We must proceed to revolutionize preK-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, and
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 and 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) 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 courses.
The harmful approach of
education professors and their acolytes sends graduates of the Minneapolis
Public Schools into the world and onto college and university campuses little
academic preparation, so inadequate as to necessitate 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
We have witnessed the poverty of the
prevailing philosophy of education espoused by education professors. Lamentably, the notions of most education
reformers are little better.
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 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. Philip 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 prepare 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. 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 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 at the Minneapolis Public Schools. You can voice your views 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 in
schools with students facing the most daunting 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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