Essentials of Retraining Teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> (Part Six of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members)

In considering the essentials of teacher retraining at the Minneapolis Public Schools, be reminded of these definitions and a firm conviction:

 

Definition #1:

 

An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum in specified, grade by grade sequence to all students throughout the K-12 years.

 

                                                                                               

Definition #2:

 

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

                                                                                               

Firm Conviction

 

People are highly intelligent creatures.  All people possessing IQs of 85 and above may learn anything there is to know. 

 

Once we get this conviction in our guts, we must acknowledge that the important factor for learning great amounts of information concerns rate of intake and processing.  People whose cognition operates at higher IQ levels will learn more rapidly than those whose IQs are in the lower range.  We then adjust our rate of delivery and our schedules projected for student acquisition of information accordingly.  But we proceed on the absolute conviction that the great bulk of students can learn anything, and that they can be properly prepared to take advanced courses no later than the high school years.

 

We then do acknowledge that some students, those operating below IQs of 85, are not likely to learn some information at an acceptable rate during the K-12 years.  Even with this acknowledgment, we must be cautious.  Cognitive assessments are extremely useful but imperfect.  We must maintain high expectations for learners traditionally consigned to “special education” classes, aspiring to give them the rich skill and knowledge sets that our enhanced curriculum offers.  We then try hard, observe

astutely, and adjust schedules as necessary.  Even people who do give evidence of genuine cognitive impairment have capacities to learn, feel, and experience for which they frequently are not credited.  We must do our very best culturally to enrich every single child entrusted to our intellectual nurturing;  then we must manifest the skill to make judgments as to the learning capacity for those who process information very slowly.  We must sensitively and accurately adjust learning schedules accordingly.

 

With our definitions of an excellent education and an excellent teacher residing at the upper levels of our consciousness;  and upon the conviction that human beings are highly intelligent creatures;  we must then set about creating highly educated students by giving them an excellent teacher in every single classroom.

 

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In order to impart to our students their rightful inheritance of the rich storehouse of knowledge that has been generated by their fellow human beings, we need better teachers.

 

We must energetically be about the task of training teachers to deliver the high-quality, advanced curriculum.

 

We must retrain teachers at the level of the central school district, with the training that we render in our own Minneapolis Public Schools as the model that other school districts will follow.

 

To revolutionize teacher training is to revolutionize the human experience.

 

Knowledge is empowerment.  To empower teachers with knowledge is to create in them the high potential for transforming the lives of young people who have waited far too long to receive a substantive education.

 

As things stand now, many young people in the Minneapolis Public Schools are not graduating as a technical matter, which denies to them important certification in the workaday world via a high school diploma;  almost as bad is the prevailing circumstance that those who do walk across a stage at the end of their senior year to claim that formal certification lack the knowledge base that a diploma should signify. 

 

Many of our students graduate without understanding fractions, decimals, or percentages;  much less, then, do they understand algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, or calculus.

 

Many graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools have no ability to read Shakespearean literature, most have never heard of August Wilson, and in fact even the mere names of Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lorraine Hansberry, Ernest Hemingway, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or Maya Angelou echo faintly if at all.  Most graduates cannot write an acceptable essay, nor do they have the ability to conduct research or to produce papers with proper citations (footnote, endnote, or internal).

 

Most graduates cannot tell you how long ago the Big Bang occurred, and they do not know when the Earth was formed or anything about the processes that formed our planet.  They cannot trace the evolutionary development of plant and animal life on Earth, and they cannot identify the importance of Australopithecus, homo habilis, or homo erectus.  They could not tell you about the importance of neural synapses, chemical bonding, or the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.  Mention the names Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Curie and you’ll see a lot of dazed eyes and hear confused mumbling.  They may know that Albert Einstein had some wild hair and said something about “E” being equal to “MC-squared,” but they could tell you little about the physics of energy, mass, and velocity, or the relativity of time in space. 

 

Graduating seniors cannot as a rule separate out very clearly the defining features of the great river valley civilizations or tell you much about Egypt---  other than that the latter had some cool

pyramids and some ruler-types called pharaohs.  Ask students to explain clearly why the civilizations of ancient Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, Han Dynasty China, the Mauryan Emperor Asoka, Charlemagne, the Abbasid Muslim Empire, empire of Songhay, or Mayan civilization are of such importance to humankind’s past--- and they’ll be hard-pressed to give you anything resembling an acceptable answer.  Many would struggle to distinguish a meteorite from a Shi’ite.

