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Florida Today
"U.S. schools should teach students to think in order for them to
develop full potential"
Marion Brady
"Gifted
kids are bored by U.S. schools,"
said a front-page headline in USA Today.
That's reassuring.
Students who weren't bored with typical classroom work would surely be
brain-dead.
If they're bored, they're alive, well and educable.
What's not reassuring is that, when compared with the top students in 13
other countries, those bored students are at or near the bottom of the
heap in nearly every subject.
If I were on one of those newly formed school advisory committees, were a
member of the school board or a college trustee, here's some of what I'd
be pushing:
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I'd demand that students be required to
think. "Thinking" means recalling, categorizing, inferring, hypothesizing,
valuing, generalizing, translating, synthesizing. Of those eight thought
processes, traditional schooling emphasizes only the first recalling. I'd
demand that the other seven get equal time.
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I'd push to get students out of classrooms
and into the real world.
Books, lectures and "educational" television (is that an oxymoron?) are
third- and fourth-handed images of reality passivity they require isn't a
normal human state.
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I'd insist that math, science, history and
all the other bits and pieces of instruction be logically integrated.
Students are never shown "the picture on the lid of the box" that pulls it
all together and makes the parts of the reality puzzle make sense. An
integrated curriculum would also be compact, allowing students more time
to pursue individual interests and strengths.
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I'd begin to "dejuvenilize" schooling,
especially at the high school level, putting progressively more
responsibility for the school's functioning on students.
I'd insist that music, art and other studies that enrich experience and
lift the human spirit not be treated as barely accepted stepchildren, to
counter our culture's narrow preoccupation with the mundane.
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I'd ban standardized testing. Its negative
effects far exceed its benefits.
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I'd make every academic administrator,
including principals and presidents, teach at least one class. No
exceptions. The payoffs are too extensive to summarize.
These are, of course, unlikely reforms.
Schooling in America has many purposes. Unfortunately, developing human
potential to its maximum isn't one of them.
Florida Today
7-18-94 by Marion Brady
Culturally, just who are we in the USA
Recent
news said that Florida's statewide school board association is refusing to
get involved in the Lake County-triggered "debate" about cultural
superiority.
Whether we're The Greatest Culture on Earth is a legitimate, interesting
question. it's also. however, an extremely complicated one.
The complexity of the issue begins with the concept "our culture."
Unlike, say, the Japanese, American ethnic origins are extremely diverse.
just who are we culturally?
The strongest strain is Angle, but even that's confused. English settlers
came from four different parts of England at four different times and
settled in four different regions of America. They all spoke variations of
the English language, but iii fact they were culturally very different
from each other, and those differences are still apparent.
Add to the English immigrants the Native Americans, Africans, Germans,
French, Italians, Spanish, Poles Chinese and all the rest, and the
cultural picture is so diverse that no one who studies the matter
seriously would even use the phrase "our culture" in referring to America
as a whole. The United States isn't a coherent culture. It's a political
state.
Then there are the hundreds of difficult questions raised by the phrase
"is superior."
Many good Americans, for example, believe God rewards goodness with
material wealth.
But other good Americans think God has been pretty clear about not laying
up for themselves "treasures on Earth, where moth and rust corrupt," and
about it being "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."
No, the matter isn't simple: What makes a culture superior'' Technological
superiority? Military power? Gross national product? Healthy,
well-educated children? Concern for future generations?
Honesty in interpersonal relationships? Kindness and generosity toward the
unfortunate? Living in harmony with the environment? A legal system that
functions justly?
A valid judgment about cultural superiority would require asking hundreds
of such questions to identify criteria, assigning such criterion a
relative weight, then matching the actual behavior of the members of every
culture on Earth against the criteria.
A conclusion only would be possible, of course, if all people agreed about
the proper questions and their relative importance.
An "Us vs. Them" level of dialogue can never move beyond an embarrassing,
childlike airing of ethnocentric prejudices. We'd all do well to study The
words of those who have earned the right, through a lifetime of study and
experience, to speak on the subject of relative cultural merit.
One of those was Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist who did so much to
shape the U.S.' successful post World War II policies toward Japan. She
wrote, "... human institutions and motives are legion, on every plane of
cultural simplicity and complexity,
and ... wisdom consists in a greatly increased tolerance toward their
divergences."
