Michael Alex
2009
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Dinner Table Politics The Myths That Make Us Stupid Third Course: Education and other Misguided Efforts that Encourage Stupidity ∞ “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain “The trouble with people...is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.” NAME Billings “...Teaching [is] not unlike inviting students into exchanges around the dinner table.” - Ken Bain
∞ Myth: Politics has no place in the schoolhouse, which should be an objective, non-partisan environment. ∞ As a child, I excelled in school. In high school, my grades were consistently honour roll. I was, by my recollection, well liked by most of my teachers and most of my classmates (a balancing act that any survivor of high school cliques can attest is no small feat - most kids who are obviously liked by teaching faculty suffer the social exile associated with being a ‘goody-goody’ or ‘teacher’s pet’). I soaked up most of what the public schools I attended had to offer: I played for the teams, joined the clubs, went to the parties, sat on student council. I left at the apex of student success: scholarship winner, best all-round male student selected by the faculty, chosen class Valedictorian by my peers. Aside from high grades or awards or social recognition, I think its fair to say that I was most recognized, albeit never explicitly, for having mastered the ‘game’ that is school. And I loved the game, particularly the rewards that one can accrue if they play well. To my mind now, the most important thing I took from years in school was a genuine love of learning and a self-motivated intellectual curiosity. Further study was never in question. At university, I enjoyed, with minor hiccups, similar success: scholarship money, entrance into elite schools and programs, a rich balance of work and play. My dorm-mates commented with amusement on my habit of completing, in summer breaks, course readings I hadn’t gotten to in the frantic days of term end deadline chasing. Why? Simply put, I wanted to soak up everything on offer at school - it wasn’t a mean to any particular end. So, after graduation, life as either professional student or teacher beckoned. I chose both. In the decade since those days, I have taught what is popularly known as social studies in public high school classrooms. I have learned a lot since, not leaving school exactly, but moving to a bigger desk. This is not an uncommon experience for those who teach. I love teaching and I think it is fair to say that I am an excellent teacher. The performance, the issues, the give-and-take – teaching is a high, a rush. I am a very
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different kind of teacher than the one I envisioned I would be when I was in teacher’s college mind you, and I think that my students have benefited from this discontinuity. I am not the Font of All Wisdom standing in front of scores of charmed, awed students that I had imagined. Instead, I mediate and mentor in sometimes chaotic, sometimes difficult but interesting, challenging and always political classrooms. I am aware that the this personal sketch might sound boastful, but I offer it only to throw into relief my main point that follows. I have worked hard to be knowledgeable about what I teach and harder to gain skill in teaching it. Moreover, the truism that teachers teach people, not subjects is correct: I have worked hard to get to know my students, to understand what excites them, frustrates them, makes them tick. It is tiring, rewarding work. Yet, I am well paid, have a holiday schedule that is the envy of my friends and neighbours, and get to work with young adults ten months a year, exploring ideas, challenging them and being challenged in turn, laughing out loud and fighting through a lot of bullshit. I love my work and feel fortunate that I do what I do. So it might come as a bit of a surprise to that someone personally as well as professionally fulfilled, comfortable in the teaching arts and long an able navigator of the school system would admit this: I have strongly and repeatedly considered quitting teaching. I actively considered a career change to a non-teaching job in no fewer than half of my ten years of teaching. I am hardly alone. In recent years, official estimates have tracked the number of rookie teachers who leave the profession within the first few years to be at best slightly lower than 10% or as high as fully one third. I offer this background for a couple of reasons. One, I think it’s important to be honest about my own experience and the biases that colour my perspective around not only the politics of schools and education, but teaching specifically. Critics who might suggest a particular agenda at play in what I am writing here, let me beat you to the punch. I do have an agenda: I love learning, love teaching, love school and vehemently support public education. That said, I respectfully maintain that most schools, constituted on the status quo model that they are, are broken and that it is in our collective best interests to fix them. Moreover, I mention my personal successes not as self-congratulations but as a personal rejoinder. As a student, I benefited from the school system’s strict adherence to the status quo. In terms of the perks I enjoy as a teacher, today I have every selfish interest now in leaving well enough alone. Even my current teaching assignment, in which I benefit almost total job security by virtue of union membership is, by any standard, as plum as they come. No matter. Despite my personal self-interest and stake in protecting the fruits of my privilege, I cannot remain silent. Though this chapter is key to understanding the immensity of challenging dinner table politics, it also stands as a personal act of conscience: I cannot live with silently aiding and abetting the endemic and largely avoidable failure of our schools. Much of this failure is based in an aversion to clear vision. Assuming the popular but nonetheless sham stance that schools should or
