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Re: [arn-l Digest] Vol. 3 No. 536 Messages: 4
- To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
- Subject: Re: [arn-l Digest] Vol. 3 No. 536 Messages: 4
- From: "weeks" <tweeks@nckcn.com>
- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 20:44:17 -0500
- References: <20071001102306.EEB6150D5D1@interversity.net>
Another twist on changing times:
Jack pulls his pickup into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack.
1973: Vice Principal comes over, takes a look at Jack's rifle, goes
to his car and gets his own to compare with Jack's.
2006: School goes into lockdown, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail
and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized
students and teachers.
*Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school.
1973: Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end
up best friends.
2006: Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark.
Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started
it and Mark was only defending himself.
*Scenario: Jeffrey won't sit still in class, disrupts other students.
1973: Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by Principal,
after which Jeffrey sits still in class.
2006 Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. School
gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.
*Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his father's car and his Dad gives
him a whipping.
1973: Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college,
and becomes a successful businessman.
2006: Billy's Dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster
care and joins a gang. Billy's sister is told by state psychologist that
she remembers being abused herself and their Dad goes to prison. Billy's
mom has affair with psychologist.
*Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.
1973: Mark shares aspirin with Principal out on the smoking dock.
2006: Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations.
Car searched for drugs and weapons.
*Scenario: Mary turns up pregnant.
1973: 5 High School Boys leave town. Mary does her senior year at
a special school for expectant mothers.
2006: Middle School Counselor calls Planned Parenthood, who notifies
the ACLU. Mary is driven to the next state over and gets an abortion without
her parent's consent or knowledge. Mary given condoms and told to be more
careful next time.
*Scenario: Pedro fails high school English.
1973: Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, goes to college,
now runs his own business.
2006: Pedro's cause is taken up by state democrat party. Newspaper articles
appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for
graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school
system and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core curriculum.
Pedro given diploma anyway, but ends up making minimum wage mowing lawns
for a living because he can't speak English.
*Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from the 4th of July,
puts them in a model airplane paint bottle, blows up a red ant bed.
1973: Ants die.
2006: BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with domestic
terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home, computers
confiscated, Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed
to fly again.
*Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee.
He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort
him.
1973: - In a short time Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2006: - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She
faces 3 years in State Prison and is forced to register as a sex offender.
I work in a small Kansas school. After reading the following information,
it made me think about the above e-mail. The e-mail was sent to me from my
sister.
todd weeks
----- Original Message -----
From: <arn-l-owner@interversity.org>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2007 5:22 AM
Subject: [arn-l Digest] Vol. 3 No. 536 Messages: 4
ARN-L Daily Digest
Volume 3 : Issue 536 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
200709/130: PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK
Harold Berlak
200709/131: Re: PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK
GERALD BRACEY
200709/132: something that may be of interest
Kenneth Bernstein
200709/133: NY Times: "No Graduate Left Behind"
ElsaHaas
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:58:09 -0700
From: Harold Berlak <hberlak@yahoo.com>
To: listserve ARN <arn-l@interversity.org>
Subject: PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK
Message-ID: <2FED3FD8-4707-41E6-9082-6B47453D25A6@yahoo.com>
I thought this would be of interest. I don't know the source.
------------------
PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK
by
SLOAN WILSON
This essay appeared in a magazine back in the late 1940s. I came
across it a decade ago in an "ancient" book entitled Essays for
Modern Youth in our high school library. You may recall Sloan Wilson
as the author of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.
The verbal splendor resulting from recent charges that the schools
are not teaching reading right, and older charges that they aren't
teaching anything right, is undeniably exhilarating. Abraham Lincoln
is supposed to have said that a man should preach as though he were
fighting bees, and I can't help admiring the way critics of the
schools have transferred his advice to their line of endeavor. We
haven't heard much lately abut the evils of Progressive Education-in
fact, the very phrase has acquired a nostalgic ring-but there are
still a few people around who seem convinced that the public schools
are promoting socialism of some kind, or worse. The schools have been
called Godless, and their administrators have been widely described
as just plain cotton-headed. A good argument can be started almost
anywhere over the question of whether there should be federal aid to
education. Businessmen voice pathetic complaints that the high-school
graduates they hire as secretaries just can't spell, and college
professors snort about the qualifications of entering freshmen. The
phrase "crisis in education" has become a cliché, used by some to
mean that they are woefully short of money. A visitor to this country
would almost inevitably deduce from the headlines that things have
never been so tough. As a rather bewildered friend of mine said
recently at a PTA meeting, what's going on around here, anyway?
SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
I have an easy answer. In the last fifty years, and especially in the
last ten years, our nation has gone humanitarian to a great and
wonderful degree, but it doesn't yet want to pay for it. The schools
have never been anywhere near as good as they are today, but the gap
between what they are and what the people want is greater than ever
before. Nobody really wants to provide the money, time, and thought
necessary for closing that gap-the hope is that it can just be argued
away. Most of the controversy over public education stems from a
strong desire to get something for nothing.
To understand the truth of this, it is necessary to have a clear,
unsentimental picture of the way the schools were in the past. The
idea that we once had marvelous public schools in this nation, and
that modern philosophies of education have ruined them, is the most
obvious kind of nonsense. As a matter of fact, no nation through all
history has even had good public schools for all its people, or
seriously tried to. Really good education for every child is a
startling new concept, one of which the United States can be
justifiably proud.
Anyone who doesn't believe this should go to the trouble of
consulting records to find just what kind of public education existed
in his own town fifty years ago. What most people would discover is
that fifty years ago, city schools were dull and dingy buildings,
with classes of forty or more pupils common. Country schools were
usually one-room affairs, with children of widely varying age and
ability taught at the same time. Few of the teachers fifty years ago
had anywhere near as much education of any kind as most teachers
today. The elementary school curriculum was pretty much limited to
the Three R's, and the high schools confined themselves to a college-
preparatory program. As someone has said, the subjects were optional:
the pupil could take them or stay home. The vast majority of the
students never went to high school.
Admittedly, there was a certain clarity about the school situation
fifty years ago that is lacking today. Most high-school graduates
could spell quite well, because it was usual for only brilliant
students to go to high school at all. There were no remedial reading
classes, because those who couldn't read were simply dropped. It was
also undeniably true that the great majority of all American children
got very little education of any kind. Apparently, people didn't care
about that much fifty years ago-there was far less talk about an
education crisis then than there is today. Throughout all history
most people of the world had got very little education, so why get
excited about it? Of course the public schools were threadbare, and
the classes crowded, and the teachers little educated, but they were,
after all, charity schools, and it was pretty good to have any free
schools at all. Most people who could afford it sent their children
to private schools as a matter of course, and they supplemented
straight classical programs of education with tutors: the dancing
master, the music teacher, the tennis instructor, and all the rest of
them. The children of working men got their vocational education by
dropping out of school early and becoming apprentices, and no one
brooded about their lack of general education. There was no crisis-
most people saw nothing whatsoever to worry about.
THE QUIET REVOLUTION
The extraordinary thing is that the revolution against this age-old
concept has been so quiet and so invisible that many people today
aren't aware that it took place. It all happened very simply. Every
year more and more pupils sought admittance to the high schools. A
high-school education was part of the American dream, and people in
those days dreamed hard and fruitfully. High schools which dropped
too many pupils began to get a bad reputation. Public schools are,
after all, managed by politically selected school boards, and are
designedly sensitive to public pressure. The theories of professional
educators did not instigate the great change in public education-it
was the demand of the public, insistently voiced through every school
board in the land. And what the public wanted was perfectly clear: a
high-school education for every American child.
But all children are capable of a straight classical program, plenty
of educators objected. Well, all right, the answer came: most
children are capable of acquiring some education, aren't they? Give
each child as much as you can. Don't kick them out of school. It's a
disgrace to be kicked out of school, and schools shouldn't be in the
business of disgracing children. Just keep all the children, and give
them as much as possible.
No one voice, no one proclamation, gave this answer. It worked out
gradually by thousands of day-to-day decisions at countless school-
board meetings throughout the country. Professional educators tried
to find a way to obey the command. They devised new programs for
those who were unable or unwilling to take the college-preparatory
work. The sound of the hammer was heard in the land as courses in
many training and mechanics proliferated. For the girls there were
"domestic arts," a new phrase for cooking, sewing, and other
housewifely chores. And of course, the traditional subjects were
still taught-they were taught to more people than every before. The
educators did their best to provide something useful for the slow
without handicapping the gifted.
