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A Crucible Moment in Education
There was some rolling of eyes in my community when President Obama announced he would like to see high school mandatory until age 18. That’s because at Bard College of Simon’s Rock, my alma mater, where I’ve been teaching for the past 17 years, the standard procedure for students is to leave high school at about age 16, generally after 10th grade, and shift into our early college program.
Most Simon’s Rock students are motivated to step off the beaten path and try a different approach to college because they’re high achievers who are bored in high school. A few come to us because they’ve been so socially mauled in high school that Simon’s Rock becomes not only an academic, but also a social refuge for them.
In any case, for my students, being compelled to stay in high school until they were 18 years old would have been torturous, and would not have improved their future chances of success any more than “dropping out” to try a more innovative form of education—early college.
President Obama’s instinct that staying in school is better than dropping out altogether is absolutely correct. It’s just that if we’re going to compel kids to stay in school, we need to make their schooling compelling.
Lots of great minds have already weighed in on the question of how to make learning fun and meaningful, but somehow we do not seem to have made a dent in the great battleship Education, which is still plowing its way implacably through the cold waters of Teaching to the Test.
It’s true that there is a certain amount of knowledge that you simply have to be taught, in that passive sense of receiving information and committing it to memory. For instance, the alphabet. The multiplication tables.
And having got these basic tools, you need to be taught how to use them: how to read, how to manipulate numbers. If you’re going to be a doctor, you need to be taught how human systems work, just the way an engineer learns how a mechanical system works, or a mechanic learns how a car works. OK.
But beyond mastering these kinds of basics in any field, there are two things students most need to get out of their education: learning how to figure things out for themselves, and learning how important their educated selves are to their communities and the larger society as a whole.
In today’s networked world, we no longer need to have kids waste their time memorizing all the state capitols, or learning by rote anything that can be measured in a multiple-choice test. What kids need to learn is how to find the information they need to answer the questions they have about the world. They need to learn how to frame their questions, understanding that the way a question is asked will often guide or predetermine its answer.
Reading is still a fundamentally important skill, but what we need to be teaching kids is how to read between the lines. How to see through propaganda that passes for “fair and balanced” journalism, for instance. How to sift through multiple sources of information on a given topic, and understand the criteria for determining which source is most credible.
But even that is not enough. Students not only need to become active readers, but also nimble thinkers, capable of taking in a spread of ideas on a given topic, and responding with their own original thinking. A society where kids only learn how to feed back to their elders old, predigested ideas is a stagnant society, and we can’t afford that kind of stagnation at this time.
And here we get to my second point: kids not only need to learn to think for themselves, they need to understand how important this activity is for our rapidly changing society. And that means taking the skills they’ve gained through their education out of the school and the academy into the street.
Students at every level, even the littlest ones, will benefit from a much more active engagement with the social and natural environment beyond the walls of their classrooms. Little kids should be planting gardens in their schoolyards and composting the remains of their lunch. In Waldorf kindergartens like the one my sons attended, kids partake in preparing their mid-morning snack, and in keeping their classroom clean and neat.
What kids learn through activities like these is the importance of collaboration to community—an invaluable life lesson that needs to start early and be reinforced in different ways as they grow older.
We need to get kids out of their classrooms and into their communities, bringing their creativity, their intelligence, their caring and their wonderful energy to bear on the challenges that lie just outside their classroom doors.Instead of our current competitive test-based system, we need collaborative learning that anticipates the kind of team-based environments of the most successful communities and businesses. Instead of seeing kids hunched on their own behind raised folders taking a test—no cheating!—we should see groups of kids assembled around a problem, working collaboratively, noisily, joyfully to solve it.
The task of the teacher in this kind of learning environment would be to set the kids ever more challenging and interesting problems, with clearly visible and defined real-world applications, and guide the kids to the tools they need to solve the problems and evaluate their successes or setbacks.
Lord knows there is no shortage of serious problems in our world today, problems that demand every ounce of our most focused attention to surmount. We need to get kids out of their classrooms and into their communities, bringing their creativity, their intelligence, their caring and their wonderful energy to bear on the challenges that lie just outside their classroom doors.
