know this as a culture for a very short period of time. We have not been at this large-scale public education stuff very long at all. More on a quick history in another chapter. Here I want to ask, not why is education better than forced labor, or better, perhaps than having kids all hanging out in pool halls till they are old enough to drive and collect unemployment? What I am asking about is why do we bother doing this thing the way we do and what do we hope to get out of it? The short answer is, “a degree.”

But a high school diploma is, as they say, just a piece of paper. It may well indicate that you can sit up and take fluids, and it might indicate that you showed up for school on a semi-regular basis over the course of seventeen or eighteen years, but beyond that I believe that even the most sincere and the most cynical agree that it holds little promise and implies precious little about the bearer. One could give all these examples about individuals who graduated who could not read, or write or do division, or become governor of states like Minnesota or California, but we all know that this is so. The point is not that there should be a more rigorous struggle to get this document. It is just that it should be understood that dressing up in a weird, polyester, rental robe and getting this piece of paper is all well and good but this is not what all the fuss was about. These rites of passage are important markers for kids and also set up a nice indicator of when parents should start charging rent, but they are clearly not what school is about.

Well the average person has a whole unstated subset of opinions on this from: what they were told while in school themselves; to what they learned by seeing Welcome Back Kotter on TV, to their own skewed memories of what kind of experience they had while there. Each of these assumptions carries a set of expectations like,

1. School is a drag
2. School prepares people to make money
3. School rewards the industrious little nerdy kids
4. School is the path to intelligence
5. School is about socialization and that is good/bad
6. School is a necessary evil
7. School is an equalizer
8. School is a pretty good baby sitter

Most schools of education tend to use text books that speak well of the process. Further they tend to propagate a bit of an incestuous line of reasoning that is also found among people at an Amway rally. “What we do is good, do you agree?”

A rousing, “Yes!” is shouted by the faithful.

“We are helping others have better lives!”

“Yes!”

“We need to continue this good work!”

“Yes!” and so on. Now the goods that these fine sales people are foisting on their unsuspecting friends and family may well be the finest soaps and dry goods for the price anywhere around, but anyone who is benefiting by a system is not exactly who you want to have giving you objective information about its merit. Now I am not saying that teachers are trying secretly to sell household products to teens. Rather, I just point out that most books about teaching and learning tend to be written by the converted. i.e. “I liked school, why don’t you?” People who hated school and were desperate to get out of that system and experience the real-world (whose existence is still inconclusive to me) seldome make careers writing about how much they hated it.Instead we hear stories from the those who droped out about how they rue the day that they made that rash decision, and they wish that they could have stuck it out and become doctors and lawyers, and people who make barges full of money. But, you know, there are also lots of folks who hated school, endured it, got out and have ever since shuddered when thinking of it. But the folks who write the books are like the victors in any war, they tend to tell their side.

Every time I do this thing where I ask “what is this really all about?” people run from the room like I just pulled out a slide projector and wanted to share my trip to Iowa with them. So knowing that this is irritating, I ask it anyway: If you did not know anything at all about this education deal and were being asked to send your kids away for hours upon hours a day for a real big general reason would you still do it? A parent is giving away part ownership of these gadgets that they are fully dedicated to and most times are wildly in love with. These are little genetic extensions of themselves with the same name, the same skin color, and often they have similar attitudes and similar flaws, and they even know all of the family secrets. Do you really want them gone all day?

For most of us there is a resounding, YES. We did all we could just to keep track of their wayward and often argumentative cutenesses for the first five years and we are ready and willing to let somebody else pitch in. Further, they need to learn to count and stuff, I mean everyone does, so school is seen as a good thing. The 80’s movie, Say Anything, with John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler has his character speaking to a prospective father-in-law about his goals and he says

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought or processed. Or repair anything sold, bought or processed. You know, as a career I don’t want to do that.”

At this point in human history most of us find ourselves preoccupied with making, selling, and purchasing regardless of whether that is what we want to do or not.

Since there is that whole childcare-cost thing that we have to deal with for the first twelve or thirteen years of life, school is a no-brainer for most of us regardless of all the fancy reason-for-being crap. Now I say this with all due respect for the stay-at-home parents (wish I were one) and for those whose Montessori ideals are all about nurturing and guiding not just unloading the kids. Later in the book I will talk about some cool ways to think about elementary school, but it is important to acknowledge that there is a vocational-element in the preparation for life (if that is what these school things are doing) and there is a real-world need for government-subsidized help since we are out there working our butts off and paying big taxes for this government-sponsored service.

Speaking of being Americans, there is also the need to keep kids off of the streets. Just as an aside I mention that the whole concept of truant officers, and I am not sure that they ever existed, seemed to be to stop little James Cagneys from nipping apples off the shop carts. Now I was not raised in a big city, but in my collection of expectations I sense that big cities were full of black and white street corners and apples carts and kids nipping apples off of them and there you have another reason for education.

OK back to the “vocational education” reason. Education for us serves our needs as professionals so that we are not toying with keeping our kids home all day thinking that we could somehow out-teach the teacher there in the public schools. I will speak of the cool idea, and the lousy reality home-school is later, but for now, let it suffice to say that vocational motivations for public ed are from both sides: The parent needing to work and the kid needing to learn to work. In this model it seems like there is a small difference between this and Fagan out there teaching the orphans to pick a pocket or two. I just think that this sounds so mercenary and so cold. If education is about training the haves and the have-nots to all be haves then it seems rather shallow. Maybe it’s the Lloyd Dobler in me, but it begs the question, “Is that all there is?”