As school enrollments increased, the demand of the public proved
insatiable. At school-board meetings, wistful parents kept showing up
to ask for something new. Why not courses in dancing and music and
tennis-it didn't seem fair that the children of the poor should be
entirely cut off from such things. Shrewd managers of factories
appeared to ask that vocational education be tailored to meet their
immediate employment needs. People worried about safety asked why
courses in driving automobiles couldn't be instituted to help cut
down the terrible death toll on highways. Others requested courses in
family life to help reduce the divorce rate, and instruction about
alcoholic beverages to help reduce alcoholism. The schools were asked
to encourage good citizenship, patriotism, and international
understanding. And how about moral and spiritual values? Sure, the
schools can't teach sectarian religion, but moral and spiritual
values can't be entirely left out, can they>
Everybody wanted to add something, and nobody wanted to cut anything
out. Certainly no one has ever suggested that the Three R's are less
important than they ever were-in fact, shrill proofs have been
offered that in this highly technical age, they are more important,
and the schools should emphasize them more. More of everything has
been the cry-more and yet more!
Well, we'll try, the educators said. Educators I've met are a
remarkably cheerful and resilient crowd. They had to say they'd try,
for school administrators are paid to carry out the educational
programs voted for by school-board members. They didn't, of course,
always succeed. All kinds of new problems loomed before them.
Say that a town which fifty years ago had a hundred high-school
pupils now has a thousand-that's a conservative amount of growth in
this nation. How do you find which of those thousand pupils are
capable of college-preparatory work, and how do you give it to them
without splitting them of from all the others and creating a socially
dangerous kind of elite group within each school system? How do you
teach a hundred subjects as efficiently as you once taught a dozen?
The answers usually involved requests for more money. The public was
demanding more of the schools, and inevitably, the schools had to
demand more of the public. Here, of course, the controversy began,
for the people who asked new courses were under the impression that
public education is free. What do you mean, it costs money? What's
getting into the schools, anyway? They're spending more and more
every year, they're going hog wild! Taxes are going up. Somebody must
be getting something out of this. It's socialism, that's what it is.
The two great American ideals of good universal education and low
taxation collided with a bang-or more accurately, with a long series
of bangs which continue to deafen our ears today.
The people also found that the addition of millions of new high-
school students and hundreds of new courses had somehow changed
things. Bewildered complaints about the schools mounted. A high-
school diploma didn't mean what it used to-it meant simply that the
schools had done all they could for the recipient during the
prescribed number of years. That, after all, was what the public had
asked, wasn't it?
Yes, but the able children are getting as good an education as they
ever did, and millions more of them are getting an opportunity for
it, the educators said soothingly. But was it true? Sometimes not.
The intent of neither the public nor the educators had changed, but
immediate realities sometimes forced the dilution of college-
preparatory courses. It takes a lot of money to run a topnotch
college-preparatory program in the midst of all the other duties the
schools have been called on to perform. In some schools-indeed, in
many schools-children who wish to prepare for college are a real
minority group. All kinds of unpredictable things happen. Recently a
great many Negroes moved to a large Midwestern city from a rural part
of the South where Negro children had had woefully inadequate
schools. The schools in the Midwestern city had to help the Negro
children to make up for years of poor preparation, and there was no
special appropriation to meet the emergency. No one should be
surprised to find that, for a while, the general level of education
offered by those schools sank.
NINETY TIMES MORE PUPILS
What's the matter with public education, people want to know. And at
the same time they say, too many American children have bad teeth.
Can't the schools provide free dental inspection, and free dental
care for those who can't afford treatment? Sure, that's public
health, not public education, but few towns have public-health
agencies capable of providing free dental inspection or care for so
many children. It would be cheaper to do it through the schools than
to create special agencies. After all, we can't let the children's
teeth rot, can we? Look at the great number of young men rejected by
the draft boards during the last war because they had bad teeth.
What it all amounts to is that the American people rather suddenly
subscribed to the ideal of public schools which will do all they
possibly can to help each child become as healthy, wealthy and wise
as native endowments permit. It's perhaps a logical ideal for this
country-it tends to set a sort of one-generation limit on class
barriers, and it certainly glorifies the holiness of the individual,
be he poor or rich. I rather doubt that the public thought of such
fancy theories. Somehow it just didn't seem fair to allow a child to
go to hell in a basket because his parents wouldn't or couldn't get
his teeth examined, or because he couldn't learn French. There must
be some good in every child, the feeling was-let's do what we can to
develop it. So the decision was made, without any real recognition of
the fact that something new was being conceived. Having set the goal,
the people have apparently forgotten that enormous effort and expense
are needed to reach it. They seem to expect the great change in the
schools to take place smoothly, without any bother or confusion at
all, and certainly without more expense.
In spite of that, an extraordinary amount of progress has been made.
