Introductory Comments
Review of Fundamental Principles
Impelling the K-12 Revolution
We will transform the nature of the human
experience on this earthly sojourn when we revolutionize K-12 education.
In order to wage the revolution in a practical
way, in the way that Saul Alinsky would counsel us to implement plans for
on-the-ground change, we must be clear as to our objectives, our definitions,
and the details of our plan.
We must first of all be clear as to the
purpose of K-12 education.
The Poverty of Prevailing Notions as to the
Purpose of K-12 Education
Professors of education tend to identify the
purpose of education as the development of student “critical thinking skills”
and a process of discovery that encourages “lifelong learning.” Undergirding this approach to education is a
“constructivist” ideology conveying the message that curriculum should be
driven by student experiential frame of reference and current interest, with
teachers acting as “facilitators” who guide young learners to sources of
information used to pursue individual and group projects.
Education reformers who work outside the
education establishment, in the world of private enterprise, identify the
purpose of education as preparation for the marketplace. These reformers, either explicitly or
implicitly dissatisfied with the public schools, emphasize an educational
transformation whereby high school graduates will possess the math, reading,
writing, technological, and industrial skills necessary to succeed in college,
university, and workplace settings. They
want high school, college, and university graduates to be prepared for
performing tasks pertinent to well-paying jobs capable of maintaining
economically viable nuclear families.
The purpose of education identified by
education professors is intellectually impoverished. The purpose of education identified by
reformers from the world of private enterprise is insufficient.
The Impoverished View of the Education Professor
The approach of education professors is a
smokescreen for their own intellectual lassitude and for the insufficient
knowledge base of the putative educators whom they produce.
I ask my students in the New Salem Educational
Initiative all the time to think analytically about the reasons for Hamlet’s
dithering once he vowed to avenge his father’s death; about the relative claims of the Palestinians
and the Israelis to territory that each considers theirs as a matter religious
and historical right; about federal
budgetary priorities that when considering outlays for defense, Medicare,
Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), physical
infrastructure; about the roots of rock
and roll in blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, and country; about the distinguishing elements of
classical, romantic, and baroque music;
about whether the goals sought by the African American Northern
Migration were fulfilled; about the
comparative styles of Arthur Miller and August Wilson--- and on and on with application of analytical
processes to the world of knowledge.
They come alive when I ask them to give their viewpoints about such
matters. They typically have not been
asked to give well-reasoned views at school.
By no means have our students generally been asked to “think
critically.”
And the projects that they have pursued, so as
supposedly to follow their passions and prepare themselves for “lifelong
learning,” are inevitably done without proper academic context. Their teachers facilitate their quest for
information by pointing them toward websites, on which they yank down
information for which they have little background in assessing value and
pertinence. A student conducting an
African American History Month project in February on Frederick McGee (a St.
Paul attorney of the early 20th century who was a colleague of W. E.
B. Dubois and others in the Niagara Movement) may have no sense of the people
and issues that led to the founding of the NAACP, or of the circumstances in
Minneapolis-St. Paul that drove McGee’s own activism. A student may lunge into a project on the
Cold War with no background as to what communism actually means in theory and
practice, or how a figure such as Joseph Stalin was an ally against fascism and
Nazism but an enemy in the struggle for postwar international influence. Students may grab books for sessions known as
DEAR (Drop Everything And Read), making selections from mediocre volumes
available in their classrooms but never gaining fascination with majestic
children’s literature such as Winnie the Pooh, “The People Could Fly,” or
“Inktomi Lost His Eyes.”
The notion that our children are gaining
critical thinking skills or that they are being prepared for lifelong learning
is a charade. They lack the knowledge
base upon which critical analysis must proceed, and the projects that they
pursue under flimsy guidance are done in such haphazard fashion and with such
little respect for the requisite body of contextualizing information that they
gain no practice in conducting authentic research or in the systematic quest
for knowledge that lifelong learning would entail. This disrespect for research extends through
high school. I have students in the New
Salem Educational Initiative at all levels K-12; rarely has a student at any level learned in
classes at her or his school how to do proper citations, whether internal
citations, footnotes, or endnotes.
The Insufficient View of the Business Person
The purpose of education identified by
education reformers from the world of private enterprise is very worthy, but it
is incomplete.