Florida Today
2-8-99 by Marion Brady
Schools stuck on unexamined assumptions
There's
an old Appalachian story about a stranger lost on a mountain road. Reining in
his horse, he asks a farmer how to reach a town some miles distant.
The farmer begins an explanation, stops in mid-sentence, says, "Nope,'` and
starts a different set of directions.
The farmer's voice trails on. Again he mutters, "Nope.'
Two more attempts end similarly. Finally, he pauses at considerable length and
looks up at the stranger. ''Mister." he says, "ain't no way to git thar from
here."
For America's education establishment, the farmer's verdict is apt. Education
movements, new legislation, novel instructional strategies and fads of all sorts
come and go with marginal effect on standardized test scores, dropout rates,
student enthusiasm and other indicators of progress. If what we're looking for
is performance close to student potential, we're not even close.
We're stuck where we are primarily because of unexamined assumptions. And until
we examine those assumptions and replace them with more valid ones, we're going
to stay stuck. Here are some of them:
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Teachers and students aren't really trying very hard, so raising standards or
threatening to cut off funds will make them buckle down and do better.
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Standardized tests are really sophisticated. They measure not just simple
skills, but other mutters so important they can be used as accurate indicators
of school quality.
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Basically, teaching is pretty simple, so two or three days a year of
additional training is sufficient to keep up with the field.
-
The bottom line purpose of education is to prepare students for work. Or help
them understand themselves. Or teach them to think. Or mold them into
democratic citizens. Or expand their understanding of the world in which they
live. Or build character. Or something. No matter. Having a clear idea of the
purpose of schooling isn't really important. Knowledge may be a seamless.
integrated whole, but students don't need to know that. Schooling is about
“covering" subjects and courses that have little or no apparent relationship
to each other.
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The single most important thought process is the ability to remember, so
that's what schooling should emphasize. All other mental processes --
hypothesizing, generalizing, synthesizing, inferring, valuing and so on -- the
young can pick up on their own.
Our schools (even the best of them) barely scratch the surface of student
potential. Its possible “to git thar from here" -- possible to have schools that
keep alive the deep seated human drive to understand that now begins to wither
away along about the third or fourth grade. We can do it, but it isn't going to
happen until our dialogue about what we're doing, and why we're doing it, moves
beyond the simplistic notion that the answers to our educational ills lie in
vouchers or choice or school competition or some other concept borrowed from
freshman-level economics.
A resident of Cocoa, Brady has written several books in the field education
and is a former community college professor.
The Orlando Sentinel
by Marion Brady
There's more to an education than getting job skills
I read with considerable interest Monday's article in The Orlando
Sentinel "School Plan Fuels Debate Over Focus." It reflected, of course,
philosophical differences that have long pulled the educational establishment in
different directions.
In America, the weight of public opinion on this issue usually comes down on
the side of "useful" education -- meaning, ordinarily, an education that allows
the student to move smoothly into the work force.
Our schools and colleges are full of students impatient to get their general
education requirements out of the way so that they can concentrate on "what's
important" -- meaning the course work in their chosen field.
I'm in favor of specialized education. I served for a time as a member of
the forerunner of the state of Florida's Vocational Arts and Technical Education
Advisory Council. However, there's a lot more to a good education than the
acquisition of job skills.
First, narrowly trained individuals frequently lack the breadth and depth of
understanding and creativity demanded by satisfying work. Specialized training
may get one off to a fast start, hut it's of limited value over the long haul.
Whatever the future holds, job success will almost certainly depend on far more
than An individual's work skills. Just being able to do something is now almost
never enough. One has to be somebody.
Second, those who allow themselves to be a molded into just the right shape
to fit instantly into a specific job sell themselves short. Every person's
educational goal should be to become as human, as civilized, as complicated, as
interesting as possible. Narrow training often means narrow interests, and
narrow interests create bored and boring (and sometimes dangerous) people.
Finally, everyone should have some understanding of what the late
sociologist C. Wright Mills called "the trends of the era" -- should be able to
stand back from hi or her experience and put it into a reasonably accurate
historical perspective.