The Obama administration has just released a major new report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future, prepared by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, which brought together leaders in higher education from around the country to come up with recommendations for ways that education can help students become engaged, responsible local and global citizens.
The report concludes that given all the “pressing issues” facing us today—“growing global economic inequalities, climate change and environmental degradation, lack of access to quality health care, economic volatility, and more,” educators need to focus on “expanding students’ capacities to be civic problem-solvers using all their powers of intellect and inventiveness.
“The kind of graduates we need at this moment in history,” the authors say, “need to possess a strong propensity for wading into an intensely interdependent, pluralist world. They need to be agile, creative problem solvers who draw their knowledge from multiple perspectives both domestic and global, who approach the world with empathy, and who are ready to act with others to improve the quality of life for all.”
The report “urges every college and university to foster a civic ethos that governs campus life, make civic literacy a goal for every graduate, integrate civic inquiry within majors and general education, and advance civic action as lifelong practice.”
Specifically, the task force advocates developing service learning and community engagement programs that move beyond simple volunteerism to actually involving young people as active participants and innovators in making their social environments more vibrant, more responsible, and more equitable.
Sounds good, and sounds simple to implement, but as I know from trying to develop community engagement structures for students at my home institution, it takes staffing—and therefore funding—to provide the channels students need to quickly jump into productive off-campus programs. Commitment to this kind of active learning environment needs to come from the top, and that’s why I am excited to see such an array of distinguished leaders in education come together as the signatories of this new National Task Force report.
Let’s hope some of that energy and enthusiasm will trickle down to schools and campuses all over the country, and soon. The tone of urgency evident in the title of this report, A Crucible Moment, and in the President’s remarks about education this past week, is not exaggerated.
We are in a crucible moment in so many ways, and we desperately need to equip our young people with the skills and outlook they will require to bring us safely through the turbulence that awaits us in the foreseeable future as the globe heats up and pressures on human society increase.
Keeping our kids in high school until they’re 18 is only a good idea if high school becomes a meaningful, active learning environment. Let’s do what needs to be done to make that so—or let’s come up with another model. Early college, for example—a good idea whose time may finally have come.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllTeaching is the planting of seeds, not the harvesting of a crop. When we harvest prematurely, we lose everything that sustains life. Hence, the failure of teaching to the test.
beautifully concise - thanks
Many people develop the civic literacy she writes of by living their lives. The classic text on this kind of development is The Education of Henry Adams, a book which should be read by every teacher, and by everyone who complains about how little useful material students get in school.
She seems to want to jump-start students in the process of learning by living. But it is not clear to me how she would integrate that into the (as she admits) necessary curricula for doctors, engineers, etc.
This author is a report from the rarified world of educational choice. And I am happy to report that my son was able to experience a similar hand picked and small learning environment. It's great. But I myself was the product of a parochial education to grade 8 and public high school, junior college, a hosptial based nursing school and university after that. I am a success story. The product of 8th grade educated parents that were themselves second generation immigrants and grew up in non-English speaking homes.
But this essay is really a narrow view of a really difficult problem. I once heard that Gandhi was heard to say that we don't need mass production, we need production for the masses. We need a model of work that meets the need of the many not the few.
Similarly, in education, we need models of education for masses. We need ways to education people from a variety of back grounds, to give them basic knowledge to communicate and make effective decisions. When someone from a poor back ground shows apptitude and ability, there needs to be a way for them to get more. I recently learned that no matter how well the public education system I work in does at educating a non-naturalized student there is no real post-high school education for them.
As a school nurse, I'm not here to tell you what we DO need. I can tell you what makes me uncomfortable about what I see in my school. I see a huge amount of teaching to the test. A huge amount of math and reading education to the diminishment of science (has a small spot in the ed week), music ed (we have fairly strong programs), PE (about 40 minutes a week), But very little on geography and history and the social sciences.