Job readiness is one of three main purposes of
an excellent K-12 education. Students
must be prepared for a life of professional satisfaction, in which they can
earn incomes adequate for maintaining a family in what we conventionally regard
as middle class circumstances. This is
very important to me, inasmuch as a chief goal of mine in giving my students an
educationally challenging and stimulating experience is to advance their
economic prospects for an adulthood in which they have ended the cycle of
generational poverty that has trapped their families--- ancestral and contemporary--- for many decades extending into the
present. Education is the key to ending
cyclical poverty.
But just to escape poverty is not to be happy
or fulfilled.
The Three Purposes of K-12 Education: Cultural Enrichment, Civic Preparation, and
Professional Satisfaction
Cultural
Enrichment >>>>>
The happy and fulfilled person is alive in the
world of knowledge. She or he can go to
a production of A Street Car Named Desire
or A Raisin in the Sun and have a
sense of the place that Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry occupy in the
realm of American drama. She can tune
into Cosmos and be alert rather than
lost as Neil deGrasse Tyson, the great popularizing successor to Carl Sagan,
traces the evolution of humankind from creatures who emerged from the sea and
adapted through natural selection to circumstances of the earthly terrain. He can continue to be animated by the musical
worlds of hip-hop, rhythm and blues, rock, and country, while still
appreciating the genius of Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. She can understand how Sigmund Freud and B.
F. Skinner each challenged the assumption of free will--- and thus evaluate whether our approach to
criminal justice actually operates on sound principles of human behavior. The happy and fulfilled person has a sense of
her or his place in a world history that has known the Tang Dynasty, the
Tokugawa shoguns, the emperors of Songhai, the mathematicians of the Maya, the
architects of Angkor Wat, the empires of the Mediterranean world and of
European ambition, the genius of a United States Constitution that nevertheless
required the responses of Frederick Douglass and A. Phillip Randolph and Gloria
Steinem.
Education is not just a matter of professional
satisfaction. Education is also a matter
of cultural enrichment. But that’s not
all.
Civic
Preparation >>>>>
The purpose of education is also civic
preparation. People in the United States
live in a nation that is the envy of many people across the globe who yearn for
democracy. And yet too many people in
the United States do not understand the electoral college system, how primaries
differ from caucuses, the constitutional principles that inform the debate
between liberals and strict constructionists, the roles of the House of
Representatives and Senate when considering a process that leads from
impeachment through trial for a president or other federal official accused of
“gross crimes and misdemeanors.” People
who have no or little knowledge of the organizational efforts of Sam Adams,
Harriet Tubman, Floyd McKissick, Bella Abzug, or Saul Alinsky have no
appreciation of the power that lies within themselves if they were to exercise
their full rights of citizenship.
Instruction in those features of history and
government that prepares a person for citizenship is a key component of the
purpose of education. The exercise of
citizenship animates a person for the pursuit of causes beyond the self. Understanding how one may act to advance
one’s own rights is
important, and that is a part of civic
preparation. But civic preparation also
entails an understanding of one’s own demographically defined group, how that
group fits into the body politic, and how the rights of the individual,
particularistic group, community, state, and nation fit into the complex weave
of the polity. When a person is given
the factual information necessary for embracing the responsibility of
citizenship, the chances are enhanced that a person’s civic responsibility will
be exercised both to uphold personal dignity and to promote human betterment in
concentric movement from the person all the way out to the nation as a whole.
And a person with a strong sense of self, a
grasp of the civic ethic, and dedication to the lives of people in the larger
community, is a person whose own purpose in life is multifaceted. She or he moves forth with a firmness of ego
that allows for altruistic commitment to the greater good.
Professional
Satisfaction >>>>>
A person who has been culturally enriched and
civically prepared via a strong liberal arts education by definition has
acquired the mathematical skill, reading comprehension, and technological
knowhow that flow from an excellent education.
.
So let us not fret too long about job
readiness, ensuring that young people have the skills necessary for
postsecondary training that is required for today’s job market, or making sure
that we are competitive with a rising Chinese economic power. Those things will come with a strong liberal
arts education.
Creating New People and a Better World Through
the Power of Education
When a person is well educated, and therefore
culturally enriched, that individual sees the world with eyes ever alert, ears
always tuned, thoughts constantly responsive to the wonder of the everyday.
He notices that his bank building represents a
Neoclassical style that prevailed in the Midwest from the late 19th
century into the early 20th century.
