Oct 3, 2019

>Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Sixty-Four (Part Three, Philosophy) >>>>> Properly Defining an Excellent Education and the Excellent Teacher

We must proceed to revolutionize pre-K-12 education by emphasizing knowledge acquired over the process of delivery.  Thus, we should proceed on the basis of the definition gleaned from the work of E. D. Hirsch, but with more attention paid to teacher quality and with extension of Hirsch’s work, which concerns especially pre-K-6 and also grades 7-8 curriculum, to grades 9-12 of high school.

 

Accordingly, we must revamp and upgrade curriculum for specification of knowledge sets for delivery in logical succession throughout the pre-K-12 years.  Currently, we have little curriculum at all at the K-5 level and consider middle school a time primarily for socialization.  We wait until high school to deliver anything approaching a content-rich curriculum, and we try to do this with too many teachers who are not knowledgeable enough to deliver the content.

                                                                                               

Having revamped, upgraded, and sequenced the curriculum, we must train teachers who are academicians able to impart specified skill and knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

In overhauling curriculum and training teachers, we must be clear as to what constitutes excellent education and the excellent teacher:

 

Definition of an Excellent Education

 

An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets in the liberal, technological, ande vocational arts in grade by grade sequence throughout the preK-12 years.

 

Definition of the Excellent Teacher

 

An excellent teacher is a person of broad and deep knowledge, with the pedagogical skill to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

Why Defining Excellent Education and the Excellent Teacher Are so Important

 

Remember that the education professor first made her or his appearance on university campuses in the early years of the twentieth century.  Previously, these trainers of teachers had operated out of institutions known as normal schools.  Few people living as the 19th century turned into the 20th century had sought education beyond the sixth grade;  a few went through the eighth grade;  a very small percentage went on to high school.  Teachers at grades one through eight stressed reading, fundamental math, and lessons in geography, history, civics, and literature found in books such as the McGuffey readers.  Teachers at the high school level were field specialists who trained student populations aspiring to college and university attendance.

 

Thus, well into the twentieth century, teachers saw themselves as imparters of knowledge in specific subject areas.  Many teachers, especially at the grades one through eight level, were not well-trained, but even they saw themselves as transmitting important knowledge and skill sets to students.

                                                   

But university-based education professors had other ideas. 

 

Now finding themselves surrounded by professorial field specialists with much more knowledge than they, education professors began to stress pedagogy over subject area knowledge, process over content.  Terms such as “teaching the whole child,” “project method,”  and “child-centered education” conveyed in explanation and application the key idea that knowledge does not matter;  rather, education professors stressed the process of learning, with deference to the personality and capabilities of the individual child. 

 

Resonating with 19th century literary and philosophical Romanticism touting the divine spark within the individual, the doctrines of education professors conveyed a naïve belief that children if left unfettered by their teachers would find their way to the education that they needed. Education professors faced challenges in convincing local parents and teachers to embrace their “progressive” approach to the education, but from the 1960s on their approach became deeply rooted in the locally centralized school districts of the United States.

 

Over time, subject-specific masters and doctoral degrees gave way to graduate degrees in education for those seeking advancement in the school district hierarchy.  At their core, staff at the Davis Center (central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools, 1250 West Broadway) do not believe in the importance of knowledge.  Students learn very little at grades K-5, and curriculum is weak at grades 6-8 and 9-12.  Only in Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses do students have a chance to get a substantive education, but by that time their academic foundation is weak;  and very few teachers have the knowledge to teach AP and IB courses.

 

Understand how these terms represent the harmful approach of education professors that sends graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools into the world and onto college and university campuses with so little academic preparation, necessitating remedial education for one-third of those graduates.

