Guest post: What does it mean to be well educated?

[From Chris; originally posted at A Blog About School]

So much of educational debate focuses on how to assess whether our schools, teachers, and kids are meeting certain goals, but the goals themselves seem very narrowly defined. It sometimes seems like we are letting assessment itself drive the goals -- as if we’ve concluded that there’s no point in pursuing any goal if it can’t be measured on a test.

That strikes me as impoverishing our conception of education, so I wanted to open up that topic here. In one recent post, I described one quality that I hope education will instill in my kids: healthy skepticism, by which I mean not just being able to evaluate other people’s claims about the world, but being inclined to do so.

What qualities do you think a good education would instill in a person? How do they break down between acquired knowledge, skills, behavioral traits, mindsets, and values?

(The title of this post is borrowed from a book by Alfie Kohn.)

A Valedictorian Speaks Out

I just came across this wonderful speech by a valedictorian, Erica Goldson of Coxsackie-Athens High School. Here's a couple of highlights:

I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system.

...When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning.

I couldn't have said it better myself!

Changing Education Paradigms

Here's an interesting speech by Ken Robinson, plus animation!

A Radical Unschooler

I grew up reading the works of Gerald Durrell, beginning with My Family and Other Animals. This is an account of the 5 years the young Gerald Durrell spent with his family on the island of Corfu. (There's a nice BBC adaptation which is available on Netflix.)

Louisa Durrell occasionally worried about young Gerald's schooling, and employed various tutors to transmit the basics, but she also gave her son enormous freedom to explore the island's wildlife. His years on Corfu launched his later career as a naturalist and writer. Gerald Durrell treats his mother as a comic figure in his books, but it's clear that she was an adventurous and unconventional spirit who gave her children a wonderful start on life.

I've always admired those, like Durrell, who, rather than climbing up some prefabricated career ladder, invented their own career to suit their passions and abilities. In our times of rapid social change and economic uncertainty, more and more people will be called on to do this. How can a lockstep, authoritarian school system help our children find their own way in a constantly changing world?

Guest Post: the Finnish Paradox

from northTOmom at Parenting is Political:

The Finnish Paradox: Is Finland to Education as France is to Health?

The French Paradox is a well-known conundrum in the field of public health. Wikipedia defines it as: "the observation that French people suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats." The reason we have a hard time understanding how the French can eat the way they do—for instance, consuming full fat cheeses at lunch and supper daily—and remain healthy is that we are looking at the problem of diet and health through a particular lens, namely, the lens of fat intake. If our perception of health revolves around the issue of fat, specifically around the notion that reducing saturated fat is essential to good health, then there is no way to understand French health statistics; they become a "paradox." If saturated fat is not the key issue—and the latest medical research suggests that in fact it is not—then the French way of eating and staying healthy becomes less mysterious. After all, in addition to consuming all that saturated fat, the French do not snack much between meals, they drink loads of healthful red wine, and they eat a far greater variety of foods, including many more types of fruits and vegetables, than North Americans.

The Finnish education system is a paradox to American education "reformers" in the same way the French diet is a paradox to mainstream medical scientists. In Finnish education less is more. Kids start formal education late by North American standards (at age 7), and their school hours are shorter. Finnish teachers assign very little homework and carry out minimal standardized testing (performing sample testing only); teachers are less bound by rigid national curriculum standards, and are largely unburdened by hysteria over "accountability." In Finnish classrooms there is little technology—fewer smart boards, more blackboards. There are no gifted classes, the idea being that the more able students will benefit from interacting with, and helping, the less able students in the classroom. Yet despite all this, Finnish students' scores on international tests are among the highest in the world.

What are education professionals to make of this? Here again is a paradox wherein the data do not fit preconceived theories. Yet as in the case of the French diet, the data don't lie. Sooner or later American educrats—those currently making a lot of noise about the "crisis" in education—will have to deal with Finland. They would do well, in my opinion, to read an essay published last year by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. The author of this essay, Linda Darling-Hammond, explains how Finnish education officials chose a very different path to "reform" from that of their Anglo-American counterparts. Unlike Anglo-Saxon countries:

Finland has not adopted . . . standardization of curriculum enforced by frequent external tests; narrowing of the curriculum to basic skills in reading and mathematics; reduced use of innovative teaching strategies; adoption of educational ideas from external sources, rather than development of local internal capacity for innovation and problem solving; and adoption of high-stakes accountability policies, featuring rewards and sanctions for students, teachers, and schools.