So, Jennifer, you are correct when you say that busy work like memorizing state capitals is silly; geography education is not. I've been reading Parenti's Tropic of Chaos and I have been forcing myself to face how geographically ignorant I am. Americans are raised like North America and Europe are "it" and everything else exists to serve us--grow us things cheaply.
Our inner city public schools at their most dismal are a story of how we abandoned each other. The same people who can yabber endlessly abour the badness of abortion and how children (my children) are a precious resource, seem to have no compunction about abandoning many, many children to inner city places with no economic opportunity, which predictably breeds crime and drug abuse, which strips a tax base to support schools.
I hate to say this but in some senses I favor some return of local control where teachers, using the best of their specialized knowledge, try to connect their enthusiam for children and teaching with the needs of children.
I doubt that my education conformed to the benchmarks of NCLB or common core educational standards but I came out exposed to math--imperfectly--, exposed to English--imperfectly--, exposed to geography and history--imperfectly--, etc. etc. I have a clear memory of teachers who did not inspire and those who did. And I write fairly articulately and I help a lot of people with the skills learned through my basic publicly funded education.
There will always be children who get more and get the best but we really need to focus on what "libery and justice for all" looks like.
Molly--thanks for your post. It says many things I wanted to say. As a former public school teacher, I can only say that there are NO models of teaching/learning that fit every population of students or every student. Some kids like formal schooling, solving the odd problems, going over homework, and answering questions on tests to prove mastery. Some kids like group work and many don't. Some kids like project-based curricula and others prefer a curriculum based upon judgments made by experts in the field. Some kids do not like abstract thinking and prefer an education that deals with real things around them--autos that won't run and hair that has to be curled by someone.
I'd like to make an outrageous statement many will dispute: For the most part, public schools are doing a rather good job educating students--especially given the resources they are given. Urban school districts are NOT typical. Most students attend schools in the suburbs, small towns, or in the country and they get, on the whole, a fairly decent education. Certainly that was true with me. Like you, I have some facility with language--and at least some of that was gained in a public school. For that reason, I cannot join the author of this article in her implied criticism of public education. She has to prove to me that the educational model she puts forward can be adopted by all the varied schools and students across this country. She will have a hard time doing so.
"For the most part, public schools are doing a rather good job educating students--especially given the resources they are given. Urban school districts are NOT typical. "
I agree with what you say here. There is a group of children that are failed by education but they are also failed by their parents, their communities and others prior to and concurrently with their education. We do well by many children.
I could on but I won't.
Lord save us from another blue-ribbon commission report that pretends to solve a problem that doesn't exist, while ignoring the reality around us. By all means encourage "civic engagement" in college, but if the society around the college is promoting a hyper-individualistic ethos of accumulation and consumption, won't that "encouragement" ring a bit hollow? At a time when state colleges and universities are scrambling for funds for their primary mission (education?), and corporate-subsidized research is becoming more and more dominant, and the football coaches are paid more than the college president, shouldn't our energies go toward something more important than the window treatments on the Titanic?
I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for authentic education, including opportunities for solving real problems and thinking of how one's own education relates to the rest of society. I just wish our society gave such opportunities to all its children, rather than opportunity for some and platitudes for the rest.
Agreed! There are now a few spin-offs from the original Simon's Rock model, the Bard High School Early Colleges (BHSECs) which are public and free, but use selective admissions, like many charter, magnet or special mission schools. I want to see the early college model go viral, so to speak...so that more and more kids who are willing and able to move faster into college-level work can do so.
Obama's goal is, obviously, to prevent kids from dropping out of high school. It is surely not part of his intention to prevent good high school students from moving on to college or pre-college programs.
The Late Frank Zappa:
"The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U. S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things."
The author is describing a progression in schooling, past the competitive test. Maybe her ideas progress further than most.. But ultimately where this idea is going may be very surprising to all. Take the idea to its limit, and you'll see that the ultimate goal is to get kids out the school altogether, and into the real world, where real life takes place, and real learning takes place.
