written
by
Martin
Cothran
A couple of years ago, I was sitting
down on a Sunday morning reading my local paper.
I was reading a story about the “new”
things happening in education. One of the “new” things happening, said the
story, was that they were going to start getting rid of “rote memorization” and
putting more emphasis on “creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking.” I
remember putting the paper down and telling my wife, who was cleaning up the
breakfast dishes, “Dear, It’s coming back.”
“What’s coming back?”
“It.”
“What’s It? I don’t read minds, you
know.” She’s always saying this, my wife. That she can’t read minds. She is
under the impression that I think she should know what I’m thinking without my
having to explain it.
I ask her if it wasn’t one of the
conditions of marrying her that she be able to read my mind, at which point she
stops and, holding a soap-covered knife she is in the middle of washing, she
gives me a blank stare. I obediently go back to my paper, impressed with the
soap-covered knife—and with her stare, which is about as impressive as the
knife.
By the term “It,” of course, I mean the
Education Reform Monster who goes into hibernation and comes out every
twenty-five years or so to eat our schools. I explain this to my wife.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay,” and went on
doing the dishes. We had already been through one attack of the Monster when our
children were young. We had not originally intended to homeschool our children
some twenty-five years ago when we sent our first child, a boy, to the local
public school.
Kindergarten was not bad. He learned
nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and other classic children’s literature. They did
the things in class that you would expect them to do in a kindergarten class.
They learned to recognize letters and do some simple arithmetic.
But by the next year, our school began
to change. Our state legislature had passed a sweeping education reform program
the year before that was influenced by the reform that had been making the news
around that time. It was called “outcomes-based education.” A court case had
been filed a few years previously to try to correct inequities in school
funding from one district to another, but when it got to our State Supreme
Court, the justices ruled that our whole system of schooling had to be changed.
In came the education consultants.
Educational experts from impressive places descended on our Commonwealth to
advise our state’s lawmakers on what they should do to change our schools. The
result was a wholesale transformation of what school was for. The education
system was turned upside down.
By the time our oldest child had
reached first grade, the new educational regime was in place, and the new
education ideas were being implemented.
I had taught our oldest how to read, so
when he arrived in first grade, we figured this would stand him in pretty good
stead; the teacher would be impressed, and he would have an easy time.
So we thought.
But what transpired in the classroom
was very different. Among the newest things at this time was something called
“whole language instruction.” When my son was given a simple book to read by
the new teacher, he began reading and sounding out the words as he went along,
which was what we had taught him to do—to read phonetically. But the new
teacher was not impressed. In fact, she was not happy at all.
He was not to sound out a word when he
came to one he didn’t know. He was to first observe the context of the word, to
think of the other words he knew in the surrounding sentence, and think about
what the paragraph was about. He was supposed to look at the shape of the word
and see if there was anything about it he recognized from other words he knew.
There were, in fact, about four steps he was supposed to go through before
actually sounding out the word.
Spelling instruction in this class was
equally exotic. He would come home with papers of things that he had written
with comments such as “I love your best guess spelling!” adorning the page on
which my son had misspelled several words.
What was this new philosophy that
encouraged teachers to praise the mistakes children made instead of the things
they did correctly?
My son learned very little that year,
but my wife and I learned plenty. We ended up pulling him out of public school
and putting him in a local private Christian school that emphasized basic
skills and religious instruction. Like our other three children, he experienced
a mix of private and homeschool instruction until he reached college.
But my own child’s experience piqued my
interest. I worked with a conservative public policy organization at the time
the new reforms began changing our schools. And I began investigating exactly
what this “new” education was.
In the ensuing several years, other
aspects of this “new” form of education became apparent. Teachers were not only
no longer allowed to teach formal grammar and spelling, but they were not to
correct their students' papers for these things because this would stifle their
creativity.
Teachers were not to stand up in front
of their classrooms and teach, but to play the role of “facilitator” in the
education of the children in their classes, because children needed to be
“active learners” rather than “passive learners.” And students were supposed to
choose what they learned through “learning centers” rather than have the
teacher directly tell them what they were supposed to do.
The very structure of the classroom was
to be changed. No longer would there be rows of desks, a physical arrangement
that bespoke order and individuality. Long tables were installed so that
children could “collaborate” in “groups.”
Individual subjects were out too.
Projects and unit studies would replace them.
The “rote” memorization and “boring”
drill and practice were to be abandoned. These, parents were told, were not
only not conducive to learning, but were positive impediments to it.
And then there was the abandonment of
the traditional curriculum: the shift from classic literature to amorphous
books by unknown authors and the neglect of the standard history curriculum. In
fact, there seemed to be no curriculum at all.
Every one of these changes—the back-away
from basic skills, classroom methodologies that took the teacher out of the
role of directing the classroom, the shift from tried-and-true disciplines
toward “hands-on” methods, and the abandonment of traditional methods of
knowledge acquisition and a curriculum—all of these, parents were told, would
help the acquisition of knowledge.
All of the “new” practices which were
to replace these hoary methods of old were sprayed with the thin rhetorical
veneer of science. They were “research-based,” and if parents only knew what
the experts in colleges of education knew, they would be assured that this was
the best way to educate children.
As it turns out, these methods had no
compelling research backing. Nor were they new.
As I found out during the reforms of
the '90s, most of these methods had been around since the 1920s and had little
record of success in educating children. Many veteran educators had seen them
come through the schools as recently as the late '60s and early '70s with open
classrooms and the New Math.
