Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
When I was a student, I was pretty clear about why I went to school every morning, and that it had to do with things like long division and where the Alps were. While I was indisputably a “whole child” even back during the Eisenhower administration, my school was expected to deal primarily with the part of me that was learning to read and think about academic stuff. Apparently people figured that the liberal arts and sciences were already a tall enough order for public school classrooms to handle.
I was expected to behave myself and treat my classmates decently. Mostly, though, when it came to values, behavior, and social responsibility, we had churches, Boy Scouts, and neighbors. We also had these adults we kept at home called parents.
Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not suggesting we return to the idyllic 1950s. I recall enough to know it wasn’t an idyll. My father’s good old days included the Great Depression and World War II. Mine featured Joe McCarthy and segregation.
I am suggesting that schools seemed to work better. Yes, Sputnik rudely jolted us out of our postwar scholastic complacency, especially in math and science. But while methods and personalities varied from classroom to classroom, and school to school, as they always will, teachers and communities shared a common understanding of why we had schools and what they were supposed to teach.
Schools existed to graduate informed, productive citizens capable of supporting and governing themselves. In that aim we hadn’t changed much since Jefferson.
Nor should we.
We have now.
Jefferson believed in teaching children “reading, writing, and common arithmetic” so each could grow up able to “calculate for himself,” “express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts,” and “improve, by reading, his morals and faculties.” Preserving the liberty won in the Revolution required that “the mass of the people” be “enlightened” and “informed,” with each student’s education “proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his life.”
One size didn’t fit all then either.
Jefferson was particularly concerned about extending education to “youths of genius from among the classes of the poor.” He believed that American life would be best ordered not by an “aristocracy of wealth,” but by an “aristocracy of virtue and talent,” both of which he argued were “scattered with an equal hand” throughout society.
In short, Jefferson saw education as the means to equipping students with the specific skills that would allow them access to the fund of necessary knowledge. Armed with those skills and those ideas, each citizen would be able to “read and understand what is going on in the world and to keep their part of it going on right.”
In many schools teachers are no longer allowed to give zeros for work students don’t turn in. That calculated deception may conceal failure, but it doesn’t eliminate the failure itself.
Since then tax-supported public schools have provided an education to all classes of American society. That grand and expensive effort has advanced many children whose birth alone wouldn’t have afforded them the opportunities for leadership, success, and service from which the rest of us have often benefited.
It’s impossible, however, to dispute that “low socioeconomic status,” by which officials mean the disadvantages associated with poverty and race, continues to hinder many children’s access to those opportunities. For 60 years, from school desegregation to affirmative action, we’ve sought through government action to remedy those economic and racial inequities.
At the same time, education theorists and policymakers have instituted school reforms that likewise have attempted to mitigate some students’ disadvantages. Unfortunately, reformers’ recycled, serial fixes, from “cooperative learning” and grouping students in classes without regard for their ability, to guaranteed “success for all,” “algebra for all,” and “college for all,” have more often than not impeded education for students of all abilities and classes. In the process we’ve watered down what success, algebra, and college look like.
Ironically, the more we’ve tried to manufacture success for every student, the less success our students have enjoyed. It does no good to decree that all students will meet high expectations – even if those expectations were realistic, which they commonly aren’t – if you then manipulate the standards by which those students are judged. In many schools teachers are no longer allowed to give zeros for work students don’t turn in. That calculated deception may conceal failure, but it doesn’t eliminate the failure itself.
Higher graduation rates are meaningless if you’ve redefined high school so you can claim fewer students are dropping out of it.
Lower suspension statistics don’t mean schools are less disrupted and dangerous if they’re lower only because officials have ordered schools to stop suspending disruptive, dangerous students.
The more we ignore students’ actual behavior, the less well-behaved they’ll become. The more we divorce achievement from academics, the less our students will achieve academically.
We haven’t yet learned this lesson. Last month the “Making Caring Common” project at Harvard’s graduate school of education published a report entitled “Turning the Tide.” The report decried what its authors regard as contemporary American culture’s emphasis on “personal success rather than concern for others and the common good.”
For the record, I see nothing incompatible in endorsing both concerns, I support seeking the common good, and I find our “selfie” nation’s rampant narcissism appalling.
That narcissism isn’t, however, what disturbs the report’s authors. They understandably condemn the “lack of academic resources and opportunities” common in poorer communities. However, they also condemn the “pervasive pressure to perform academically” characteristic of more affluent communities.
While the report does allow that “intellectual engagement” remains a valid college admissions criterion, its authors argue that to be “healthy and fair,” the process must be reformed to “reward those who demonstrate true citizenship.” The new criteria must also “deflate undue academic performance pressure, and redefine achievement in ways that create greater equity and access for economically diverse students.”
Given the current state of academic achievement, I’m reluctant to encourage students to reduce their efforts to “perform academically.” I’m uneasy about what constitutes “undue academic performance pressure.” I don’t believe we should “redefine achievement” in an attempt to manufacture “equity.”
We should eliminate obstacles that impede willing students, regardless of their race or class. But redefining achievement so we can pretend that more poor, minority students are achieving won’t help those students personally.
It also won’t serve the common good.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Mr. Jefferson and the common good appeared first on VTDigger.