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even can be apolitical amounts to putting on blinders that impair vision for more progressive (and effective) education. Even if I am doing good work in the relative safe haven of my own classroom and I am hardly alone in this - individuals working in isolated bubbles of engagement and reflection are not nearly enough. Systemic change is called for, desperately so. Therefore, in this chapter at least, I will stick to the old chestnut that one should ‘write what you know.’ Though my observations, my analysis and my suggestions for change on not empirical, nor refereed and decidedly would not be sanctioned by my employers, I maintain in good faith that they are my best effort to offer advice for improving not only the learning experiences of most students. They are also my most concrete suggestions for coping with and averting the creation, dissemination and uncritical swallowing of dinner table politics. Ten years in the classroom and thirty-five on the planet is about all I can take of the bombardment of myths that make us stupid without a meaningful attempt to do something larger about a problem that is dauntingly big. Many of the roots that sustain dinner table politics can be followed back to the classroom. So are realistic hopes for resisting and discrediting many of the most odious and persistent popular myths that make us stupid, first at home and then beyond. If we are to prepare the non-professionally political (that is, the ‘non-elite’ people who make democracy more than a slogan) with the habits of mind to meet their responsibilities as civic people rather than existing as mere units of economic production or the great mass of mindless consumers, then we must recast schools in both purpose and form. Schools must not only be acknowledged to be inherently political institutions. This trait should not be fudged or hidden, it should be inspired and promoted. If we have any hope for achieving a society of largely informed and politically responsible adults, we must start by ensuring that children are given a chance to experience and participate in politics productively - from their earliest years. Yet for the most part, talking about politics in the classroom rarely happens, and most often does so only in the form of complaint. Many people bitch and complain about schools: the teachers, the unions or the many demands they perceive our schools making on society or the public purse. But most often, purveyors of dinner table politics choose, as always, the easiest target: the lazy, good-for-nothing, disrespectful hoodlums ‘kids these days.’ Well, I’ve taught a good number of these kids and I must say that they’re mostly good for a lot - far more than many of their parents for what it’s worth. The kids I’ve taught at several schools have been largely sharp, curious and want a challenge. Like most adults, they are respectful when treated with respect. They seem to work much harder and with less down time to just be ‘kids’ than at least I enjoyed twenty years ago. But there we are: they aren’t empowered to defend themselves, so they catch much of the flack for perceived wrongs: today’s grads don’t vote. They don’t read the paper or follow the news. They’re self-interested and hedonistic. It is definitely easier to simplistically blame kids rather than consider the much harder questions about where and why our schools succeed and fail. Few like to consider harsh reality but, put simply, here it is: The graduates our schools annually produce reflect, more than we like to admit, the priorities we have set for their schooling. If we don’t like what our schools are producing, then it is
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high time to consider how the educational status quo - what one education researcher has dubbed pedagogical “rigor mortis” - fails most students in most respects. The political ramifications of this introspection would deliver a lesson that one hopes would not soon be forgotten. The ‘What?:’ Ways That a ‘Textbook’ Education Fails For a country espousing democracy as its form of governance, such sanctification of The Textbook provides a strangely incongruous apprenticeship. When we rely on a single source for all of a course’s content, we are teaching students to accept one view, one authority. We are saying that it is right to depend on a single voice, even on complicated, value-driven questions. But smart and free people don’t read this way. Instead, they recognize that most of life’s biggest questions have not yet been settled and that science, technology, and even culture proceed on the best theory to date, not on some Final Truth. That’s why mature readers use multiple sources to get a balanced view, hear the alternate theories, and make up their own minds. It is unacceptable for schools in a democracy to teach young people that only one view is sufficient - or permitted.