In fact, almost every one of the
supposedly “new” methods of education can be traced back to three documents,
all of them written before 1930: "Cardinal Principles of Secondary
Education," written by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary
Education in 1918, and "The Project Method" and "Foundations of
Method," written by William Heard Kilpatrick in 1918 and 1925,
respectively.
Little has changed except the labels,
and even some of these were left as they were, figuring that twenty or
twenty-five years was sufficient time for parents to forget how badly they had
worked the last time they came around.
The pattern of cyclical reform is what
I was referring to when I told my wife that “It” was “coming back.”
How did I know this? Because here I
was, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, hearing the same
warmed-over rhetoric I had heard twenty-five years before. Under the guise of
what is now being called “Twenty-First Century Learning,” the permissivist
program we had seen in my first child’s classroom in the early 1990s—and which
had been tried at least three times before—was being marketed as the newest
education thinking.
Whenever you see news stories that say
we need to “deemphasize rote learning” and “emphasize creativity, collaboration,
and critical thinking skills,” you know "It" is coming again. The
rumbling in the distance constituted by press reports like this is a sign of
the approach of "It."
The first thing to say about these
permissivist reforms is that the practices the reforms say they want to replace
have long been banished from the nation’s classrooms. In the opening chapters
of Charles Dickens' Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind looks out on his class and
proclaims to a colleague: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys
and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing
else, and root out everything else." Where can we find a modern Thomas
Gradgrind?
Although this is the image the
reformers want to create of the classroom out there, it is almost exclusively a
figment of their own imagination. As E. D. Hirsch points out in his book The
Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, reformers “continue to assume that
teachers are still giving lectures to docile classes lined up in rows, are still
forcing children to engage in rote learning,” and are still insisting on mere
accumulation of facts.
In fact, says Hirsch, these practices
have been frowned upon in education colleges, professional journals, and in
teacher lounges for decades, the victim of the animosity that has characterized
the education establishment since the 1920s.
“The continued beating of this dead
horse," says Hirsch, "illustrates the extreme disconnection between
the stated evils that are said to need reforming and the actual practices of
American elementary schools.”
The second point is that, far from
suffering from an overdose of memorized knowledge—facts being drilled into
their tiny little heads—today’s students suffer not from an overabundance of
knowledge, but a decided lack of it. National surveys have shown repeatedly
that American children don’t know basic facts about history, geography, and
literature and don’t do well in mathematics in comparison with many nations
which, ironically, stress rote memorization and drill and practice.
Our educational establishment—the one
that we have charged with transmitting the acquired knowledge and wisdom of the
ages—is, it turns out, not very interested in doing this. It is interested
instead in “learning styles,” “projects,” and “unit studies,” “child-centered
learning,” “learning centers,” and “critical thinking skills”—and in liberating
students from, not familiarizing them with, our civilization.
The most salient aspect of modern
education is its exaltation of process over content. According to Lynne Cheney,
former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the late 1980s:
Long relied upon to
transmit knowledge of the past to upcoming generations, our schools today
appear to be about a different task. Instead of preserving the past, they more
often disregard it, sometimes in the name of “progress”—the idea that today has
little to learn from yesterday. But usually the culprit is “process”—the belief
that we can teach our children how to think without troubling them to learn anything
worth thinking about, the belief that we can teach them how to understand the
world in which they live without conveying to them the events and ideas that
have brought it into existence.
When my second son came home from
college in the middle of his first year and announced that he wanted to become
a teacher, I told him that was fine with me as long as he didn’t become an
education major. “Why?” he asked.
“Because they will teach you nothing
about what you are supposed to teach and will instead try to train you to be an
amateur child psychologist.” After I tried to explain that the academic
standards in education departments were close to nonexistent, he looked at me
doubtfully. “If you want your brain removed,” I added, “a lobotomy would be
cheaper.”
A couple of months later, he got his
textbook for his first education class in the mail. He opened it up while I was
standing there. It was titled, Child Psychology. He looked at me with a shy grin.
“I guess you were right.”
Because of this emphasis on the how of
education rather than the what, we are not passing on our culture to our
students, nor are they acquiring the basic linguistic and mathematical skills
they need to do well in their lives and occupations.
Given that the problem education
reformers are always trying to solve is the opposite of what the problem really
is, such reforms are more likely to make things worse, not better. If the
problem is not too much rote memorization but a lack of general knowledge; if
the problem is not too much “boring” drill and practice but too much clay and
paint and coloring books; if the problem is not too much emphasis on separate
subjects but a chaos of disconnected information about which children cannot
make sense, then fighting these illusory problems with more of what we are
already doing in classrooms will not make things better, but worse.
Before the "Cardinal
Principles" document and Kilpatrick’s "The Project Method,"
there was a system of education that did see it as its job to pass on our
culture. It knew that memorization and drill and practice were not boring, but
exciting for young children. It saw that the teaching of literature and
history, when properly taught, were not only interesting, but exciting to students.
It was called “classical education.”
Classical education saw as its goal to
teach children the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, wisdom and
virtue through literature and history, and advanced intellectual skills (what
modern educators unknowingly call “critical thinking skills”) through the
liberal arts.
Classical education wasn’t abandoned
because it didn’t work; it was abandoned because new ideas took hold of our
education establishment—ideas that, as it turns out, don’t work very well at
all.
