"A child has no greater desire than to make sense of the world around him"—but the folks who oversee U.S. education will never let that happen

Going through pubic schools in Baltimore, Milwaukee and Brooklyn in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I didn't develop much enthusiasm for the educational system. It didn't seem to me to teach a whole lot, and worse still, it seemed to stifle rather than encourage and develop curiosity, imagination and creativity, which still seem to me among the most precious (and distinguishing) human qualities.

I wasn't much impressed either with what I heard about the private schools, or the tidal wave of "reform" programs—scams like the then-big "New Math," which would fail to make a dent in American mathematical illiteracy—proposed for mass education. Sure, smaller classes would be a good idea, but the teachers still have to know what's going on in those classes and have real plans for developing young minds to their maximum potential.

It was a simple quirk of fate that my first job (handed off to me, as it were, by Howie's and my old friend Danny) was with a small mostly textbook publisher that was then enjoying (for it) wild and wildly unexpected success with a trade book by a first-time author named John Holt, called How Children Fail. Based on Holt's own experiences teaching in some pretty good private schools in various parts of the country, it really dealt with the subject of how schools fail children.

Naturally, both Holt and the publisher were eager for a sequel. He obliged by tackling the much harder subject of How Children Learn.

After all, it's easy, relatively speaking, to demonstrate that one thing that doesn't happen a whole lot in our schools is learning. I say "relatively speaking" because there are a whole lot of people who still don't have a clue.

One of Holt's chief beefs with the education establishment was that so many professional educators just didn't know what was actually going on in classrooms. Holt, having taught in relatively prosperous private schools, had had the luxury of spending time as a sort of assistant teacher, meaning that he had the luxury of being in the classroom on a regular basis and seeing what even (or perhaps especially) the official teacher didn't, even with class sizes vastly smaller than the typical 35-40 of New York public schools.

Holt likened the teacher's focus to a beam of light in the forest. Within that narrow band of illumination, the behavior of all living creatures was instantly transformed; outside the beam, life in the forest was unaffected. Meaning that teachers see only what's happening where their attention is focused in that moment, and in that moment the child who's the focus of that attention behaves in a way that's likely to be strikingly different from the way he/she behaves otherwise, and from the way his/her classmates are behaving.

Just as important, Holt also got to spend time with the kids outside class, regularly enough so that his presence didn't distort their behavior as much as it would have on a single-official-visit basis. And he was sobered to discover that the official classroom view of "intelligence" didn't bear much resemblance to how the kids' minds worked in real life.

There were kids who were regarded as problem learners inside the building—and perhaps thought to be just plain stupid—who on the playground displayed command of a staggering range of sports statistics. Not just rote recall, surprising as even that would have been to these kids' teachers, but real command of those facts and how to apply them. No doubt the professional educators would dismiss such knowledge as trivial, maybe even regrettable. But at the very least, as Holt recognized, it demonstrated that when it came to something these kids cared about, their minds were capable of feats of memory and analysis unimagined by their teachers.

Still, as I was saying, it was—relatively speaking—easy for Holt to demonstrate how the schools were failing. It would be a much stiffer challenge to suggest how they could begin to facilitate real learning.

Back then, and I suspect still, the education industry was much concerned with the concept of "motivation," as in: "We need to figure out how to motivate kids" to learn. This drove Holt to eloquent exasperation. The idea that children needed to be motivated to learn drove him bonkers. I'm quoting from memory, but even after 40 years I think I've got this pretty close to word-for-word:

"A child has no greater desire," he wrote, "than to make sense of the world around him."

Wow! I've still never encountered a better definition or description of learning, or education, or teaching. And I'm sure that lots of people go into the teaching profession precisely because they are excited by the possibility of taking part in this process.

Sadly, those people have never gotten a whole lot of official support. Usually, in the end, they're ground down by the system, and either see their ideals wither away or flee the system. And while I don't have much direct access to what goes on in the schools these days, all the information I get suggests that far from doing a better job of developing minds than they did in my school years, they've gotten worse. And then came No Child Left Unscathed.