Setting down this lesson plan in a few short pages is one tall order. Be that as it may, I will do my best to lay out several political problems that our schools present, illustrate why they matter and offer suggestions for their revitalization. This, if you will, a fairly standard lesson planning technique I have adapted from other educators and adopted to structure most learning in my own classes. Whatever the problem or issue to be discussed, it is worth framing discussion around three general questions: “What? So What? Now What?” In a culture that is as anti-intellectual, insular and apathetic as our current one, it is worth juxtaposing these open-ended discussion starting points with the blasé responses that a typical disengaged person who has rejected politics in all forms will in effect adopt as their very manner of being. On most matters of formal political discussion, the standard parries are apt to be: “Don’t know. Don’t care. Can’t act.” Given the high stakes, we must do much better than this. Schools are the best and most logical place to dig in and start to do some work to improve our politics and society from the ground up. School, even brought up in casual conversation, is a topic that rarely fails to elicit strong opinions. Why? Everyone can lay claim to substantial direct experience - expertise of a very personal sort, over a decade’s worth or more. Also, school is the place where much of our formative years are spent, at least the part that is most structured and made the central routine around which, to some extent, all other parts of early life rotates. At dinnertime, the standard question thrown out by parental units to their progeny has, since the birth of public education nearly a century and a half ago has been: “what did you learn in school today?” Here’s what I’ve learned: school is a place where a small percentage succeed and most others fail (in reality if not always on official records). School is a place where some genuinely learn and most others don’t. It is a place where some make first discoveries of knowledge – its intoxication, its power, its currency. Others experience the visceral hurt of alienation and neglect. They learn too: failure, rejection and existence outside the margins.
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School is a place where kids learn to (mis)behave, to interact with others, to play the game, or to opt out of it. School is at times challenging, exciting, scary, boring, banal. It is primary social location for discovering one’s identity or creating it, remaking it, or chucking it. It’s a place for thousands of explicit lessons and thousands more that are subtler. On paper and in the feel-good rhetoric of the most recent in a long line of politicians who proclaim themselves the “Education” candidate, schools easy to quantify: they’re about learning, opportunity, the dream of futures filled with promise. The public school system remains a most potent symbol of our democracy and capacity for scheduled, organized and painstakingly documented commitment to personal actualization and, ideally, communal expressions of social justice. Amongst peoples whose states have been failed – think Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era – functioning schools are held up a measuring stick against which we can measure each community’s relative freedom, security and potential for future prosperity. In school, everyone has a chance. Open the schoolhouse door: the path to realizing the American dream (even for those not living in America) lies within. In large part, we come to define ourselves – or be defined by – our experiences at school. Think about it. Were you a straight-A achiever, an abject failure or part of the great-unwashed in-between? Were you teacher’s pet or class clown? First picked for teams or last in line? Popular or misfit? Marked for Great Things or subject of meetings to discuss and discipline your poor performance? Were these the best or worst of times? School easily raises so many passionate opinions because everyone can lay claim to some degree of experience. Almost everyone can lay claim to one or more deliriously inept or cruel schoolmaster. Luckier are those who can cite even one life-changing teacher who made them see their world differently. Regardless, one doesn’t need to be a teacher versed in the latest pedagogy-of-the-month to talk knowledgeably about what school does, what it doesn’t and whether it matters. Everyone has a stake in schools and everyone should have something intelligent to say about them. Schools are a funny thing too, because they are at once an expression of the greatest civility, progress and potential inherent in our society – and evidence of where we have failed most profoundly. One need look no further than our schools to see both the promise of equality and realities of winners and losers being neatly sorted out from the common. In reflecting on schools, what’s easy to miss is that they simultaneously act to create and enforce hierarchies of knowledge, privilege and social standing, yet they are also stand as a great experiment in social levelling. The first is easy to spot: in school we are categorized, marked, graded and labelled daily. Our perceived intelligence, sociability and myriad other personal traits are not only measured, they’re commented on and become in part public knowledge. Yet school is also a grand leveller because it is largely mandatory, is standardized and subscribes to and reinforces a particularly intoxicating (and ultimately debilitating) myth of meritocracy. In school, all comers are supposedly granted equal chance to succeed through his or her own diligence, effort and ability. Democratic in theory, capitalist in practice, school is the place where we first and enduringly are informed about whether we will awarded marks of success or the lasting stigma of failure. From day one, school exemplifies equality of opportunity in theory.