 

Our graduates typically walk across the stage to claim a piece of paper that does not signify any understanding of Classical Roman versus Gothic architecture;  the style of the Renaissance master painters versus those of the Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, Surrealists, or abstract Modernists.  They most likely could not identify whether a recording played for them is Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven;   Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, or John Lee Hooker.  They would be at a loss to explain how exactly the disparate traditions of Ma Rainey and Hank Williams gave us Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.  Ask them to describe the contributions to architecture made by Albert Suger, Fillipo Brunelleschi, and Frank Lloyd Wright---  and those puzzled expressions would grow more intense. 

 

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This will change with the implementations of knowledge-intensive curriculum that I detail in Volume I, No. 2, August 2014 of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota;  and the training of teachers able to impart such a curriculum, detailed in Volume I, No. 3, August 2014 of the journal. 

 

Deliver to young people an abundant store of knowledge in mathematics, natural science, history, language arts, and fine arts and we transform their lives.  Add to those core subjects of the liberal arts the training detailed in the second edition of the journal for world languages, industrial arts,  physical education, and an abundance of specialized courses in the social sciences---  and we send a new kind of human being forth into a world that they will make better.  They will apply for employment confidently as they prepare for lives of professional satisfaction;  but, just as important, they will live lives of cultural enrichment and civic engagement.  They will have the information base and the interest to vote, to be sure.  But they will also be motivated to be active citizens, showing up at public forums, organizing for community and institutional improvement, and volunteering not as rote, guilt-driven, episodic exercise---  but as human empathy put to altruistic action in the service of people considered part of the human family.

 

To give students the knowledge base that they will need to live such high-quality lives, we will need to view teachers in a whole new way, and to train them accordingly.

 

Concisely stated,

 

K-5 teachers will undergo a full academic year, 34 weeks in all, of training that will result in their receiving a rigorous Masters of Liberal Arts degree.  Multiple weeks will be dedicated to the study of mathematics through calculus;  the natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics;  history, economics, and psychology;  world literature and English usage;  and the fine arts (visual and musical). 

 

Teachers at grades 6-12 will be credited for a bachelor’s degree pertinent to the subjects that they will teach.  They must then pursue and receive a master’s degree in a discipline related to their teaching specialty;  master’s degrees in education will not be recognized.

 

Teachers at both grades K-5 and 6-12 will undergo a full year as interns, at the end of which they will be evaluated for positions as teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Teachers will thus be professionals who have undergone rigorous training comparable to that of physicians and attorneys;  accordingly, their pay will be raised to a median of $95,000 (from the current approximate figure of $67,000), with top earners receiving salaries of $155,000.  Such public sector salaries will not quite those of private sector physician and attorney counterparts but will recognize teacher professionalism and represent significant monetary upgrades.  With teachers thus trained, the Department of Teaching and Learning, the Office of Black Male Achievement, and the Associate Superintendent positions will be eliminated.

 

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We must have such education for our precious children.  We must allow those currently mired in generational poverty to break the cycle.  And beyond the break-through into economic stability, we must give children of all demographic descriptors lives of cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction for the common good of the human family.

 

We can do this through the power of a knowledge-rich education, imparted to all members of the family named Humanity, by high-knowledge, fully professionalized teachers.

We Must Convince the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) to Commit to Thorough Retraining >>>>> (Part Five of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members)

Teachers are abominably trained. 

 

Education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education throughout the United States are philosophically united around a harmful creed known as “constructivism,” which takes student experiential frames of reference and avid personal interests as the driving forces of curriculum.  In a system undergirded by this approach for identifying what is to be studied, teachers are conceptualized as “facilitators,” classroom presences adept at understanding the life experiences of students, listening to young people talk about their passions, and directing learners to resources appropriate to their life experiences and interests.

 

There is much that is initially appealing about this conceptualization of the educational experience, especially in the United States.  People in the United States frequently see themselves as rugged individualists, free to do, live, worship, work, and congregate as they choose.  To rugged individualists, there is a great deal of appeal in the notion of a freewheeling classroom of happy, smiling students enthralled with an educational experience that focuses on them, pitched to their interests, with a classroom facilitator interfering as little as possible with the students’ exciting educational journey.    

 

But such an approach shortchanges students.

 

By not transmitting to them what is their cultural inheritance, we rob students of the great body of knowledge and wisdom accumulated over the centuries from the greatest mathematicians, most brilliant scientists, finest literary masters, most adroit historians, and most supremely talented practitioners of the fine arts. 