Students need job skills/ it they also need the kind of understanding of
themselves and the human condition that a general education attempts to give
them. Unfortunately, traditional schooling tends to emphasize one or the other,
and generally doesn't do a particularly good job with either.
The conventional wisdom is that there simply isn't enough time in the school
day, so either general or specialized education must be slighted. In fact,
there's plenty of time. The problem lies with traditional, discipline-based
general education - a hodgepodge of subjects and courses that have little or
nothing to do with each other or with life as it is experienced.
What's needed, and what we could have, is a single block of study welding
the hard and soft sciences, the humanities and the rest into a compact,
logically integrated whole.
Students could get a vastly superior general education, in about a third of
the time, and have the rest of the day free to pursue studies consistent with
their interests or aptitudes.
The Orlando Sentinel
by Marion Brady
"Back-to-basics" flunks with knee-jerk math reform
Regarding Friday's Page One article "Law makers pushing to raise high-school
graduation standards"
Recently the Sentinel devoted three of its "Saturday special" pages
to those interested in explaining what they would do if they were high-school
principals.
Just about everybody, it seems, is an expert on what ails education.
Unfortunately, most
such expertise is nostalgia-driven and simplistic. Its prescription for every
problem?
"Back to basics! if what's now being done isn't working, do it harder, or
longer, or do it again." Fundamental change -- the kind of change that real
crises demand -- is almost always viewed wish suspicion by the amateur experts,
and is opposed.
Consider, for example, school mathematics. According to the news media, math
scores are too low. So, true to the "back-to-basics" response, a bill is
introduced in Florida's Legislature to add algebra to the high-school graduation
requirements.
It's a waste of taxpayer money. Tightening the screws may raise scores a few
points, but it won't solve the problem. Fundamental change is in order -- the
kind of change that would almost certainly pack school-board meetings and
trigger wails of protest about "dumbing down the curriculum."
Math, everyone agrees, is a basic subject. All students should come out of
school able to make change, balance checkbooks, complete income-tax forms, check
cash-register receipts, and know if they've been had by the vacuum cleaner
salesman.
This is what many think of when they think of school math. And, because this
sort of "math" is obviously a good and necessary thing, and because it's hard to
get too much of a good thing, the current math curriculum is, ipso facto, a good
thing.
There is, in fact relatively little of this kind of math in the school
curriculum. School mathematics has been shaped (as one might expect) by
mathematicians, and most mathematicians aren't much interested in balancing
checkbooks and checking receipts. Most have been drawn to the held by its
aesthetic appeal and make little effort to defend what they teach on the basis
of its practicality.
Now there's nothing wrong with math as art. But to make mandatory the
particular kind of math now required is, it seems to me, a werious mistake,
akin to making orchestra participation or oil portraiture or dance mandatory,
and then getting all bent out of shape when some students don't perform well.
Math requirements should be changed, not to make math easier but to put the
emphasis on statistical analysis -- the primary tool for understanding the
quantifiable aspects of our current situation, how we got where we now are as
a society, and where we're probably headed.
American kids are as smart as any. But ours is a pragmatic society, and the
"learn this because you're s'posed to" that still works in many traditional
cultures rings pretty hollow here.
I'll bet the farm that, if we'll forego knee-jerk, backward-looking
"reforms" and make math a source of insight into the human condition, the scores
won't disappoint.
The Orlando Sentinel
Thursday,
January 23 by Marion Brady
The tail wags the school dog
The Sentinel's attention to education is gratifying. Accounts of murder,
may-hem, sleaze and scandal may make
more interesting reading, but those articles are surely of far less consequence
than what's happening in our schools. H.G. Wells said, "Human history becomes,
more and more, a race between education and catastrophe." If he was right, it's
hard to imagine we could direct too much attention toward the teaching of the
young.
There is, however, a problem with the kind of broad citizen involvement that
news-media attention often brings. Perhaps because we've all had years of
first-hand experience with education, many of us think we're experts on the
subject. No profession is more complex than teaching, concerned as it is with
altering the images of reality in others' minds. Nevertheless, members of state
legislatures and other policy-making groups who wouldn't dream of telling
surgeons, computer analysts or aeronautical engineers how to do their jobs have
few qualms about involving themselves in the details of educating.