 

The Abject Ignorance of the American Populace Must Be Rectified Via the Impartation of a Knowledge-Intensive K-12 Education

 

There is a dominant motif in K-12 Education that has violent impact on the lives of our children, as follows:

 

The call for education reform is received by many as a chance to advocate for innovation that challenges the structure and the competency of the traditional school framework.  But most charter schools are worse than the regular public schools, home schooling has as variable success as there is competency of parents to be teachers, and aside from putting in play the notion of increased parental options, the voucher system has gained little traction.  The notion that measurable results can be achieved with a shift to smaller schools or school communities;  and the idea that designing buildings for fluid spaces offering high-technology and fast-paced activities as a means for boosting student achievement;  have as yet yielded no measurable results.  National programs such as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race to the Top are inevitably destroyed by a combination of political forces from the political left (under the sway of teachers unions and others within the education establishment) and the political right (who object to any federal or national level policy as an assault on local control).

 

This dominant motif that calls for better results, gives rein to many disparate groups for the achievement of student progress, and induces federal government action with the intent to improve student performance has resulted in little progress for our students.  The repetition of a whirlwind of mostly ineffective reformist action amidst competing political forces that vitiate any promising initiatives within the whirlwind---  has violent consequences for our youth and for the citizenry of United States.

 

We fail because very few advocating for reform have a clear conception of an excellent education and little understanding of the quality of teachers needed to impart an excellent education.

 

We fail because people of the United States have a fixation on local control that vitiates any national-level effort.

 

We fail because we have a low level of civic participation in our society, with few people involving themselves in those activities that will be necessary to overhaul K-12 education.

 

This failure has violent consequences:

 

Our young people are knowledge-starved.

 

The result for too many of our youth is a life in which there is dysfunction at home and unsatisfactory experiences at school, which is a terrible place to be:  These prevailing circumstances lead many young people to the life of the street, teenage pregnancy, gang affiliation, violent behavior, and a fast track to prison.

 

The American populace as a whole wanders through life on the basis of a very low cultural aesthetic and limited understanding of the ethical precepts that undergird the wisest among history’s philosophers and theologians.   Lives lived in ignorance and illusion are lives given to violent behavior in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, everywhere in these United States.

 

There is a better way.

 

There is a better life.

 

There awaits for us a less violent society.

 

In education there is personal fulfillment.

 

In education there is personal control.

 

In education there is altruistic inclination.

 

We must take a stand for knowledge-intensive education imparted by intellectually astute and pedagogically skilled teachers retrained at the central school district level.

 

To induce central school district staff to define excellent education and train the teachers necessary to impart that education, we must act by exerting pressure on officials at the level of the locally centralized school district

 

Failure to do so will leave us with the ignorant, violent, and dissatisfied society that we now have.

 

Success in doing so will yield people who are culturally enriched, civically engaged, and professionally prepared, and who have little reason to want a violent and desultory life.

Rather, as knowledge replaces the abject ignorance of the American populace, citizens will have every reason to want to live as fulfilled individuals and community participants for whom violence is abhorrent and life is a magnificent gift to be treasured, honored, perfected.

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 that maintains 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 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 revenge 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 must be made 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 may conduct 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 [Native American tale].

 

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 purpose of education identified by education reformers from the world of private enterprise is very worthy, but it is incomplete. 

 

The Three Purposes of K-12 Education:  Cultural Enrichment, Civic Preparation, and Professional Satisfaction

                                                           

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 for 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 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 Degrassey 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 Togugawa shoguns, the emperors of Songhai, the mathematicians of the Maya, the architects of Anghor 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.

 

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 enhance 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.

 

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 formations overhead must be Paris shooting at Hector’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 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 the 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. Phillip 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 becomes a natural extension of the first two purposes of an excellent education.  These three components together have certain unifying themes:   the joy of being alive in the world of knowledge;  the confidence that a solid body of knowing many things 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.

 

A person who possesses the cultural enrichment and the civic preparation that has come with a liberal arts education by definition has acquired the mathematical skill, reading comprehension, and technological knowhow that flow from an excellent education.  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.