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Long before graduation (or at least ‘conclusion’ for the many dropouts unceremoniously shown the door early) school exemplifies inequality of result in practice. This is hardly the sole contradiction inherent in how schools are understood or organized. In practice, and in ways too numerous to detail, schools are deeply, inherently political environments. They are rife with power plays, negotiated relationships, partisanship, policy, rules and ideology. And yet, in an elaborate, effacing and staggeringly dishonest game of make-believe, we dance collectively to the old song that says that schools are not, and must never be, political. We desperately cling to the myth that schools that encourage political introspection and debate will punish and marginalize students along partisan lines - as if this doesn’t already happen in schools. The taboo against politics at the dinner table has equally been brought to bear in the school system. Religion and sex too are for the most part ignored – education policy makers have decided that religion is too contentious to be considered critically (a commitment to secularism provides a convenient out here) and sex education, where it happens at all, is paid lip service through reduction to clinical biology. All realities of sticky, sweaty decisions and potentially life-changing pressures and the sometimes-unhappy results are neatly ignored. Whatever anyone says about supposedly unbiased, objective learning environments, we all know that classrooms are profoundly political spaces. They are rife with power dynamics that are implicitly recognized but rarely if ever directly addressed whose hands are raised, opinions sought, positions respected? Never mind dictums about the need for inquiry or academic freedom. Controversy, creative discomfort and pointed questions must never disrupt the stage-management of placid, controlled classrooms. Even in classes that focus on political study directly in terms of approved curricula, most often they are sanitized of all content that might spark controversy. Reduced to definitions, concepts lacking context or relevance, political and non-political studies alike become just one more tedious subject to memorize if one is to succeed academically. Even in overtly political subjects like the socials (those inherently polemical studies that aspire with pathetic desperation to achieve scientific precision), courses of study are too often the academic equivalent to a fast food meal: they offer the appearance of sustenance but are ultimately empty and unsatisfying, a waste of calories. Politics, where and when formally acknowledged in schools, is for the most part sucked of life and relevance by being distilled to a mind-numbingly irrelevant collection of textbook definitions, flow-charts and multiple-choice tests. Leaving aside the rote, dry lessons detailing government structures and the work of our houses of public policymaking (and outside of higher level mathematics, I struggle to name topics more disconnected from either the concern or experience of all but the most weirdly atypical teenager), politics are mostly given short shrift or, when it is deemed necessary, actively repressed. Almost all kids learn this lesson and they learn it well: politics are dangerous, boring or contentious. They are decidedly not worth serious consideration let alone a habit of everyday conversation. What we learn at school we bring home and back again: our dinner tables are poorer for this malignant habit of enforced apolitical perspectives that infects the body politic en masse.
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Yet, in an ideal world, schools would be places alive with lots of purposeful talk. At school, young people would be immersed in environments that present topics they are interested in and eager to hear about, research and above all to discuss. My contention is that young people aren’t that different from older people – only moderately more creative, optimistic and idealistic. For students, politics, religion and sex are the topics most interesting to discuss, full stop. Young people in particular are curious, anxious even, to learn about these broad topics that have been ruled out of order but about which adolescents typically have so many questions. Ask any schoolteacher of even fleeting experience about how to engage kids in topics that they might otherwise take a pass on. Easy answer: as on television, controversy and novelty sell, to say nothing of sex and violence where they can be plausibly worked in. Yet our schools mostly avoid or stultify these most potent tools and topics for encouraging student engagement. Never dismiss the ability of trained professionals experienced in education to drain even the most exciting topics of all interesting dimensions. Why? Why are politics, religion and sex relegated to the back of the classroom? For the same reasons they are excised from the dinner table: if we talk about these topics, the thinking goes, someone is bound to be upset. Tempers will flare. People will become uncomfortable. Good manners will cease to be respected. Control will be lost. Most dangerous, parents will complain. Meetings will be made necessary and offending teachers will be blinded with paperwork if not formal review. Thus, schools formally disavow politics and political issues in the name of consistency, fairness and inoffensiveness. They are therefore, for all intents and purposes, neutered of all vitality. Legions of incurious, unreflective, selfish people are the product of the alien, austere system that has become entrenched. A society populated by the politically illiterate, ripe to be duped by and reproduce the latest myth are thus graduated annually to mealymouthed acclaim. Yet whatever graduation rates and literacy test results say, accreditation is not