Now I don't mean butting elbows with korporate thugs and their puppet politicians,and their ruff-tuff wage-slaves on the faktory floor. I mean the best school is in the day-to-day working of the communities, the communities that nurture people of all ages, the communities we on the far-left have been advocating all along, which happen to be the very same type of communities kids grew up in before industrialization came and tore the village into splinters. Our type of community is the local community where people practice self-determination, own/control their own production, and have plenty of time to explore the world, with the kids, as the kids need.
I guess you can see the militarization/industrialization of society created the institutions of destruction, industrial schooling, etc, of course, in order to sustain itself, as monsters tend to do. "We don't need no education!"
Again, take the idea to the limit and you land right back at square one, the village, the local community, where the adults are taking care of themselves by keeping their economic/political power at home, where it belongs, and where the kids participate and learn in as authentic an environment as it gets. I am so amazed at the beauty of localism, solving all problems in one swell foop, ehh?
Elitism, the class system. What a monster. It has to be destroyed, from end to end. Get to work, people! Smash it to smithereens! And get to building your local communities!
"you'll see that the ultimate goal is to get kids out the school altogether, and into the real world, where real life takes place, and real learning takes place..."
Real life doesn't take place in school? Huh. That will come as some surprise to the millions of people who spend most of their waking studying, working and social hours in a school. It will indeed come as a shock to the people I know who are doing post-graduate work and are now teaching themselves, who have very fulfilling lives never having left the school environment and never planning to.
As a working class kid who got a great education via a large city public school system, I have learned to absolutely hate the ignorant and very probably jealous morons who contend that "real learning" doesn't take place in a school. Not only was a school the ONLY place where I was going to learn science. math, foreign language, computer programming, a musical instrument, literature and so forth (ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THIS ACCESSABLE TO ME IN HOME ENVIRONMENT NOR IN MY 'COMMUNITY' OF POOR UNEDUCATED PEOPLE), but a city PUBLIC school is where I learned tolerance for other racial and ethnic groups. Indeed at times I was a white minority, in a time and place where most families on my block overpaid parochial schools to segregate their kids and give them a limited and generally inferior education leading to across the board limited horizons.
If you want to live in a 19th century society, 'the community' is a great place for a lot of kids to end up semi-literate, generally ignorant, with limited experiences and prepared for work - if they can find it - in exciting fields like non-union roofer. Or you can go to Amish country, where the very limited and stunted opportunities of the kids are the direct result of taking them out of nasty school and putting them in a very tight-knit community "where the real learning happens." I wonder what the background is of people who glorifiy everything-but-school as where "real" life occurs. It's anti-intellectual reverse snobbery that leads to teacher-bashing and public education-bashing, and a good number of threads on this site are filled with that filth.
Ms Browdy has some excellent ideas about how to educate our children, but her piece omits teaching history as a major component. History needs to be taught in our public schools using textbooks like Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States."
There must a foundation built in our schools so that students graduate with a good knowledge of the importance of human and civil liberties, habeas corpus, and an understanding of the basic premises of the US Constitution and why the Bill of Rights matter. Perhaps then, workers will awaken and adopt a Socialist vision against the tyranny of the greedy-rich and their totalitarian regime.
Beyond learning the basic three R's, plus core subjects like science, history, geography, access to the arts,etc, the problem with education is standardization making the the atmosphere more and more impersonal. We split "education" into family, church and school so that schools can't touch certain aspects of education much less honor, encourage and practice the finer aspects of our humanity. As several commentors have noted, environments vary significantly from school to school. When I worked at several schools in a "good" district, I was also working with a women's group at the county jail. One of the schools felt very much like the jail in terms of dysfunction and omnipresent hyper control.
Schools that are run on fear--of failure, of not teaching to the test, or for any reason-- cannot inspire their students. Obama's idea of requiring youth to stay in school until age 18 is another prescription for a greater failure rate. On an almost daily basis it seems that the idea that this is a "free country" slips away...It seems like some people want to prepare youth to be more subservient.
Wow, this makes 15 comments. I guess since the magic words "Ron Paul" or "Obama" or "Republican" or "9/11" weren't in the title, not much worth anyone's time.
Witness the death of the Left.