The law of unintended consequences will never lack for illustration as long
as there are "amateur experts" involved in education.
I would like to call attention to one such consequence. In the pursuit of
high-quality education, the news media annually provide the public with
information about schools' scores on standardized tests. The assumption appears
to be that fear of the spotlight will make them shape up. It seems to make good
common sense.
It's worth noting, however, that what's being held up for public scrutiny is
average minimum performance -- the bottom rung of the quality ladder. Only
simple skills -- not the student's ability to engage in the kinds of complex
thought processes that real life and work constantly demand -- can be measured
by tests that merely require a pencil mark inside a bubble.
Now no one would argue that raising minimum performance isn't important. But
in ordinary, everyday experience, if we're interested in real quality, we're not
looking at the bottom rungs of the quality ladder; we're looking at the top.
"Quality" is what we associate with maximum levels of performance.
One could argue, correctly, that the whole ladder should be raised. But
in fact, that's not how it works when so much is made of minimum
performance. That becomes the tail that wags the education dog. Fearful
educators, preoccupied with minimum scores, aren't going to be much interested
in minimum performance-- in education that stretches the intellects of students.
The educational establishment is awash in programs and proposals for
improvement. Most, once the Hawthorne
effect -- the idea that people will do their jobs better simply because new
methods are being tried that are designed to improve performance -- has run its
course, make little difference. A few, like this one borrowed from
long-discredited notions that once steered industrial production, are
counterproductive.
Until we abandon our narrow preoccupation with minimum performance, and
concentrate on pushing the outer limits of student potential, attempts at
educational reform won't amount to much.
Marion Brady of Cocoa is a retired educator
The Orlando Sentinel
Sunday, May 31, 1998 by Marion Brady
FIX WHAT SCHOOLS ARE ALL ABOUT
Our schools are stuck on a low-level performance plateau. Even the best of
them fail to hook solidly into students' natural curiosity, natural need to
know, natural desire to make more sense of the world and their place in it.
Take away the report cards, certificates, diplomas, attendance laws,
parental pressures and community expectations, and they'd fall apart.
Obviously, when the drive to learn is built into kids, but schools have to
resort to threats and promises to keep them inside the walls, something is
seriously wrong.
Equally obvious, merely doing more of what we're already doing isn't going
to make what's wrong, right. Raising graduation requirements, playing with
schedules, eliminating social promotion, administering more tests, tightening
discipline, cutting class sizes, extending the school year, concentrating on
"the basics," handing out vouchers, installing exotic technology, setting up
magnet schools, staffing in innovative ways—such experiments may bring marginal
improvement, but they're not going to bring really significant, lasting gains.
They won't bring bell-ringing improvement in student performance because
none of them address the real problem—the curriculum.
The curriculum is what schooling is all about, and the familiar curriculum
(and its many variations) is a pure, unalloyed, unmitigated disaster. Beyond
the teaching of basic skills, it has no overarching aim. It short-changes every
thought process except memorization. It treats students condescendingly, as
mere passive absorbers of old knowledge rather than as active creators of new
knowledge. It ignores vast amounts of critically important subject matter. It
disregards the brain's need for a "master" information-organizing system. It
has no criteria in place that say what new knowledge to teach, or what old
knowledge to discard to make room for the new.
Worst of all, the curriculum gives students a very wrong picture of the
nature of knowledge. The human brain processes experience holistically, but
formal schooling breaks it apart into arbitrary, artificial "subjects" with
never a clue about how those subjects can be made to fit together to form a
single, seamless framework of mutually supportive ideas. Modern life makes
specialized study indispensable, but to let it go at that is like giving
students a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the lid of the box (and with
important pieces missing).
These aren't insurmountable problems. They are, in fact, rather easily
solved if properly approached. But they can't be solved if they're not
addressed, and thus far that's not happening.
In fact, most local, state, and national efforts are pushing in the opposite
direction. By focusing merely on improving instruction in subject matter areas,
they're reinforcing simplistic notions about both the nature of knowledge and
about how kids learn.
Until educators move beyond a preoccupation with their narrow
specializations and begin to look at the whole of the curriculum of which their
fields are random, disjointed parts, even the best of our public, private, and
parochial schools will continue to waste student potential at a scandalous rate.
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