In contrast, she quotes a Finnish education policy analyst who explains:

Finnish education policies are a result of four decades of systematic, mostly intentional, development that has created a culture of diversity, trust, and respect within Finnish society, in general, and within its education system, in particular... Education sector development has been grounded on equal opportunities for all, equitable distribution of resources rather than competition, intensive early interventions for prevention, and building gradual trust among education practitioners, especially teachers.

Hmm. Equitable distribution of resources. Trust. But. . . don't Finnish kids far outscore North American kids on international tests? Paradox indeed.

Poles Apart?

At its worst, the education debate becomes a clash between two extreme camps, which are often represented as follows:

To the right, we have the traditionalist camp, which is all about memorizable factoids, constant compliance, and standardized tests.

To the left, we have fuzzy progressives, who at their most mind-boggling urge us to reject "the deadly notion that the schools’ first priority should be intellectual development". These folks are all about the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage", against authoritarian classrooms, and in favor of giving students control over what, when and how they learn.

I reject both of these extremes. I would prefer to carve out a spot in the middle.

With the progressives, I care about my kids' experience at school. I've already had one child fall into profound depression because of school, and we don't need to go through that again. But I stand with the traditionalists with their interest in content and intellectual seriousness. I want my kids to be fluent in a foreign language, competent with math, conversant with history, able to write a coherent essay, and able to touch-type. With the progressives, I want them to be interested in learning more. Can't we cherry-pick the best of both worlds?

At our public school, I feel that they cherry-picked the worst of both worlds: that is, they had the top-down authority, and the constant threat of punishment, of the worst of the traditionalists, combined with the fuzzy content and silliness of the worst of the progressives. The result is dumb assignments like "write a list of healthy snack foods, one for each letter of the alphabet. First write it out as a rough draft, then make a neat copy with colorful illustrations, some clipped from magazines." This was a 5th-grade science (!) assignment. We had to fight with the teacher to get our daughter excused from it.

Readers, where are you on the traditionalist - to - progressive spectrum?

Constructivist Math and Abstraction

I'm not against the concrete approach to learning math, especially in the early grades. I think the building blocks, the scales, and the plastic pizzas can all be useful for understanding basic calculations.

But math is more than a system for sharing pizzas equally. It is also an abstract language with a consistent logic. And this is where constructivist math curricula fail miserably.

What I saw of Trailblazers was that they never took that next step to the abstract level. If the kids could divide a pizza, they were done. All too often they were asked to write about what they did in words, in a misguided attempt to cross disciplines.

But the language of math, like any language, must be learned on its own terms. Kids need to become fluent in the language of math by manipulating numbers and symbols.

One of the great benefits of math education is in teaching logic. A person who can construct a decent proof is on the way to clear thinking in any field.

Extra Credit for Overachievers: A man named Gödel proved that any logical system must be either inconsistent or incomplete. If you were going to design a system of arithmetic, which would you rather have it, inconsistent or incomplete? Which one is the system that we actually use, inconsistent or incomplete?

Where I Part Ways With Alfie Kohn

As I discussed previously, I am often in agreement with Alfie Kohn in his writings about education.

One big disagreement is over the issue of Chicago Math, aka "constructivist math". Kohn is a proponent of this approach, and he has written with contempt about the parents' groups that oppose it (see "Only for My Kid".) I've done a lot of reading about Chicago Math (on sites like kitchen table math and Out in Left Field), and my daughter suffered through two years of Trailblazers at her private school. I have come to the conclusion that on this issue, Kohn is just plain wrong.

The Chicago Math curricula are really terrible. Why? Because they contain hardly any math, and a great deal of pointless wankery, such as "write an essay about your favorite number". (True!) Kids can have years of this stuff, and still be unable to do even the simplest computations. When my daughter had Trailblazers, I went out of my way to tutor her at home with Singapore Math (I recommend it). Several of her classmates are now taking remedial math classes.

So, much as I want to like progressive ed, I also genuinely care about content. I want my kids to be capable and confident with math, and Trailblazers won't get them there. I want my kids to learn stuff, and I also want them to enjoy their childhood and not be overburdened with homework, pressure and competition.

