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.
There is no end, no bottom to the heap of issues that preoccupy public schools. We’re well past Labor Day now, and teachers are engaged and absorbed in learning about their students, fine-tuning their plans based on who those students are turning out to be, and putting those plans into practice. Even for veteran teachers in their umpteenth year, this is a full-time job.
Not that teachers have entirely forgotten the wisdom du jour they were served at August’s inservice meetings. Even when they wish they could forget it, it keeps intruding itself by way of administrative memos and workshop announcements. But when you’re actually teaching a roomful of actual students, you can’t afford to spend much time on the menu of recycled bright ideas and other irrelevancies that traveling experts and their local disciples peddle like the education snake oil it too often is.
These pipedreams and new initiatives typically cite the allegedly novel demands of the 21st century to justify turning classrooms and students upside down on a regular basis. And in fairness, schools and society today don’t work exactly as they did when I was a 20th century student. For starters, more families are headed by a single parent, and in more two-parent families, both parents work.
Despite or perhaps because of Americans’ reliance on daycare for their preschool children, many elementary students are less prepared for academic learning and commonly lack the social skills appropriate for a classroom setting. Diminished expectations for student behavior condemn children to daily, sometimes violent disruption. Reformers tout critical thinking as essential for the 21st century, as if thinking hasn’t been essential in every century, but longstanding expert disdain for facts and subject area content has denied students sufficient knowledge to develop and exercise those thinking skills.
You can’t think without something to think about.
When reformers do exhibit enthusiasm for content, it’s almost always in the area of the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. You may notice that this clever, pronounceable new acronym accentuates science and math by presenting two subjects as if they were four. In response I’d like to offer an equally redundant humanities equivalent, RELAPS, comprising reading, English, language arts, and public speaking.
Many STEM boosters envision public schools as an “education-to-employment system.” They regard the humanities as “expensive luxuries,” with some going as far as to propose “defunding” college major programs in subjects like anthropology.
Ardent tech partisans foresee a “rapidly changing” workplace, upended by automation and artificial intelligence, and decry what they describe as an “alarming disconnect” between how high school and college graduates are prepared and “what the job market actually requires.” They condemn present day schools as “anachronistic” and prescribe “scrapping our entire system.”
In their view “technical training is the new path forward.” The traditional liberal arts education is “irrelevant.”
Rebutting that charge requires that we understand what the liberal arts are. Given the way we throw around the terms “liberal” and “conservative” today, we first need to make clear that we’re not talking about partisan American politics. The liberal arts date from the Middle Ages, when “liberal” meant free. They were distinguished from the mechanical arts, which included professional and technical skills like weaving, warfare, cooking and metallurgy. The seven medieval liberal arts, which ranged from sciences like geometry and astronomy to humanities like grammar and rhetoric, were the academic studies that enabled those who mastered them to “function as free citizens in society.”
Liberal arts advocates today claim the liberal arts remain the key to developing the “clear thinking, wisdom, and character” that have always been essential through the ages, especially in turbulent times. Naturally, being education experts, they take things too far. A “two-hour Socratic conversation on works of great literature, philosophy, art, and history” will never be “at the center” of every student’s day. The “joy of learning for learning’s sake” doesn’t stimulate every adolescent and isn’t universally “what makes them happy.”
Reformers contend the workplace is changing so fast that the most crucial skill for students is “agility” in adapting to that change. They accuse schools of harboring a “deeply embedded resistance” to their reforms, but they fail to acknowledge and in many cases seem wholly unaware that the “entirely new” ideas they’re prescribing are the same bad ideas that have repeatedly failed since they debuted in the 1970s. Schools have been trudging and tap dancing through the wreckage of school change for two generations. It’s hard to muster enthusiasm when you’re being drafted to reinvent the flat tire.
Reformers justify both their radical “education and training system” and their zeal as appropriate in a 21st century characterized by “rapid and perpetual change,” which pretty much describes the 20th century my grandfather knew – a world war, flappers, the Depression, another world war, mushroom clouds, airplanes, radio, movies, television, Neil Armstrong, and me.
The surest means to prepare for a turbulent world, in his lifetime, in mine, and in yours, is to equip as many citizens as possible with informed, able minds. This is the proper mission of our public schools. Technical and vocational skills have a place in 21st century education, just as they had a place in the schools where I grew up. But a liberal education – the ability to reason logically in company with a fund of sufficient knowledge to reason about – is the key to preserving a free society for all of us.
None of this is meant to exclude today’s STEM collection. Along with Jefferson’s general assertions about the value of public education and the dangers of public ignorance, mathematics and science figure prominently in his list of “useful” subjects. I’m an English and history teacher, but in addition to the mathematics involved, I learned the most about reasoning in geometry class.
Too many graduates today suffer from an appalling unfamiliarity with the liberal arts and sciences to the point of ignorance. Ignorance doesn’t mean unintelligent. It means uninformed. Most Americans know far less than we could.
Jefferson warned us that no nation can expect to be both ignorant and free, that “light and liberty go together.”
It is clearly necessary that we each have a job.
But it’s vital for our survival as free men and women that more of us have knowledge.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Light and liberty.