In the past seventy-five years or so, high-school enrollments have
multiplied by about ninety. More education is being passed on to more
children than ever before in history, as well as more health care,
entertainment, and all the rest of it. The advance is perfectly
measurable: the average scholastic attainments of soldiers in World
War II were tested and found to be much higher than those of the
soldiers in World War I. Most suburban schools in America are
incredibly good, compared to any sort of school in the past. Many
centralized rural schools give the children of farmers an education
as good as anyone in the nation can get. The people seem to vacillate
between complacency at these gains and exaggerated horror at
weaknesses which have not yet been overcome.
There are still plenty of one-room schools where the wood stoves glow
with no sign of progress. What is worse, from the point of view of
the number of children involved, big city schools have shown perhaps
the least improvement of all. In the big cities, those who can afford
it still send their children to private schools, and the middle-class
people are rushing to the suburbs. The result is that many big-city
schools exist almost exclusively for the children of the very poor.
Those are the children who need the best schools, and all too often,
they get the worst. Not much is being done about their plight.
SOME CHILDREN CAN READ
The natural vacillation of the public between complacency and outrage
is encouraged by books, news stories, and magazine articles. Books
like The Blackboard Jungle give a picture of the worst big-city
schools, and everybody gets into a tizzy. Articles about Utopian
suburban schools, protected by the suburb's own brand of economic
segregation, calm things down. Then a book charging that the schools
are using the wrong method to teach reading whips things up again.
Halfway measures are apparently no good in books of this kind-the one
I'm thinking of gives the impression of assuming that no children are
learning to read properly these days. To parents like myself, whose
children learned to read beautifully in the public schools, this sort
of thing can be confusing, but there is a wonderful authority in the
printed word-I sometimes catch myself wondering if my daughters
really can read, even while they're contentedly curled up with books
which I at their age found incomprehensible. Critics of this kind
have one thing in common: they lead the reader to believe that if one
relatively inexpensive step were taken, like the use of more phonics
to teach reading, everything would be just dandy in the schools.
This is a perfect example of what I mean by an easy answer to a hard
question. Here we have slum schools, with miserable buildings,
swollen classes, and disturbed children in need of special care. Here
we have an increasing birthrate which demands more and more
facilities just to keep the quality of education where it is. Here we
have a shortage of teachers resulting from the fact that the birth
rate was lowest twenty-five years ago when young teachers were born,
and from increasing industrial competition for capable adults. Here
we have more and more demands placed upon the schools every day, and
a constantly proliferating list of school duties, with no clear
system of priorities governing either the expenditure of money or the
pupil's time. And here also we have a book on education recently
published, and it appears to give a very simple answer: teach more
phonics, and everything will be all right.
Maybe there is an easy answer, after all-easy to say, if not easy to
do. Maybe everything would be all right if the public just realized
the nobility of the goal it has set for the schools, and also
realized the enormous amount of money, time, and thought needed to
achieve it. Maybe everything would be all right if everyone realized
that the goal of schools capable of wasting no human talent is
eminently worth pursuing, and that a nation with the economic power
of this one could for the first time in history achieve it.
The common realization of those things would be the first step. The
second step would be for thoughtful people in every state and
community to sit down and examine the facts about their schools, hear
all relevant opinions, and chart their own course. Programs like that
of the National Citizens Commission for Public Schools and the White
House Conference on Education have been designed to encourage the
process. The business of getting together to look at facts isn't very
dramatic, and often it's downright dull, but it probably is the only
way the bright dream of good schools for everyone can be made a reality.
The job of figuring out how righteous indignation about weaknesses of
the schools can be converted into constructive action will not be
done by people who wave their arms while criticizing the schools as
though they were fighting bees. It will be done by serious-minded
people calmly appraising the schools in their own community. It will
be done by people who have learned to be patient of differing points
of view, and who know how to enlarge areas of agreement, rather than
capitalizing on controversy. Somehow an ancient fallacy will have to
be righted. The schools are no good, many people are saying nowadays,
and they imply, therefore, do not support them. I certainly agree
that many schools are pretty poor now, as they have been always, and
I believe that they therefore should be supported doubly. The job of
creating schools capable of developing all the abilities of all
American children will never be easy, but without any doubt the
American people are in their own curious way plodding toward it.
There is certainly hope in the fact that for the past fifty years,
they have plodded with the speed of hares.