 

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Low are the odds that a young student is going to gain an early understanding of the specific Native American groups who populated the two continents of the Western Hemisphere, the importance of Columbus’s voyages to the Americas, the injustices of the Middle Passage, the essential principles of the United States Constitution, or the presidencies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson---  unless a knowledgeable teacher presents information and directs discussions about these major historical events and personages. 

 

Unlikely in the extreme will students in the early grades come to know the difference between

deciduous trees and evergreens, exactly what causes and constitutes different forms of precipitation, what plants thrive in the tropics versus those that persist under desert conditions, how cells promote the growth of bodily tissue and anatomical organs, why Copernicus was so insightful in describing the universe as heliocentric, how Gregor Mendel revolutionized our understanding of heredity and genetics with his seminal work---   unless a teacher who knows and cares about such things conveys the wonder of scientific discovery to students.

 

Not at all predictable will be the student’s path to understanding the cultural contexts that have given us classical, blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop music;  the musical forms that determine the classification of those musical genres;  the defining elements of tap, folk, ballet, ballroom, and hip-hop dancing;   the musical concepts of melody, pitch, and harmony;  or the distinguishing features of West African, Renaissance European, Song Dynasty, American Realist, or International Cubist visual art forms---  unless a culturally and artistically astute teacher animates a classroom with the sheer glory of these extraordinary human accomplishments in the fine arts.

               

Nor will young students be privy to the elegant simplicity of Arabic numerals;  the interplay of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in solving and explaining so many practical problems;  the thematic unity of fractions, decimals, and percentages;  the art of selecting which of these expressions of part to whole is most efficiently applied to a given circumstance;  the magnificent equilibrium of the algebraic equation;  the combination of art and science to be observed in geometric two-dimensional and three dimensional shapes---   unless a teacher alive in the world of mathematics conveys its power and beauty to students.

 

And there is not much chance that students will gain introduction to literary masterpieces such as the A. E. Milne Winnie the Pooh books;  the stories from One Thousand One Arabian Nights;  the strange worlds that Louis Carrol created in Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass;  the power of the African American folktale, The People Could Fly; or the Native American tale, Inktomi Has Two Eyes -----  unless a teacher who truly appreciates and reads high-quality literature models such love in transmission to students. 

 

And yet these are all realms of knowledge in the worlds of natural science, history, fine arts, mathematics and literature over which children as young as those in the Grade K-2 years can roam with acute understanding when taught by a teacher of intellectual substance, rather than a mere functional facilitator.  Indeed, the examples of the knowledge base that very young children are capable of building may be found in the Core Knowledge curriculum of E. D. Hirsch, and in my own full description of curriculum properly sequenced for transmission by teachers throughout the K-12 years in the immediately prior edition (Volume I, No. 2, August 2014) of this Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.    

 

When we give students room to make their own decisions for research efforts, we must make sure that they have a solid informational base on which to identify topics for investigation.  When we ask young people critically to analyze an issue, we must ensure that they have the factual knowledge necessary to inform their analysis.  We take from our students something very precious when we deny to them their cultural inheritance in mathematics, literature, history, natural science, and the fine arts.

 

And if we deny them thusly, we send our students across the stage at graduation, after thirteen years of schooling, almost as ignorant as they were when they entered Grade K---  however thoroughly their egos have been massaged on the flimsy notion that the curriculum should be guided upon their own whims.

                                                                                               

The level of knowledge that abides in the heads of most high school graduates is unconscionable.

 

To correct this violation of a public trust, to rectify our failure to provide common skill and knowledge sets to all of our precious young people, whatever their demographic descriptors, we need better teachers.  We need teachers who respect knowledge and have it rumbling along their neural pathways, ready to be imparted with conviction, energy, joy.

 

To do this we must overleap the impediments posed by the vapid creed of education professors in our departments, colleges, and schools of education.

 

At the central school district level, we must retrain our teachers to deliver the advanced curricular content that I detailed in the immediately prior edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

 

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Over the long haul, we need to dissolve our departments, colleges, and schools of education and come to a consensus on a new approach to training teachers. 

 

But this will take a lifetime or two, and we do not have time to wait.

 

We must immediately implement my program for training and certification of primary and secondary teachers of substantive intellect and exemplary pedagogical skill. 