I always worry when politicians get involved in educational issues. This is a double-edged sword, of course. On the one hand, unless the pols do get involved in these issues, there's no hope of ever having more money available to try to do a better job of educating. On the other hand, experience suggests that the pols will always get the educational issues wrong. Always. And not just wrong, but catastrophically wrong. Naturally, then, the more obstreperously they intervene, the wider-spread the catastrophe is likely to be.

Which brings us to George W. Bush the Education President. Of course you knew that anything he touched had to turn to shit, since all his life, everything he's ever touched has turned to shit. And of all things for such a cosmically, gruesomely uneducated person to involve himself with—education?

This is a man whose entire life, intellectually speaking, has been singlemindedly devoted to stifling every iota of intelligence and curiosity he was endowed with and turning himself into a functional ignoramus. A man who has "taught" himself to value only three classes of people: bullies and con artists and—in the realm of learning—apostles of superstition and ignorance. Of course the categories overlap: The bullies and wacko religionists who back George W. Bush are among the country's more enterprising con artists.

I hope at this late date it isn't necessary for anyone who has found his or her way to DownWithTyranny to hear chapter-and-verse citations of the Bush administration's unprecedented and uncompromising and all-encompassing assault on every form of true learning—in other words, every way society has devised to help make sense of the world around us. As I've said before in this space, even allowing for this administration's unrelenting, across-the-board assault on every manner of decent sensibilities, perhaps nothing has pained me more personally than the assault on knowledge.

Now the other shoe drops.

Of course caring educators of the sort I was speaking of a moment ago have always screamed about the dangers of standardized testing, notably the all-but-certain misuse of the testing process and its results. It's one thing for teachers, and perhaps even schools and school districts, to have ways of monitoring their children's progress in measurable skills like reading and math. After all, even in my idealized view of education, in the Holtian sense of making sense of the world around us, everyone needs a basic set of skills to apply to the task.

But of course that isn't the way standardized tests are used. And as soon as the No Child Left Alone program was put together, sensible educators understood and warned that it was only about power and control and not at all about education. And from the start there have been voices warning us that the inescapable result of this new federal initiative would be to divert all available resources from the job of facilitating learning to "teaching to the tests."

Now we have it. The other shoe is dropping.

No doubt it's a slow news day, not to mention a Sunday. All the usual national and international disasters seem to be unraveling at an unnewsworthy "status quo" pace, perhaps even taking the Sabbath off. But here it is, a two-column lead story on the front page of today's New York Times:

"Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math"

The deck:

"Responding to No Child Left Behind Law, Thousands Narrow the Curriculum"

Of course, what the article never really gets into is that kids aren't really being taught reading and math. They're being taught to take standardized reading and math tests.

The notion, for example, of reading as an indispensable tool for pleasure and discovery, a key to understanding and developing empathy with our fellow humans and to unlocking the secrets of the universe, must be simply laughable in the present educational climate. I gather from the Times article that what kids are actually being taught is to hate reading and math. These subjects have been transformed into punishment, the torment of countless kids' existence.

I imagine that the religionist loons who want nothing more fervently for their (and our) children than to condemn them to the eternal darkness of superstition and mind control—they're probably smiling.

On the bright side . . . let's see, there must be a bright side. Oh yes, got it! Now that the Times has devoted all this attention to the subject, albeit in the form of a weakish lead story in a Sunday paper which is bound to go largely unread, tomorrow we can go back to forgetting all about it.

If you know Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, his searing look at this crucial episode in the ongoing catastrophe of Russian political reality, now would be an appropriate time to cue the Simpleton wailing his plaintive little ditty to the words with which he brings down the curtain on the revised version of the opera:

Flow, flow, bitter tears.
Weep, weep, true-believing soul!
Soon the enemy will come and dark will fall.
Dark darkness, impenetrable.
Woe, woe unto Russia.
Weep, weep, Russian people.
Hungry people.

Ken


UPDATE: What Do Teachers Make?

It varies state by state but in no state do we honor and respect teachers the way we honor and respect-- and reward-- celebrities or banksters. Here's a state-by-state breakdown of average teacher salaries (as well as per-pupil spending in each state).