Source of document is unknown.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:32:18 -0400
From: "GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Subject: Re: PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK
Message-ID: <009c01c803a9$63445c80$2f01a8c0@yourxhtr8hvc4p>
I talked to Sloan Wilson a few years ago, not long before his death. He
was
very ambivalent about the public schools and I think he was that way all
his
life. He was quite concerned with education and education reform and
seemed
to like nothing better than slamming Ivy League colleges when they were
country clubs.
You might want to contrast this essay with "It's Time to Close our Circus"
which appeared in the March 24, 1958 issue of Life. That issue contained
the first of a five-part series highly critical of the public schools in
the
after math of Sputnik.
Sloan's varying views also contrast interesting against a 1950 Life essay
by
Historian Henry Steele Commager, "Our Schools Have Kept Us Free." Even
more than Wilson, Commager worries that schools are moving TOO much into
the
realm of academics and are also being asked to do too many things.
Sorry I don't have a means of putting these two pieces into cyberspace.
Jerry
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harold Berlak" <hberlak@yahoo.com>
To: "listserve ARN" <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2007 4:58 PM
Subject: [arn-l] PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK
I thought this would be of interest. I don't know the source.
------------------
PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK
by
SLOAN WILSON
This essay appeared in a magazine back in the late 1940s. I came
across it a decade ago in an "ancient" book entitled Essays for
Modern Youth in our high school library. You may recall Sloan Wilson
as the author of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.
The verbal splendor resulting from recent charges that the schools
are not teaching reading right, and older charges that they aren't
teaching anything right, is undeniably exhilarating. Abraham Lincoln
is supposed to have said that a man should preach as though he were
fighting bees, and I can't help admiring the way critics of the
schools have transferred his advice to their line of endeavor. We
haven't heard much lately abut the evils of Progressive Education-in
fact, the very phrase has acquired a nostalgic ring-but there are
still a few people around who seem convinced that the public schools
are promoting socialism of some kind, or worse. The schools have been
called Godless, and their administrators have been widely described
as just plain cotton-headed. A good argument can be started almost
anywhere over the question of whether there should be federal aid to
education. Businessmen voice pathetic complaints that the high-school
graduates they hire as secretaries just can't spell, and college
professors snort about the qualifications of entering freshmen. The
phrase "crisis in education" has become a cliché, used by some to
mean that they are woefully short of money. A visitor to this country
would almost inevitably deduce from the headlines that things have
never been so tough. As a rather bewildered friend of mine said
recently at a PTA meeting, what's going on around here, anyway?
SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
I have an easy answer. In the last fifty years, and especially in the
last ten years, our nation has gone humanitarian to a great and
wonderful degree, but it doesn't yet want to pay for it. The schools
have never been anywhere near as good as they are today, but the gap
between what they are and what the people want is greater than ever
before. Nobody really wants to provide the money, time, and thought
necessary for closing that gap-the hope is that it can just be argued
away. Most of the controversy over public education stems from a
strong desire to get something for nothing.
To understand the truth of this, it is necessary to have a clear,
unsentimental picture of the way the schools were in the past. The
idea that we once had marvelous public schools in this nation, and
that modern philosophies of education have ruined them, is the most
obvious kind of nonsense. As a matter of fact, no nation through all
history has even had good public schools for all its people, or
seriously tried to. Really good education for every child is a
startling new concept, one of which the United States can be
justifiably proud.
Anyone who doesn't believe this should go to the trouble of
consulting records to find just what kind of public education existed
in his own town fifty years ago. What most people would discover is
that fifty years ago, city schools were dull and dingy buildings,
with classes of forty or more pupils common. Country schools were
usually one-room affairs, with children of widely varying age and
ability taught at the same time. Few of the teachers fifty years ago
had anywhere near as much education of any kind as most teachers
today. The elementary school curriculum was pretty much limited to
the Three R's, and the high schools confined themselves to a college-
preparatory program. As someone has said, the subjects were optional:
the pupil could take them or stay home. The vast majority of the
students never went to high school.
Admittedly, there was a certain clarity about the school situation
fifty years ago that is lacking today. Most high-school graduates
could spell quite well, because it was usual for only brilliant
students to go to high school at all. There were no remedial reading
classes, because those who couldn't read were simply dropped. It was
also undeniably true that the great majority of all American children
got very little education of any kind. Apparently, people didn't care
about that much fifty years ago-there was far less talk about an
education crisis then than there is today. Throughout all history
most people of the world had got very little education, so why get
excited about it? Of course the public schools were threadbare, and
the classes crowded, and the teachers little educated, but they were,
after all, charity schools, and it was pretty good to have any free
schools at all. Most people who could afford it sent their children
to private schools as a matter of course, and they supplemented
straight classical programs of education with tutors: the dancing
master, the music teacher, the tennis instructor, and all the rest of
them. The children of working men got their vocational education by
dropping out of school early and becoming apprentices, and no one
brooded about their lack of general education. There was no crisis-
most people saw nothing whatsoever to worry about.