 

My program focuses on an approach that would transform teacher training throughout the United States.  The approach to be implemented nationally follows logically from the program of teacher training that I assert to be ideal for the Minneapolis Public Schools.  The transformation nationally will require much time to confront entrenched interests of the many adults in the education establishment who benefit from the current system that is so deleterious to the interests of excellent teachers and students waiting to receive a substantive education.   The program designed for the Minneapolis Publics Schools could be implemented immediately, given full focus and dedication to the task, before that time when we can expect to dismantle departments, schools, and colleges of education.   

 

The immediate task is to retrain teachers newly certified after participating in current, useless programs of teacher preparation.  As to veteran teachers, my abiding estimate is that no more than 10% of the teachers presently on staff in the Minneapolis Public Schools are truly excellent;  15% are so terrible that they never should have been allowed in a classroom;  and the remainder fall in the broad 75% that are intolerably mediocre.  The terrible teachers in that 15% category will most likely always be terrible and in almost all cases will have to be jettisoned.  Most teachers in the 75% category of mediocrity should be given the option to retrain and prove their mettle for retention.  For those already operating at levels of true excellence, incentives should be put in place for them to retrain according to processes detailed in these articles, but a flexible approach may be utilized for those already manifesting abundant knowledge and high-level performance.

 

In the article that I will post on this blog tomorrow, I will provide a summary of the essential features for teacher retraining that we must convince the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers leadership and rank and file to undergo, so that they can reach their potential as teachers and impart a truly excellent education to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.  

The K-12 Revolution Will Make of the United States the Democracy That We Imagine Ourselves to Be >>>>> (Part Four of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members)

The United States has never functioned as a democracy. 

 

Throughout most of United States history, the nation has for African American people operated as a totalitarian state. 

 

As of 1789, most people of African heritage counted constitutionally as “all other persons” who were not free, indentured, or Native American.  The free and the indentured were counted in determining apportionment by states in the House of Representatives;  African Americans were counted at the fractional three-fifths, while untaxed Native Americans were counted not at all.  Women were counted for the purpose of determining representation in the House, but they had to wait until 1920 to vote, and they awaited the late 1960s and early 1970s for legal guarantees that moved them nearer to equality with men.

 

African American men should have achieved full citizenship according to the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments, but the Compromise of 1877, Jim Crow, Black Codes, interposition, nullification, vigilante judges, and lynching jurists favored de facto practices over de jure formulations.  Formal citizenship for African Americans came with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but a post-Reconstruction history of migration and Northern-style segregation yielded urban ghettos wherein the equality of opportunity inherent in democracy could not abide.

     

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted on 2 July, fifty years ago at the publication of this new journal.  But fifty years hence, we still do not have democracy.  We will only have democracy when we provide excellent education to all of our young people, providing those living at the urban core a genuine route out of the entrapment of multigenerational poverty, pressures conducive to familial dysfunction, recourse to pharmaceutical pleasure, easy money discovered en route to incarceration, and a life that will never know the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that excellent education bestows.

 

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.

 

The beauty of all of this for those of us living in Minneapolis is that we have been graced with an educational leader in Bernadeia Johnson who has the requisite courage, the intellectual ability, and the manifest compassion that will be needed to turn an underperforming school district into a model for urban educational excellence.  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 to overhaul K-12 educational at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  You can voice support the necessary overhaul at school board meetings and public forums.  You can promote and work for school board candidates who are not lackeys of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and the Democrat Farmer Labor (DFL) party.  You can offer your own tutorial services and recruit others to assist teachers at the High Priority Schools;  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 realize, for the first time in United States history, the vision of a democratic society by revolutionizing K-12 education.

The Fulfilling Life of the Well-Educated Person (Part Three of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members)

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 19^th century into the early 20^th 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 comments 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 20^th versus the 19^th 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.

 

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.

 

Knowledge conjoined with ethics and spirituality is the essence of the happy life.

 

Students of all demographic descriptors are due an excellent education comprised of these constituent elements of knowledge, ethics, and the opportunity to develop a spiritual sensibility upon the solid foundation of those first two elements.

We Must Fulfill the Three Great Purposes of Public K-12 Education (Part Two of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members)

We must be clear as to the purposes of education, understanding that the purpose of education as identified by professors of education is impoverished and that most other definitions are incomplete.

 

Professors of education typically identify the purpose of education as the development of student “critical thinking skills” and a propensity for “lifelong learning,” with “constructivist” curriculum driven by student experience and interest, so that teachers become mere “facilitators.”

 

The purpose of education identified by education professors is intellectually impoverished, a smokescreen for their own intellectual lassitude and for the insufficient knowledge base of the putative educators whom they produce. 