In a similar vein, I really wanted to like this essay, "Turning Schools Into Robot Factories". And I did like it, right up to the point that the writer complained that upper elementary students "were also taught the formula for dividing by fractions (as if anyone ever does such a thing)". I want my kids to be able to divide by a fraction. It's part of the logical system known as arithmetic, and I think it's basic for any educated person. Is that too much to ask?

Guest Post: Back to Jail -- Ugh!

From northTOmom at Parenting is Political:

Back to Jail—Ugh!

Between the ages of eight and eleven I kept a diary. Although I like to think I was a fairly imaginative kid, my diary entries are strikingly unimaginative and repetitive. But they are interesting to me nonetheless for one reason: every weekday entry during the school year started this way: "I went to jail, ugh." Throughout the entire course of the diary I never referred to school by any other term. The reason this interests—or rather confuses me—is that I didn't actually dislike school. I didn't love it, I may have been a little bored, but I had several good school friends, and I was comfortable there. My elementary school, and even my middle school were second homes to me. I do not remember experiencing them as places of stress or undue misery.

As I prepare to send my own daughters back to school, I've been reflecting on what a difference two or three decades makes. My daughters are in the throes of back-to-school dread, and for good reason: to them school does indeed feel like a sort of prison. Despite the "progressive," child-centered rhetoric of the last thirty years—rhetoric that is especially prominent in school boards such ours (Toronto District School Board), which pride themselves on their forward-thinking approach to education—I would argue that schools have become more repressive, more prison-like than when I was a kid. Take lockdown drills, for instance, which every school in the TDSB is required to conduct twice yearly. This is a practice that originated in prisons as a means of containing riots by controlling the movement of the inmates; its adoption by school boards throughout North America is justified by citing hypothetical threats to "security." When my children were subjected to their first mock "lockdown" in grade 2, they were traumatized, their minds filled for days with images of potentially violent intruders skulking around the schoolyard or wandering down hallways. Around the same time, the school implemented new anti-bullying policies and procedures, the literature for which was full of references to "safe" schools. Could the administrators not see a contradiction between the two policies? How is subjecting children as young as four to lockdown drills conducive to creating a psychologically "safe" space? Have school boards ever performed a cost benefit analysis of the practice in terms of psychological harm versus physical security? (When kids get to high school, the "lockdown" effect is in many cases compounded by the presence of armed police officers enforcing "zero tolerance" policies. But that is a subject for another post.)

Today's schools are punitive and authoritarian in a subtler but arguably more harmful manner as well. Without much debate or any overt change in policy, schools have begun in recent years to exert more and more control over children in the most basic, bodily of ways. In the playground there are rules against running, against using the playground equipment in an unapproved manner, against play fighting or roughhousing of any kind. Within the school and classroom, access to the bathroom is even restricted. If a child asks to go to the toilet before or after recess, his or her request is likely to be denied. I witnessed this policy being enacted in a junior kindergarten class a few years ago while I was volunteering in the school library. A junior kindergartner (i.e., a four-year-old child!) had the audacity to ask the teacher if he could go to the bathroom soon after recess. I didn't hear everything the teacher said in response, but I did hear her when she began to yell loudly at the child who was slinking down the aisle toward the nearest bathroom, "No, it's not okay. You know you're supposed to go at recess. You know the rules. It's not okay!" When Michel Foucault wrote about the ways in which the state exerts it power at the micro level, including at the level of the human body, he probably did not have this scenario in mind. But for me, it is a perfect example of the early "disciplining and punishment" of the human soul.

A few more anecdotes to drive home the point, especially the under-acknowledged fact that schools have become more, not less, authoritarian in recent years:

My older brother recently told me that when he was in elementary school—this would have been in the late sixties—a teacher berated him in a manner that he felt was uncalled for and unfair. My brother's response? He simply left the school and walked home at recess. The school called my mother, who actually defended him!

Fast forward forty some-odd years. I picked my daughter up from school one day in fourth grade and upon seeing me, she immediately burst into tears. She'd been feeling physically ill for the final half hour or so of school, and upon arriving home she promptly threw up and took to her bed. I later asked her why she hadn't told the teacher she needed to call home. "It was close to dismissal time," she explained. "The teacher would have said I had to wait."