She observes admiringly how the Mississippi
river wends its way through the vibrant cities near its upper reaches. She reflects upon the remarkable spectacle of
a noble waterway beginning as a stream out of Lake Itaska, widening as it variously
ambles and rushes southward on to the Delta at New Orleans, into the Gulf of
Mexico. And she remembers how this
riverine highway awakened the literary gifts of Samuel Clemens, inspired him to
embrace river captain allusions in opting for the pseudonym of Mark Twain, and
moved him to eloquent abolitionist commentary even as he sends readers into
belly-holding fits of laughter.
Sounds of Scott Joplin emanating from an
unlikely urban doorway capture the appreciative comments of the educated person
who knows the connections and has come to appreciate the line running from the
work songs of the slaves through the forms of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues,
all the way to hip-hop.
One of two friends driving down the highway
comment that two large cloud formations overhead must be Paris shooting at
Achilles’s heel. The other remembers how
Hamlet goaded Polonius into sycophantic acknowledgment that a particular cloud
was successively--- upon the observation
of the Prince of Denmark--- a camel, a
weasel, and a whale.
A young woman and man feel awkwardness of a
first date fade when, after viewing a special
exhibit at the Walker, they engage in a
good-natured debate for the remainder of the evening as to whether a Jackson
Pollock painting deserves the same consideration for greatness as the work of
Leonardo Da Vinci.
At a table in a favored restaurant, a crowd of
people in their mid-thirties work their way through a conversation that begins
with a discussion of the Balfour Declaration and the White Papers, proceeds to
the horrors of the gas chambers, continues to the fate of the Palestinians as
second class citizens in a land they claim as their own, moves to the matter of
resurging Anti-Semitism among some European populations, and ends with a
careful examination of the claims of the two sides in the Arab-Israeli dispute.
When one friend complains about the many
faults of government, an energetic conversation ensues when another friend
asserts, “In a democracy, you are the government.” There is a basis for this discussion, since
all of these friends have been educated in schools in which they have
accumulated factual information pertinent to electoral college, primaries,
caucuses, and lobbyists. They know the
history of the Republican and Democratic parties, including the nature of the
very different incarnations witnessed in the 20th versus the 19th
century. They understand the historical
context in which John Stuart Mill could be a liberal when he seemed so
unconcerned with the fate of the underclass;
and how conservative economists in the United States are very proud of
the classically liberal economies prevailing in their nations. They know about the activist organizational
efforts of Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Samuel Gompers, A. Philip
Randolph, and Saul Alinsky, so they know that, whatever their differing view on
the power that should be granted in the name of governmental institutions,
there is a fundamental truth to the idea that if people exercise their rights
of citizenship in a democracy, there will be a mutual identity between people
and government.
The world of knowledge is a limitless sky
under which one can know so much, yearn for much more, stay forever young,
forever interested, always engaged, never bored.
Fulfilling the Purposes of Education and
Creating Better People by Revolutionizing K-12 Education
If education is imparted in the proper spirit,
with attention to cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional
satisfaction, the latter two become natural extensions of the first purpose of
an excellent education. Cultural enrichment
will come only in the context of a deep and broad knowledge of the liberal
arts; and thorough preparation across a
strong liberal arts curriculum in math, natural science, literature, history,
and the fine arts will necessarily provide the pertinent information for civic
preparation and the practical skills necessary for viable job candidacy.
A knowledge-heavy education stimulates
analysis and discussion with one’s classmates, teachers, and others on the
academic journey of the K-12 years. Such
an education provides both the specific skills necessary to undertake
additional training for professional specialization; and the shared knowledge of the human
inheritance that promotes productive and rewarding interactions with one’s
colleagues in the workplace.
The three components of cultural enrichment,
civic preparation, and professional satisfaction
have certain unifying themes worthy of
inclusion as the purpose of K-12 education:
the joy of being alive in the world of knowledge; the confidence that a solid body of knowledge
brings; a connection to other people who
share as cultural inheritance the literature, art, music, and scientific
discovery that their human fellows have produced across the oceans and
continents of the globe; and an
appreciation for the power of education to integrate knowledge into culture,
citizenship, and career in such a way as to unite the three components in the
elevation of the very nature of existence.
By imparting to all of our precious children a
strong liberal arts curriculum, we will create happier people and a much, much
better world.
Creating Happier People and a Better World by
Revolutionizing K-12 Education
Happiness entails both a sense of ego strength
and of altruistic concern. The chances
of both developing a confident self and a spirit of empathy for other people
are maximized when one has been the beneficiary of an excellent K-12 education.
