The Minnesota Legislature is Poised for the Annual Lunge into Its Chamber of K-12 Ignorance

Two major circumstances in the tragicomedy that is Minnesota legislative and executive policy that purports to be seeking excellence in K-12 education are these:


1) No one in Minnesota government has a firm definition of the putative goal: an “excellent education”; and


2) No one making or executing our law has any expressed idea as to the most serious impediments to achieving an “excellent education.”


I can help.


An “excellent education” is a matter of teachers possessing breadth and depth of knowledge imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum to all students.


An “excellent teacher” is a professional having broad and deep subject area knowledge and the pedagogical ability to transmit that knowledge to all students.


Such definitions put into sharp relief the impediments that prevent us from achieving an excellent education.


At the root of the problem is the spectacle of professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education who do not believe that systematically acquired and mentally stored knowledge of the liberal arts is important. They believe in so-called “constructivist” approaches that begin with the knowledge base and life experiences of the student as a foundation for seeking information that is relevant to the particular young person.


This so-called “progressive” approach to education is implemented upon the assumption that the systematic, sequential accumulation of knowledge in math, natural science, social science, history, literature, and the fine arts is not important. Only those topics that passionately drive a given student, for which a teacher serves as “facilitator” in accumulating this particularistic information, are important. As to accumulated knowledge from the human inheritance, one can always “look it up.”


But this view of education and the teacher is deeply flawed.


Imagine going to a cardiologist with complaints about chest pains and being told that the doctor would have to take a moment to look up what is known about arterial blockage, because this was not covered in medical school.


Consider describing to an attorney an experience whereby police officers broke into one’s home without a search warrant and being told by this lawyer that this sounds like an interesting predicament that the barrister would have to research, because such instances were not part of the law school curriculum.


Taught by such professors promulgating the “constructivist,“ “progressive” approach to knowledge and pedagogy, our K-5 teachers, especially, enter our classrooms woefully underprepared. Those who teach at the grades 6-12 level are a bit better trained, because most get bachelor’s degrees in legitimate disciplines (e. g., physics, math, history, economics, English literature, fine arts). But low licensure requirements mean that those who enter our middle schools and high schools are not always truly masters of their fields.


Graduate programs for teachers, in the meantime, provide programs for easily attained master’s degrees that are financial spigots for universities.


Teachers unions act in ways to protect such unprepared teachers. Most central school district and school building administrators are too busy protecting their sinecures of substantial remuneration to contest teacher union power, and thus the status quo prevails. Our children walk across stages to receive diplomas in name only. Most could not tell you the difference between debt and deficit; the Roman and Byzantine Empires; Newtonian and Einstein’s physics; Ego and Superego; or the literary styles of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.


And they could not tell you the essential differences, we might note in this Black History Month, in the approaches to the African American dilemma in the early 20th century as espoused by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey.


Most of our Minnesota legislators, Governor Dayton, and education commissioner Brenda Cassellius could not tell you much about these things either. And this is the bunch of ne’er-do-wells who will continue to gut state academic standards, eliminate MCAs as graduation mandates because they reveal uncomfortable truths, and act to preserve a knowledge-poor system of K-12 education while claiming that preschools will provide the route to college readiness, whatever happens in grades kindergarten through twelve.


This is what anyone truly interested in K-12 education needs to know about educational excellence and the impediments to it in Minnesota. Then that person will understand that reform will never come at the state level.


The needed overhaul of K-12 education will ride the waves of energy emitted by local school district activists who work in the interest of children while state legislators lunge about in their chambers of ignorance.