Certainly, giving humans a method for supporting themselves is important. I imagine some few years ago when there was a thought that the most you could do for the blind was teach them how to make brooms to sell. Or I think about somebody going into the trades as a young apprentice to be a printer because that was what dad was, and so forth. There is an aspect of education that says, the more information you get, the more can do. The more you can do, the more you can make. More skills equal more possibilities. Surviving is no small task. Being able to eat is pretty important, so maybe that is the goal?

Then there is the thought that school is that “other road,” not the commoner’s path. This is sort of elitist so brace yourself for some condescension. Our SAT scores as a nation are going down. Students often leave school without a rudimentary knowledge of the Bill of Rights, they can’t tell the difference between Shaka Kahn and Genghis Khan, as neither of them has yet been on the “Expensive Celebrity House Make-over Show.” They rant that there is now grade inflation, and kids do not know their periodic table, nor their multiplication tables; teachers are lax and good old-fashioned discipline is needed, not molly-coddling the little ingrates. In short, schools, and what’s worse academics are going to hell in a waste paper basket, and there is nothing to be done about it. Whew.

Here the point of schooling is to make every kid a little scholar, complete with academic gown and tassel aside the little mortar board on his head. “If I could be this smart why can’t he. Back in my day we were all way smarter, and dammit kids were respectful to their parents too.”

It is clear that it is hard to arrive at distinctions between , “What is school about?” and “Why isn’t it about what it used to be about?” whatever that was. Generally, the camp that says that school really is about academia are enlisting a mythology about school being a place where everyone was served and everyone was smarter. Rather, what we find is that the more diverse and the more inclusive the school the diverse and the more varied the interests and the scores. But more on testing and scores later.

For now, let me give you an important although boring distinction. There are two separate groups that people break down into: those who think that there are two groups and those who do not. Oops, that is not my point. Let me restate then. There are two groups that I will pretend exist to make my point. Historians call them reformists and revolutionaries. First of all we can see that they are similar because they both end the suffix “aries,” which is totally irrelevant. Secondly, and more importantly they have a different take on “how to fix what is.” A revolutionary says that the old model was broke and we need something better. Like Marx saying that he hated being all poor while the rich got richer. Which didn’t pay off very well for him because his family hated him as they stayed very, very poor, and he did not bathe or cut his beard, all because he forgot to franchise Communism. We also see the American Revolution, (if we remember that unit in social studies our freshman-year of high school, or if we saw the movie) and recall that this too was about saying, “If you don’t like it, you should start up a new country that helps rich, white, land-owners make more money.” This too sort of misses the point, but the idea is that these guys wanted something new.

Meanwhile, other than revolution there is also reformation. Reformation states that things used to be just fine but now they suck, and we ought to stop moving away from what worked so well before. Imagine, if you will, the kind of things that Marie Antoinette might have said about eating cake, or what the hard-headed folks who fought the advent of technologies like, the combustion engine, chloral fluoral carbons and the eight-track tape player. The folks who fought against these were

 

. “Why is this important?” you may ask. Well aside from the fact that it allowed me to introduce the eight-track tape player, these distinctions are critical because they will allow me to use these words through the rest of the text. Oh, and they also are two ways of looking at this complex issue.

It is not the correct way and certainly we all have both reformative and revolutionary tendencies. Neither side is saying what my teenager says about most everything, “It’s all good.” Both sides agree that it is not all good, and “what is” could and should be better. So when you talk about what schools are, and what should, and could be, it is a nice starting place to say that 1.) they used to be better and we need to go back to fix them. Sort of like noticing that your hub cap fell off a few miles back and turning around is the reasonable thing to do. Or 2.) it has never been right and we need to find a new way of doing business. The analogy here is not that you need to go back to fix your car, but that while you were fiddling with hand crank on the engine a hover craft went by.

Ahem, now back to the academic-fix perspective. This is reactionary. I will cover how the past model of education was by-and-large a product designed by those who did not have to work for a living milking cows, and could ponder Plato in their free time in a later chapter, but for now let me point out that this perspective is forwarded strongly by the same folks who always are reactionary, the winners. If you are a writer of staid academia and are published in the realm of higher education, and then you are allowed to write text books on education. You are not only allowed, but in order to remain tenure-track at your university, you are required to publish a certain amount, While you yourself may or may not have attended a public school (because, face it, if you are that academically gifted, then your parents probably were as well) and you certainly are unlikely to set foot in one, a public school I mean, as that is now beneath you as a professor of education at “We Condescend to Write About It” College of Ed., this does not prevent you from being the leader in the field.

Will the winners in the academic path of being the smartest-kid-in-the-class then write that school is in need of true change, or will they write about how it is just not rigorous enough? If more people only knew their periodic tables then it, America, would be a better place. Yes this is one-sided, and oversimplified, but I still feel strongly that much educational literature and theory comes out of a culture that is self-serving and has no interest in serving paths that are “not like their own.” It’s like asking government to pass meaningful fund-raising legislation. It’s not as though they can’t be trusted… OK well it’s exactly like they can’t be trusted. They cannot see beyond where they sit.

When kids ask, “If I will never actually use this information, why should I learn it?” The smart educators all roll their eyes, and smile knowingly at one another. But what if that really were a fair question and, less the eye rolling and knowing smiles, teachers had to answer it? That is at the heart of the first questions in the chapter, “Why do we do things the way that we do, and what do we hope to get out of it?”