On another occasion, my daughter had a total breakdown after she accidentally dented her trombone. Even though my daughter considered the band instructor to be one of the "nice" teachers, she claimed he was nonetheless going to "murder" her for denting the instrument. I have rarely seen her so distraught. She cried for one hour straight, repeating over and over again "he's going to kill me." I asked her why she couldn't just tell him the truth: that someone had accidentally bumped into her and the trombone got dented. She looked at me as if I were stupid and said, "I can't just say that, because he's an adult and I'm not, and teachers don't believe kids." I went into the school the next day and talked to the teacher, who nonchalantly told me he'd send the trombone out to be repaired. He even provided another trombone for my daughter to use in the meantime. But I was left wondering whether he would have responded as casually had my daughter actually done the explaining herself. What is it about him, I wondered, or more generally, what is it about school that makes my daughter feel so utterly dis-empowered as a human being?

This, I believe, is the kind of question we, as parents and as citizens who pay for public education, need to be asking not just about specific schools, but about the current culture of public school in general.

Yes, Prime Minister

I've recently become addicted to the "Yes, Prime Minister" series. Here's the episode on education. It's surprisingly relevant today.

Yes, Prime Minister: National Education: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

A few highlights:

Sir Humphrey: "... we keep the NUT [teachers' union] happy and we educate our own children privately!"

Sir Humphrey: "The education system does all that most parents requires of it -- keeps the children out of mischief while they're at work."

Sir Humphrey: "Children? Who mentioned children? The Department of Education never mentions children!"

Prime Minister: "We're supposed to be preparing children for a working life. Three quarters of the time they're bored stiff!"

Sir Humphrey: "I should have thought that being bored stiff for three quarters of the time is an excellent preparation for working life."

(How many teachers have written in to StopHomework making this exact argument?)

For all you overachieving types, here's the Latin that Sir Humphrey quotes in vain:

1.) "tempura mutantur nos et mutamur in illis"

(Sir Humphrey's translation: "times change and we change with the times")

2.) "si tacuisses philosophus mansisses"

(Sir Humphrey's loose translation: "if you'd kept your mouth shut we might have thought you were clever". More strictly, "if you'd remained silent you would have remained a philosopher".)

The Misery Index

Instead of listing high schools by the number of students who take AP tests, I'd like to see schools rated by a "Misery Index", which would be based on questions like these:

Do the students get adequate sleep? Do they have time to pursue their own interests after school? Do they describe themselves as "stressed"?

If you ask one of the students, "what was the last book you read for pleasure?", does she look at you like you've got two heads?

Are the students engaged in learning, or do they see school as a resumé-building obstacle course? If you ask a student about a subject that she passed last semester, does she still know it?

How do the students treat each other? Is there a sense of community, or cut-throat competition? Is the school rife with mean girls and bullies?

How do the teachers treat the students? Are they control freaks? Do they teach actual content, or mostly compliance?

How do teachers and administration treat parents? Are complaining parents told that "nobody else has complained", or that "the other parents want what we have now"? Are parents treated with contempt or respect?

What's the homework like? Is there simply too much for a normal student to fit in to a normal day? Does it help the students learn, or is it busywork?

You'll notice I haven't provided a way to assign points for each of these questions. That is deliberate. We all have enough spurious numbers in our lives.

What is a Kid-Friendly School?

A kid-friendly school is a school that puts the kids first. A kid-friendly school is one where kids are happy, healthy and learning.

I've had more experience with kid-unfriendly schools, so I can describe them in detail. I live in a well-regarded, very wealthy, suburban school district, which I now know enough to call "nominally high-performing." In our district, you will meet some kids who are depressed, anxious, stressed-out drudges, and others who are brittle, show-offy game-players. These are the good students, of course.

In our district, achievement trumps learning, and reputation trumps reality. If many of these kids get accepted to high-status colleges, this is considered proof that the school system did a good job. But I ask, how does it profit a child, to gain Harvard and lose her mind? I never again want to hear a parent brag about getting her child in to some competitive college, only to have the child suffer a nervous breakdown the first semester and come back home.

If the "great" public schools are really terrible, how terrible are the "bad" public schools?