the same as education. By even the most generous measures, and notwithstanding the increased access to and production of publicly accessible knowledge, rampant stupidity marks our society today. Yet, many educators will unhappily admit that many if not most students, no doubt under great pressure to reap the economic benefits of accreditation, are more concerned with grade transcripts than actual learning. According to Professor Kim Blank of the University of Victoria, “Many students who challenge a grade believe that working hard, competing all assignments and attending class - even if they don’t necessarily produce great work - should be enough to receive an A.” In my experience, some students (and more often their enabling parents) don’t even believe this should be necessary. Yet empty accreditation that applies a veneer of respectability that can, for a time, hide stupidity, infects our democracy, our communities, our everyday lives. And, in large part, we perpetrate this stupidity upon ourselves by confusing test scores for genuine knowledge, degrees for discretion, curriculum with conscience. We have, inadvertently or not, gotten exactly the results that the system we have devised and perfected were bound to produce, for graduates and dropouts alike: apathetic conformism, perverse levels of
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self-interest, uncritical consumption, naked celebration of nonsense and nihilistic navalgazing. It is, as Kurt Vonnegut once noted, as if our national motto has become “Ignorance is Strength!” Beyond the classroom, avowedly apolitical schools engender a culture that is not only politically stunted. It has essentially become one of learned helplessness. When it comes to the many problems, the political challenges we face today, and will face in the future, we are hobbled on three counts: at a time of limitless and easily accessible information, more and more people know less and less. Secondly, even amongst those who can claim to ‘know,’ a paltry sum of the informed care. Finally, and most damningly, for the meagre few who are politically aware and want to act – these are the powerless – they have no idea how or where to begin. Whatever they may have done in the past, and despite the many positive (often inadvertent) by-products of the public education system in its once and forever incarnation, schools – their teachers, bureaucrats, politicians, academics, concerned citizens and public supporters – profoundly fail the very people they mean to help, those they vainly and wrong-headedly hope inculcate with a passion for “life-long learning.” ∞ The ‘What?’ of public education is broad enough that it would take more than a chapter indeed, more than one book to catalogue. In the broadest sense, schools aren’t working anymore because they utilize a 19th century industrial organizational structure while operating in the post-industrial (post literate?) 21st. Amongst educators, this truism is widely observed. So, to be more specific, I have chosen eight of the most problematic manifestations of this outdated educational organization and practise. Of these eight we should definitely say: enough! (I’ll return to these problems in the “Now What?” section where I offer some concrete suggestions for change). The negative effects of this system can be measured in its impacts on both individual students and, taken as a whole, the collective stultification of our political culture: Schools teach what we don’t need to know, students learn what they don’t care to. Students, particularly when failing to meet teacher or parental expectations, are quick to employ the line: “but what use will this be in the real world?” This observation, frequently astute, is nonetheless problematic on two counts: First, it delineates between everyday life, real, and life in school - somehow unreal. Schools, if they are to be relevant, must always be connected to and interact with ‘real’ worlds. Moreover, this observation makes plain what is already plainly apparent to even the youngest students much of what we learn will, in fact, not be of any use outside of the classroom and of scant use within it. ‘Banking’-style instruction kills all but the strongest impulses to learn and actively discourages student autonomy and creativity. It should go without saying that dominant curricula must be radically shifted. Ideally, students themselves would play a primary role in determining this content. But content is
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merely one aspect of the problem, form is also a consideration. We should briefly consider how students are mostly taught. Most non-educators will likely be unfamiliar with the tag ‘banking’ education. Labels aside, almost everyone knows this practice well since it was almost certainly the form that nearly all of your formal education would have taken. Banking refers of course to the idea that students provide an annual tabla rasa, the proverbial blank slate upon which learned teachers can belch and barf their ample knowledge and expertise on their waiting, docile (and helpless) empty vessels. Kids minds are the banks, empty until filled by teachers, ideally with passive acceptance and little action or interaction. This form of instruction is not only wrongheaded but dangerous on several counts. Most damningly, it doesn’t work very well. Studies show that only about ten percent of all people learn best through lecture format instruction. With only one person speaking at a time (and obviously there are times for this in every classroom), the opportunities for learning are reduced to passive observance. It is boring (hence the tendency to pass notes, whisper off topic or, today, surf the web by stealth). Banking is ineffective; more and more ineffective as classes grow in size since opportunities for each student to take part are diminished. Third, this