 

An excellent education provides cultural sustenance.  The world comes alive in appreciation of the musical forms of classical, jazz, rhythm and blues, blues, folk, country, and rock and roll.  The visual cortex lights up with excitement in viewing the work of the Old Masters, Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and Abstractionists.  The cosmos becomes a source of wonder upon contemplation of the great astronomical concatenation that followed a tremendous explosion 13.8 billion years ago.  Language and dramatic insight flow from the literary treasures of William Shakespeare and August Wilson.  Historical context explains the advent of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinhem, the power of their conviction, the impact of their activism. The Pythagorean Theorem is seen for the sheer beauty of its explanatory precision.  Newtonian Laws of Motion explain one’s traverse across earthly expanses, Einstein’s Relativity provides introduction to worlds beyond worlds.

 

An excellent education provides civic preparation.  One understands the great experiment of the Enlightenment that is the United States.  The educated person has a grasp of constitutional principles and can personally evaluate Supreme Court decisions.  One understands the historical forces that have produced roles and statuses pertinent to class and gender.   She who has received an excellent education knows the function and the functioning of the Electoral College, understands caucus and primary, has the knowledge base to file for public office, comprehends the array of issues necessary for effective campaigning.  He who has the educational foundation to join the informed electorate can determine on the basis of historical fact, national relevance, and international circumstances the wisdom of sending the sons of mothers and the daughters of fathers forth into potentially lethal battle.

 

An excellent education provides professional satisfaction.  Fueled with the power of an excellent education, a person can take one’s position in the fields of medicine, law, education, business, or agriculture.  Given the options provided by an excellent education, decisions regarding vocation may be rendered with considerations of responsibility to the family formed of spouse, children, and relatives;  and the family formed of humanity.  Dedication to a satisfying job gives a person a sense of dignity, the spirit of contributing to the familial and the greater good, and the abiding assumption that at the end of this earthly journey a legacy will remain.

 

People of all ethnicities of whatever economic wherewithal deserve the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that an excellent education brings.  Excellent education for most people must be gained in the schools of locally centralized school districts.  An excellent K-12 education is defined by knowledge and skill sets especially yielding information across the liberal arts of math, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), social science (upon a foundation of history, geography, and economics;  with introduction to political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology);  and the fine arts (visual and musical).  An excellent education can only be imparted by excellent teachers, who by definition are pedagogically gifted professionals possessing deep and broad subject area knowledge across the liberal arts. 

 

The locally centralized school district is the unit in the United States best positioned to impart an excellent education.  It also must be the organization that provides teacher retraining, so that well-meaning and dedicated teachers who truly strive for excellence can overcome the inadequacy of their training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.

 

We must get this mission in our guts. 

 

We must feel in the depths of our individual and collective souls the responsibility to all of our precious children. 

 

We cannot wait until all families are the perfections of our imagination. 

 

If all families are not as we think they should be, be must embrace all children as our own. 

 

Through excellent K-12 education we can shape a different world. 

 

We can pay the debt of history and atone for the misdeeds of our forbearers, even as we seize the instruments of democracy that our ancestors have placed in our hands. 

 

For to be sure, we can at last achieve true democracy by providing equal opportunity for every person via our transformation of K-12 education.

 

We need not go to Guatemala to build schools, though that is a great service if we can do that, too.  We do not have to wait until the next hurricane hits Haiti, although compassion for people in other places is a wonderful thing.  But there are people very near your house, close to your community, living a short flight of the robin from your abode, who await the justice to which you can contribute if you care enough.

 

You need not go to an international outpost, to Washington, D. C., or even to the state Capitol in St. Paul to make a difference.  The opportunity to make an enormous difference lies in organizational and personal effort supportive of the initiatives already in progress at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  You can voice support for these initiatives at school board meetings and public forums.  You can promote and work for school board candidates who understand the importance of knowledge-intensive education.  You can offer your own tutorial services and recruit others to assist teachers schools wityh students facing the most life challenges;  and if you can do this well, you will make a direct contribution to educational excellence for every child.

 

And in doing these things, you will be helping to atone for a brutal history and to advance the vision of a democratic society by revolutionizing K-12 education.

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