When one’s brain is filled with knowledge upon
the basis of a rich liberal arts curriculum, she or he walks confidently on any
trodden path, among a great diversity of people, and into a multitude of
professional offices. Inasmuch as an
excellent education includes a consideration of ethics, from a study of the
work of great philosophers at all times and many places of the human
experience, the well-educated individual has learned to contemplate concerns
beyond the self. Proper training for
citizenship, one of those components of purposeful education, also provides the
person with the proper knowledge base for civic participation, and a sense of how
the life of the polity is best served by considering the needs of the many.
We must start to build a better world by
taking necessary sequential steps. In
Minneapolis, this means backing the promising tenure of Bernadeia Johnson as
superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. We back, specifically, her encouraging moves
to strengthen curriculum through Focused Instruction and to meet the needs of
the most academically challenged students at High Priority Schools.
In doing this, we encourage the superintendent
to focus on the needs of every single child, knowing that that child represents
the future and our hopes for a better world.
We get a strong liberalarts curriculum in place, find a way to impart
this curriculum to every single child, and send that
precious young life into the world with a
brain chocked full of knowledge, thus abetting a strong sense of self in the
civic and professional realms and firm concern for one’s fellow human beings.
We do this in Minneapolis, thus showing how
the impartation of an excellent education is possible and produces rewarding
results for the human community writ large.
Upon what will become known as the Minneapolis Model, urban communities
across the United States will produce
their own happy and altruistic people. Then nations across the world, even those in
the European social democracies and East Asian economic powerhouses that now
have much better systems of education than our own, take note. A realization of the power of knowledge
properly contextualized and internalized spreads across the world. In the course of whatever time it
takes--- decades, a century, perhaps two
centuries--- people in all areas of the
globe will come to appreciate the personal confidence and the benefits of
empathy for others that a broad and deep education brings.
Stupid wars abate. Treatment of women rises to match the
treatment of men. Treatment for all
people ensues upon a foundation of ethical concepts on which people of many
faiths can agree. People can at last
concentrate on matters of familial bliss, cultural refinement, and
intellectually stimulating substance. In
a future in which the power of education takes hold of people’s hearts and
consciousness, human beings across this wide and beautiful world can live life
at its highest levels, rather than forever feeding at the bottom in the style
that currently prevails.
But let me be clear. While I fervently believe that creating
happier people and a better world via the power of education is possible, we
cannot merely wish such a circumstance into being. We must get to work, applying what my West
Texas pappy always called “elbow grease,” doing the difficult, practical things
necessary to achieve an ideal objective.
I’m sure that my West Texas pappy took little note of the work of Saul
Alinsky and the latter’s emphasis on pragmatic revolution. But these two men from widely differing cultural
and geographic origins observed the same principles as to how to get hugely
important things accomplished.
So let us begin to build a better world by
doing everything necessary to ensure that all of our precious children receive
an excellent education. And the way to
do that is to specify the components of an excellent liberal arts education at
Grades K-5, 6-8, and 9-12.
………………………………………………………………………….
Humankind is very young.
The universe banged into existence almost 14
billion years ago, expanding in those processes that created the earth almost
10 billion years later. Simple cells
took life comparatively quickly, just under a billion years after the earth
formed, but not until 500 million years ago did fish swim in the sea. Amphibians crawled onto the earth about 360
million years ago, and reptiles roamed some 60 million years after that; then about 200 million years ago mammals
moved across the surface of this planet.
Birds flew across the skies at about 150 millions years ago, and flowers
bloomed some 20 million years thereafter.
But not until 60 million years ago did the earth know primates, and the
Great Apes did not make their terrestrial entrance until another 40 million
years had transpired.
Not until 2.5 million years ago--- tens of millions of years after the
appearance of those Great Apes--- did
creatures of the genus homo appear,
and life ensued another million years before
representatives of that genus walked
upright. Our more immediate progenitors,
of the genus homo and the species sapiens, trod the expanses of East
Africa for the first time only about 200 thousand years counting backward from
this year of 2014.
So we are very young.
No wonder that we’ve made so many mistakes in
this trial and error of a process called life.
We are, as the Lord Hamlet tells us, “a work of art,” “noble in reason,”
“infinite in faculty.” But we are still
learning how to shape ourselves into the works of art that will make us worthy
as the “paragons of the world,” to use our reason for creating conditions of
peace, to call upon our faculties to be all that in our enormous potential we
can be.