 

Education reformers who work outside the education establishment, in the world of private enterprise, identify the purpose of education as preparation for the marketplace. 

 

The purpose of education identified by reformers from the world of private enterprise is insufficient.

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The great purposes of education are cultural enrichment, civic preparation,  and professional satisfaction.

 

Education is a matter of 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 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 a matter of 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 education is a matter of professional satisfaction:

 

Possessed with a full stock of knowledge and skill, the educated person goes forth to life as an economically productive and prosperous citizen, with the ability to locate the work experience consonant with the person’s life values, goals, and aspirations.  When those whose origins are in families that have been stuck in generational cyclical poverty become thus professionally prosperous and fulfilled, generational poverty ceases and the cycle is terminated.  Myriad social problems are curtailed and democracy ensues for the first time in the history of the United States.  

 

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.

 

Fulfilling the great purposes of K-12 education means citizens realizing their best selves and the citizenry collectively becoming the democracy that we heretofore have only imagined ourselves to be.

  

Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members >>>>> Part One of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> The Damage Caused by Those Campus Low-Lifers Known as Education Professors, with Intimations for Undoing the Damage

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.

 

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 20^th 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 poetic visions of Dakota origins.

 

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 purposes of education lie in cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction upon receipt of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education, imparted by knowledgeable and pedagogically gifted teachers to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

The sentence immediately positioned above packs a book into one line.

 

Details will be observed in the next articles in this series.

As You Scroll on Down This Blog to the Immediately Succeeding Articles, Be Aware of the Importance of >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, and the Revolutionary Messages Delivered in these Three Latest Editions

Immediately succeeding this article are three lengthy articles in a row, each of them actually five articles in one, presented as they appeared in the April 2018, May 2018, and June 2018 editions of  Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

 

The latter is an academic journal of the type historically placed in the periodical section of university libraries, now also found online.  I launched the journal in July 2014, at the same time I began my four-year investigation into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  This became a chief means of conveying the results of my research and the ideas that will be featured in my nearly complete book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

 

These two publications, along with another nearly complete book of my authorship, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, constitute parts of a multi-means effort to overhaul K-12 education at the level of the locally centralized school district, beginning with the Minneapolis Public Schools, so as to make that district a model for the impartation of excellent education.  The focus is on public K-12 education institutions, because these are of paramount societal importance;  the revolutionary effort is by extension applicable to all schools, at all levels, everywhere.

 

The other means of waging the necessary revolution include my direct teaching of students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, wherein students demonstrate their propensity for achievement as observed in the acquisition of knowledge and the manifestation of high ethical standards;  my television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison (Minneapolis Telecommunication Network [MTN] public access Channel 17 in Minneapolis);  the blog that you are now reading, on which you will find 686 articles of heavyweight scholarship and thought;  and public appearances, including first-up conveyance of my messages at monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.

 

Mine is the life of the revolutionary.  I spend 16 to 18 hours each day delivering my message pertinent to the future of K-12 education, at the core of which will be knowledge-intensive curriculum imparted by excellent teachers.    

 

The academic journal, three editions of which you now have a chance to read below, demonstrates the seriousness of revolutionary intent and by inference shows my own stance as very different from other education change advocates.  I am the strongest supporter of K-12 public education that one will find---  and also the severest, best-informed critic.  My revolution is waged on the basis of unprecedented knowledge of the inner workings of institutions of public education;  and an unrivaled work ethic.  The content of the journal articles that you will now read are major cases in point.

 

The first two editions (April 2018 and May 2018) that you will read focus on the wretched quality of articles, written by both in-staff and outside authors of opinion pieces, in the Star Tribune.  The third edition to which you will come as you scroll on down the blog focuses on the woeful philosophy that undergirds teacher training as perpetrated by education professors and that is ingrained in their verbiage.    

 

Education professors are at the root of all maladies in public education.  Their intellectual shallowness and purveyance of errant notions have ruined generations of teachers and administrators.  The abominable quality of coverage of K-12 issues in the Star Tribune brings into sharp relief both the lack of a viable public information source and the culpability of many people and institutions for the wretched quality of K-12 education:  The culpable parties include those in the public education establishment of education professors, teachers, and administrators;  but also consist of people and institutions external to the education establishment who are complicit in the sustenance of the injustice perpetrated on students and thus our society, whose citizens are the students who variously graduate or do not graduate from our public school districts.

 

Hence, you should read the following articles at a high level of focus.

 

They are part of a unique academic journal and the most important effort to transform public education in the United States.