THE QUIET REVOLUTION
The extraordinary thing is that the revolution against this age-old
concept has been so quiet and so invisible that many people today
aren't aware that it took place. It all happened very simply. Every
year more and more pupils sought admittance to the high schools. A
high-school education was part of the American dream, and people in
those days dreamed hard and fruitfully. High schools which dropped
too many pupils began to get a bad reputation. Public schools are,
after all, managed by politically selected school boards, and are
designedly sensitive to public pressure. The theories of professional
educators did not instigate the great change in public education-it
was the demand of the public, insistently voiced through every school
board in the land. And what the public wanted was perfectly clear: a
high-school education for every American child.
But all children are capable of a straight classical program, plenty
of educators objected. Well, all right, the answer came: most
children are capable of acquiring some education, aren't they? Give
each child as much as you can. Don't kick them out of school. It's a
disgrace to be kicked out of school, and schools shouldn't be in the
business of disgracing children. Just keep all the children, and give
them as much as possible.
No one voice, no one proclamation, gave this answer. It worked out
gradually by thousands of day-to-day decisions at countless school-
board meetings throughout the country. Professional educators tried
to find a way to obey the command. They devised new programs for
those who were unable or unwilling to take the college-preparatory
work. The sound of the hammer was heard in the land as courses in
many training and mechanics proliferated. For the girls there were
"domestic arts," a new phrase for cooking, sewing, and other
housewifely chores. And of course, the traditional subjects were
still taught-they were taught to more people than every before. The
educators did their best to provide something useful for the slow
without handicapping the gifted.
As school enrollments increased, the demand of the public proved
insatiable. At school-board meetings, wistful parents kept showing up
to ask for something new. Why not courses in dancing and music and
tennis-it didn't seem fair that the children of the poor should be
entirely cut off from such things. Shrewd managers of factories
appeared to ask that vocational education be tailored to meet their
immediate employment needs. People worried about safety asked why
courses in driving automobiles couldn't be instituted to help cut
down the terrible death toll on highways. Others requested courses in
family life to help reduce the divorce rate, and instruction about
alcoholic beverages to help reduce alcoholism. The schools were asked
to encourage good citizenship, patriotism, and international
understanding. And how about moral and spiritual values? Sure, the
schools can't teach sectarian religion, but moral and spiritual
values can't be entirely left out, can they>
Everybody wanted to add something, and nobody wanted to cut anything
out. Certainly no one has ever suggested that the Three R's are less
important than they ever were-in fact, shrill proofs have been
offered that in this highly technical age, they are more important,
and the schools should emphasize them more. More of everything has
been the cry-more and yet more!
Well, we'll try, the educators said. Educators I've met are a
remarkably cheerful and resilient crowd. They had to say they'd try,
for school administrators are paid to carry out the educational
programs voted for by school-board members. They didn't, of course,
always succeed. All kinds of new problems loomed before them.
Say that a town which fifty years ago had a hundred high-school
pupils now has a thousand-that's a conservative amount of growth in
this nation. How do you find which of those thousand pupils are
capable of college-preparatory work, and how do you give it to them
without splitting them of from all the others and creating a socially
dangerous kind of elite group within each school system? How do you
teach a hundred subjects as efficiently as you once taught a dozen?
The answers usually involved requests for more money. The public was
demanding more of the schools, and inevitably, the schools had to
demand more of the public. Here, of course, the controversy began,
for the people who asked new courses were under the impression that
public education is free. What do you mean, it costs money? What's
getting into the schools, anyway? They're spending more and more
every year, they're going hog wild! Taxes are going up. Somebody must
be getting something out of this. It's socialism, that's what it is.
The two great American ideals of good universal education and low
taxation collided with a bang-or more accurately, with a long series
of bangs which continue to deafen our ears today.
The people also found that the addition of millions of new high-
school students and hundreds of new courses had somehow changed
things. Bewildered complaints about the schools mounted. A high-
school diploma didn't mean what it used to-it meant simply that the
schools had done all they could for the recipient during the
prescribed number of years. That, after all, was what the public had
asked, wasn't it?