We have been so cruel to each other.
Even as we created marvelous works of early
civilization--- the Pyramids of Egypt,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Great Wall of China, the temple complex at
Angkor Wat, the Colossus of Rhodes, the aqueducts of Rome--- we beat up on each other, calling Alexander
and others “Great” for doing so. Even as
we asked searching questions and as compassionate thinkers conceived of
philosopher kings, enlightened beings, a King of Peace, we--- those same beings--- slaughtered each other by the millions. We fell before the legions of Caesar, the
armies of the Great Khan, the banners of white and red roses, the marauders of
the Aztec empire, the invaders of European colonizers, the ship captains of the
Middle Passage, the despotic purveyors of genocide in Germany and Cambodia, the
lynchers posing as citizens in what otherwise we have claimed to be the
greatest democracy on earth.
But we have also done much good.
We have created alphabets, aesthetically
pleasing written characters, presses that produce books. We have imagined ourselves at our
best--- in prayer, meditation, and good
works. We have made peace after war and
established institutions for promoting human understanding. We have sought the truth of earth’s place
among the planets, revealed the laws that govern motion and light and sound,
discovered the relativity of time in space.
We have probed the depths of our own mental processes and built machines
that see into our very brains. We have
made such technological advances that at any instant in this year of 2014 we
can call forth facts on any given subject of our whim. We communicate with our fellows in a
multiplicity of ways.
Now we must learn to communicate with as much
quality as we do quantity.
We must go to work on ourselves.
………………………………………………………………………
We do that through education.
Any worthy endeavor begins in one place and
spreads to others. So let us make
Minneapolis the place and the curriculum presented herein the basis for
creating a more culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally
satisfied human being. When people have
a thorough knowledge of mathematics, they think more logically and reason with
greater acuity. When people have read
the
works of literary masters, their neural
pathways are alive with rhythms, symbols, and ideas that elevate the quality of
their own thoughts and the beauty of their personal expression. When people command a thorough understanding
of history; and evaluate the actions of
the human past in the manner of its wisest philosophers, theologians, and
religious teachers; they have a much
stronger sense of what is right and what is wrong among behavioral options. When women and men have a thorough grasp of the
natural sciences, they are better able to live with a sense of appreciation and
wonder at the sheer majesty of the universe, the celestial bodies, the earth,
human beings themselves. And when people
come to understand the beauty, insight, and imagination embodied in the works
of great painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians, they glimpse into the
art forms that they themselves can be.
Let us make of ourselves works of artistic
beauty through the power of education.
Let us understand the religion of the other, the psychological
motivations of our fellows, the history that may give evidence of
misunderstanding, discord, and separation but that we can use to comprehend, to
empathize, to unite.
Through the power of education we can know
ourselves more thoroughly and walk more confidently into any arena of
life. We are culturally enriched, so we
have a depth of appreciation for the artistry of humanity anywhere we go. We are civically prepared, so we understand
the nature of citizenship, and we dedicate ourselves to actions that improve
our individual lives and the circumstances of our fellow human beings. And because our brains are filled with
knowledge and skills in magnificent array, we walk confidently and adeptly into
the workplace with results that contribute to our personal wealth, the material
wellbeing of our natal families, and the economic advancement of our society.
If we create ethically better and economically
more prosperous people in Minneapolis
by revolutionizing K-12 education, our
approach to curriculum moves centrifugally into other places where K-12
education is imparted. So do movements
grow, ideas spread, and a revolution change the very basis of the way we live
our lives. By creating the well-rounded
individual, alive in the world of knowledge and anchored in a firm sense of the
ethical, we establish that paragon toward which others cast an upward
gaze. What once was local becomes
national, then international, and as people across the world become
well-educated, the terror that haunts too many human beings in their one chance
on earth ends and existence worthy to be called “life” begins.
We do this by believing in the potential of
every single human being. We do this by
enriching with knowledge the brain of every student in the Minneapolis Public
Schools. We do this by offering as
exemplars of humanity those students who have been given the gift of an
elevated life through the power of education.
And now that we believe in the potential of
each student in the Minneapolis Public Schools, as we contemplate empowering
those precious beings with the knowledge that will elevate their experience as
human beings, we know that we will need teachers who understand the mission,
have the knowledge, and possess the pedagogical ability to educate every young
person whose destiny depends on them.
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