style of teaching is implicitly offensive. Nobody likes a know-it-all, particularly one who insists on holding forth from a set plan which they will not be knocked from. Fourth, and this should go without saying but, then again, so many teachers operate according to a myth that contradicts this basic reality: nobody does know it all. Fifth, banking-style instruction places the focus on the wrong party - the teacher rather than the students. Teachers should know the material already, so why are they doing all of the talking? Finally (actually, this most common mode of instruction has so many other detriments, but I think you take the point), banking education rewards students for ‘right’ answers, punishes them for ‘wrong’ ones and privileges regurgitation of answers over posing intelligent questions. The latter is always better than the former, if only because they are almost always better indicators of deep knowledge, intellectual curiosity and critical thought. Ready recitation of easy (and frequently memorized, soon to be forgotten) answers is indicative of no more than a particular form of intelligence that is of dubious value in a world where answers are a click away. More to the point, if we want students to learn by taking chances, to employ the natural curiosity that humans are endowed with, then we shouldn’t punish and stigmatize children for being wrong. We should encourage creativity and reward those willing to take chances. Checking off right answers so that the class can move to new checklists is more than boring - it’s a waste of time. On a related note, any classroom organized to facilitate this mind-numbing form of instruction - row upon row of desks separated to block students from communicating with one another are in desperate need of a interior designer. Think about it: do we organize our homes this way? Our workplaces? Outside of sweatshops and jails, I cannot think of a place so ready to embrace this mode of anti-social organization. We owe our children more than to treat them like so many slaves to intellectual industry. The political implications of a (quasi-) education based largely on banking should be obvious: a population that for the most part celebrates trivia mastery as knowledge. A
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people unused to discussion, civil disagreement or debate. Atomized individuals eager to be told what and how to think while maintaining the fiction of their own unique perspective. People unused to purposeful talk or thoughtful interaction. People who have been rewarded - given top marks even - for parroting back easy answers rather than engaging critically or creatively. Such ‘learning’ kills any real ability to be or become educated. Teachers’ preoccupation with ‘covering’ curriculum and reliance on textbooks renders material learned superficial and dangerous This observation is a natural lead-in from the last one. First off, in their hurry to ‘cover’ material, teachers ensure that appreciation for said material will be limited and inherently shallow. Consider, if you will, a course that most people would find interesting, say the history of cinema. Rather than showing students, for instance, a trilogy of classics like the Godfather series, would they be better served with a five minute summary, devoid of all the things that make these and other films worth seeing? Would a film student be considered knowledgeable without doing the work of learning (in this case, watching)? Even if he or she could recite plot, character and theme? Learning in school should be no different. Studying a limited array of topics in depth, preferably with interrelation to other subjects will always be preferable to token coverage, almost always in preparation for a meaningless multiple-choice form of evaluation. Any teacher worth their salt will be better employed giving over the power to choose what to study to students, instead acting as mentor rather than knowledge repository. Teachers can and should earn their keep by guiding students to and through topics of relevance, and for successfully convincing students that subjects that they might otherwise skip are in fact worthwhile, then demonstrating how and why while facilitating links to other questions, other learning opportunities. I would argue that any teacher unable to make the case for a unit of instruction should not be allowed to teach it, nor should any unwilling student have to study it. If topics are relevant, then this task should be child’s play, particularly for such well-educated individuals. Schools unhealthy reliance on textbooks for instruction is a related problem. Using textbooks as anything other than reference volumes is a sure fire way to turn kids off of nearly any subject. This is why so many textbooks are returned each year unsullied by students’ hands - they intuitively know and reject a form of knowledge transmission that is by necessity devoid of context, interesting narrative and payoff for reading. No wonder that so few non-students would turn to a textbook to learn about any subject; one might as well attempt to grasp an appreciation for literature by dictionary or history via encyclopedia by reading one unrelated entry after another. What textbooks really excel at is making a teacher’s job easier: with a narrowly circumscribed course of study, designing and grading tests is oh so easy. But this type of education is worse than empty, it is risky in terms of its political implications. If we ascribe to the dictum that it is possible to know just enough about something to be dangerous (a truism of which your average home computer user is no doubt painfully aware), then filling or at least attempting to fill the heads of children with