Yes, but the able children are getting as good an education as they
ever did, and millions more of them are getting an opportunity for
it, the educators said soothingly. But was it true? Sometimes not.
The intent of neither the public nor the educators had changed, but
immediate realities sometimes forced the dilution of college-
preparatory courses. It takes a lot of money to run a topnotch
college-preparatory program in the midst of all the other duties the
schools have been called on to perform. In some schools-indeed, in
many schools-children who wish to prepare for college are a real
minority group. All kinds of unpredictable things happen. Recently a
great many Negroes moved to a large Midwestern city from a rural part
of the South where Negro children had had woefully inadequate
schools. The schools in the Midwestern city had to help the Negro
children to make up for years of poor preparation, and there was no
special appropriation to meet the emergency. No one should be
surprised to find that, for a while, the general level of education
offered by those schools sank.
NINETY TIMES MORE PUPILS
What's the matter with public education, people want to know. And at
the same time they say, too many American children have bad teeth.
Can't the schools provide free dental inspection, and free dental
care for those who can't afford treatment? Sure, that's public
health, not public education, but few towns have public-health
agencies capable of providing free dental inspection or care for so
many children. It would be cheaper to do it through the schools than
to create special agencies. After all, we can't let the children's
teeth rot, can we? Look at the great number of young men rejected by
the draft boards during the last war because they had bad teeth.
What it all amounts to is that the American people rather suddenly
subscribed to the ideal of public schools which will do all they
possibly can to help each child become as healthy, wealthy and wise
as native endowments permit. It's perhaps a logical ideal for this
country-it tends to set a sort of one-generation limit on class
barriers, and it certainly glorifies the holiness of the individual,
be he poor or rich. I rather doubt that the public thought of such
fancy theories. Somehow it just didn't seem fair to allow a child to
go to hell in a basket because his parents wouldn't or couldn't get
his teeth examined, or because he couldn't learn French. There must
be some good in every child, the feeling was-let's do what we can to
develop it. So the decision was made, without any real recognition of
the fact that something new was being conceived. Having set the goal,
the people have apparently forgotten that enormous effort and expense
are needed to reach it. They seem to expect the great change in the
schools to take place smoothly, without any bother or confusion at
all, and certainly without more expense.
In spite of that, an extraordinary amount of progress has been made.
In the past seventy-five years or so, high-school enrollments have
multiplied by about ninety. More education is being passed on to more
children than ever before in history, as well as more health care,
entertainment, and all the rest of it. The advance is perfectly
measurable: the average scholastic attainments of soldiers in World
War II were tested and found to be much higher than those of the
soldiers in World War I. Most suburban schools in America are
incredibly good, compared to any sort of school in the past. Many
centralized rural schools give the children of farmers an education
as good as anyone in the nation can get. The people seem to vacillate
between complacency at these gains and exaggerated horror at
weaknesses which have not yet been overcome.
There are still plenty of one-room schools where the wood stoves glow
with no sign of progress. What is worse, from the point of view of
the number of children involved, big city schools have shown perhaps
the least improvement of all. In the big cities, those who can afford
it still send their children to private schools, and the middle-class
people are rushing to the suburbs. The result is that many big-city
schools exist almost exclusively for the children of the very poor.
Those are the children who need the best schools, and all too often,
they get the worst. Not much is being done about their plight.
SOME CHILDREN CAN READ
The natural vacillation of the public between complacency and outrage
is encouraged by books, news stories, and magazine articles. Books
like The Blackboard Jungle give a picture of the worst big-city
schools, and everybody gets into a tizzy. Articles about Utopian
suburban schools, protected by the suburb's own brand of economic
segregation, calm things down. Then a book charging that the schools
are using the wrong method to teach reading whips things up again.
Halfway measures are apparently no good in books of this kind-the one
I'm thinking of gives the impression of assuming that no children are
learning to read properly these days. To parents like myself, whose
children learned to read beautifully in the public schools, this sort
of thing can be confusing, but there is a wonderful authority in the
printed word-I sometimes catch myself wondering if my daughters
really can read, even while they're contentedly curled up with books
which I at their age found incomprehensible. Critics of this kind
have one thing in common: they lead the reader to believe that if one
relatively inexpensive step were taken, like the use of more phonics
to teach reading, everything would be just dandy in the schools.
