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 the Puritans invented American public education four centuries ago, their purpose was straightforward. They were trying to teach their children to avoid the snares of the devil. Since the Bible for them held the keys to seeking righteousness and avoiding perdition, it was necessary that their children learn to read. This would clearly benefit their individual souls, but even more important, it would ensure the health and well-being of their society as a whole.
Thomas Jefferson secularized that notion of education as a public good. He believed in government by the people, and he knew that if we were to successfully govern ourselves, we’d need some pretty well-educated ordinary people to do it, the more the better.
Most everything that’s happened since has amounted to tinkering with education’s methodology, not its purpose.
Most everything until now.
As we take the pulse of our public schools today, we need again to consider why we have them. When I was a student, I knew why I was there, and I knew, as much as a child could know such things, why my school was there. Whether we were preparing for college, for direct entry into the business world, or for a trade, public school existed to teach us knowledge and skills.
When I eventually became a teacher myself, I brought those expectations with me to my classroom. Yes, the particulars of that knowledge and those skills have changed over the ages, and they’ve even changed around the edges in the brief interval since I graduated. Today’s Renaissance men and women need to master topics da Vinci could only imagine, and even in Leonardo’s day scholars disagreed about some of the fine points of the comprehensive knowledge expected of educated men.
No one, however, disagreed that that body of knowledge and skill existed. Everyone understood that education, though then limited to the few, was the enterprise by which each generation passed along to the next the knowledge it had inherited and the learning it had acquired through its own study and inquiry.
Until now.
Today, the paper tiger Common Core notwithstanding, schools are more intent on keeping students “engaged” than they are on actually teaching them. We talk about a “positive – yet challenging – learning environment.” We even have a newly recycled grading system based on “proficiencies.” But for all our talk of “high standards” and “proficiency-based graduation requirements,” students can fail to meet those standards and still move on from grade to grade. We just can’t use the word “fail” anymore.
We’re advised to “put the student in the role of the teacher,” that students “love to explain concepts to their peers.” First, I’ve met plenty of adolescents who for assorted reasons prefer not explaining anything to anybody. Second, it’s tough to teach others when you don’t know much. You can’t explain concepts you don’t understand.
I try to engage my students in discussions. I coax them, cajole them, goad them, and joke with them. I let them explore and present their opinions while I listen. But the day they can explain history better than I can is the day I need to go home. Putting students in groups so they can teach each other while I walk around and “facilitate” sounds progressive and swell, but in practice it too often really means that 12-year-olds are spending their time in class misinforming each other.
We piously eliminate content from subjects like history and science. We pride ourselves on teaching our students “thinking skills” and insist it’s more important that they’re “learning how to learn.”
You can’t think without something to think about.
Learning things is the best way to learn how to learn.
Finally, in a retro message from the 1970s, we’re exhorted to make what we teach “relevant to students” because they “love to learn about things that relate to their own lives.” Like most adolescents and post-adolescents, my students have a limited understanding of their own lives. That said, I try to connect what we’re learning to their experiences. That’s why, whether we’re reading a story or studying history, I’m always asking them, “Has this ever happened to you,” and why I’m always raising my hand as most of them raise theirs. It’s why tomorrow I’ll again remind them that nations behave like people.
Let’s forget for a moment, though, the forgivable limitations of my students’ abilities and experience. Let’s forget the absurdity of purging schools of content knowledge.
There exists a certain malignancy in tailoring education to the interests and priorities of students. Content shouldn’t be served up to be relevant to them. Students need to make themselves relevant to the liberal arts and sciences. They need to recognize their small place in the great scheme of human endeavor and scholarship.
All the world’s knowledge towers above them. They grow in stature by aspiring to its heights, not by waiting while their teachers and their school reduce the wisdom of the ages to just another of their daily choices. What shall I wear? What shall I post? What shall I learn?
NEA Today recently featured its speculations as to traits schools “need to succeed.” Highlighted suggestions include a “welcoming front office,” celebrating the priority given public relations over substance in today’s schools, a “future-focused curriculum,” which doesn’t mean the liberal arts and sciences, and a “welcoming climate” where children can “feel safe and respected,” the most hypocritical expectation of all, given the license to disrupt and maraud granted the most aberrant students under the banner of behavioral fashions like “collaborative problem-solving.”
I have suggestions, too. We need to stop wringing our hands over bullying at the same time schools’ counseling culture licenses bullies to torment their classmates. We need to stop manipulating grading systems in a naked attempt to eliminate failure by redefining it. We need to stop reducing schools to daycare centers. We need to stop placing recess and fresh fruits and vegetables above academic learning and decent behavior.
We need to warn our students that engaging in their education is what they have to do, not what schools are supposed to do to them or for them.
Their own well-being is at risk.
So is the future for all of us.
If that’s not sufficient cause for them to engage, all may already be lost.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Education’s purpose has not changed.