This is a perfect example of what I mean by an easy answer to a hard
question. Here we have slum schools, with miserable buildings,
swollen classes, and disturbed children in need of special care. Here
we have an increasing birthrate which demands more and more
facilities just to keep the quality of education where it is. Here we
have a shortage of teachers resulting from the fact that the birth
rate was lowest twenty-five years ago when young teachers were born,
and from increasing industrial competition for capable adults. Here
we have more and more demands placed upon the schools every day, and
a constantly proliferating list of school duties, with no clear
system of priorities governing either the expenditure of money or the
pupil's time. And here also we have a book on education recently
published, and it appears to give a very simple answer: teach more
phonics, and everything will be all right.
Maybe there is an easy answer, after all-easy to say, if not easy to
do. Maybe everything would be all right if the public just realized
the nobility of the goal it has set for the schools, and also
realized the enormous amount of money, time, and thought needed to
achieve it. Maybe everything would be all right if everyone realized
that the goal of schools capable of wasting no human talent is
eminently worth pursuing, and that a nation with the economic power
of this one could for the first time in history achieve it.
The common realization of those things would be the first step. The
second step would be for thoughtful people in every state and
community to sit down and examine the facts about their schools, hear
all relevant opinions, and chart their own course. Programs like that
of the National Citizens Commission for Public Schools and the White
House Conference on Education have been designed to encourage the
process. The business of getting together to look at facts isn't very
dramatic, and often it's downright dull, but it probably is the only
way the bright dream of good schools for everyone can be made a reality.
The job of figuring out how righteous indignation about weaknesses of
the schools can be converted into constructive action will not be
done by people who wave their arms while criticizing the schools as
though they were fighting bees. It will be done by serious-minded
people calmly appraising the schools in their own community. It will
be done by people who have learned to be patient of differing points
of view, and who know how to enlarge areas of agreement, rather than
capitalizing on controversy. Somehow an ancient fallacy will have to
be righted. The schools are no good, many people are saying nowadays,
and they imply, therefore, do not support them. I certainly agree
that many schools are pretty poor now, as they have been always, and
I believe that they therefore should be supported doubly. The job of
creating schools capable of developing all the abilities of all
American children will never be easy, but without any doubt the
American people are in their own curious way plodding toward it.
There is certainly hope in the fact that for the past fifty years,
they have plodded with the speed of hares.
Source of document is unknown.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:15:58 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
From: Kenneth Bernstein <kber@earthlink.net>
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Subject: something that may be of interest
Message-ID:
<20963.1191190558710.JavaMail.root@elwamui-huard.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
I will be doing a review of Carl Glickman's book, and in the process of
reading it was blown away by some of what Deborah Meier had written, so I
jumped ahead of myself and did a dailykos diary on that today, which was
one the recommended list for a while.
Y'all might not only want to read it, but also glance through the
comments.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/9/30/6284/50387
And I highly recommend the book. I will be sending a review to Education
Review later this week.
teacherken aka ken bernstein
Kenneth J. Bernstein
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:03:04 -0400
From: "ElsaHaas" <ElsaHaas@si.rr.com>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Subject: NY Times: "No Graduate Left Behind"
Message-ID: <000201c803b6$11bc3f60$1bcefea9@ScottWorks>
Has anyone seen James Traub's article, "No Graduate Left Behind", in
today's
New York Times magazine section (the section this time is called "The
College Issue")? I haven't noticed any posts about it, but I might have
missed them.
Oddly, I don't think the article ever mentions the federal student aid
that
has been a tool that Spellings wanted to use to get accrediting agencies
and
colleges to fall in line with the idea of some kind of "accountability",
via
testing, for colleges. (And I think that the idea that the federal student
aid - what's left of it - amounts to a government subsidy is supposed to
be
the rationale that makes Republicans seek "accountability" instead of
leaving college education to the free market economy, isn't it?)
Towards the end, Traub says, "... The self-accountability of our system of
higher education is grounded in the optional nature of college attendance.
But college isn't really optional any longer. The economic value of higher
education, on both the individual and the national levels, has given the
public a stake in outcomes not so different from the stake it has in the
public schools..."
I left college after three years to work for a homeschooling magazine, and
later traveled and, while living in Spain, became a self-taught English
tutor (for adults), translator and interpreter. Thank goodness the feds
didn't interfere with my "dropping out", because it was one of the best
decisions I ever made.
I shudder to think that my husband and I have liberated our son from
school,
only to someday find that college has become compulsory. But maybe that's
a
nightmare for the 22nd century.
Elsa Haas
------------------------------
End of [arn-l Digest] Vol. 3 No. 536 Messages: 4
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