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a dog’s breakfast of ideas is a dodgy enterprise. With only the most cursory access to topics that they have apparently learned, most students - and later as post-school adults will have sufficient powers of recall to get things ‘just’ wrong, to inflame opinion, to be reactionary, to blindly pass on a variety of myths that make us stupid when not unwittingly constructing their own. This approach to education does more than ensure a society of incurious people (since they will have been persuaded that depth is an unnecessary frill). It provides just a taste of knowledge, a smattering of content to recall for any purpose, but lacking deep understanding. Such people are ripe to be manipulated, at the dinner table, in front of the television - anywhere and everywhere! Student testing is rarely effective - more often it actually hinders genuine learning. Most testing is bogus, simple as that. Formal tests privilege a specific breed of thinkers with a particular form of intelligence - recall. In informal discussions with colleagues over the past few years, we have noted that scores rarely deviate from patterns established early in academic years. What is in October will most often be in June. If test scores are such an easy predictor of accomplishment, we should consider: why we bother teaching (or students learning) at all? If test scores are a fait accomplise, then either the teaching/learning relationship is dysfunctional (likely) or the tests themselves are a faulty gauge and a waste of time (certainly). Any learning that is geared to a temporary mastery of course content will by definition be impermanent. This is the antithesis of real education. Further, such testing sets up a competitive atmosphere amongst students that is as unhealthy and incompatible with co-operative (and most effective) learning. It is however a fantastic crash-course in preparation for capitalist competition since this winner-take-all scheme of ranking - with the perennial crop of losers interspersed with a few champions - provides a model of our over-arching mode of economic, political and social organization that even the youngest or dullest child will intuitively understand. This model of sham meritocracy provides the shallowest - but invariably persuasive intellectual underpinnings for much of the selfishness and inhumanity we see in our world. It is so dominant, few dare to challenge it. On a subconscious level, it girds an appetite for dinner table politics: You versus me. Us versus them. Draw the partisan lines. Win at any cost, consensus is for wimps. It is the law of the jungle, tarted up and civilized. This fact does not make it less grotesque. Besides, this is another example of schools conforming to the idea that they reflect a somewhat ‘unreal’ world since, in the ‘real’ world, post-school, people are rarely subject to written evaluations in the course of their daily lives. Do we evaluate relationships according to a pop quiz? Do many employers evaluate employees based on written tests? Teachers themselves have been some of the most outspoken critics of the recurrent rage for standardized testing in literacy and numeracy. In the fall of 2007, Kathryn Sihota, a respected Grade 3 teacher with nearly three decades of teaching experience working on Vancouver Island, British Columbia was disciplined for insubordination. Her crime? Refusing to run her eight year old charges through the DART (District Assessment of Reading Test), a standardized measure of reading comprehension (Incidentally, the Pedagogical Acronym (PA) along with its simpering
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evil twin, quasi-Orwellian educational jargon that tend to draw their inspiration more from twisted irony than accuracy, are both mainstays of professional teacher-speak. Anyone who willingly employs either should be challenged for their lack of clarity and are should be viewed with suspicion). Sihota, faced with crying, stressed children, informed school authorities of her refusal on these grounds: “I’ve got to do a lot of thinking about this and decide. My intention is to provide the best learning environment for my kids and if that means standing up again, well, maybe that’s what I’ll have to do.” Then again, in the ‘real world,’ we have too often followed the directives of corporate entities that generate (and directly profit from) standardized tests rather than the advice of educators only trying to do right by ‘their kids.’ Though exceptional (and no doubt motivated to act by the double security she in effect enjoys as a unionized teacher who is so close to retirement that she is unlikely to face serious reprimand prior to retirement), Sihota is hardly alone. Critics point out, correctly, that a best case scenario for such evaluation is one where classes are geared to preparing for an arbitrary test rather than engaging in authentic and organic investigation. One wonders why so few of these same educators have failed to apply the same critical eye to how students are evaluated in their classrooms. On a similar note, I would also point out the almost psychotic aversion to such modes of evaluation amongst teachers themselves. Recently, in the jurisdiction where I teach, a system of semi-annual evaluation with a rating scale of ‘Exemplary,’ ‘Good,’ ‘Satisfactory,’ and ‘Unsatisfactory’ was assailed by my union as a punitive system. Many teachers were fairly agog at the idea of being evaluated by a school administrator for even one period of instruction at a three year interval. So, the teachers fought back against this system, which could easily have been an “A” through “F” report card. And they won. This is a classic goose-for-gander scenario: why should students be forced to submit to anything their seniors (who are, mind you, far better coached and protected from poor grades) reject out of hand? Grading students is a lazy and largely inaccurate way of providing feedback on student progress. This flows naturally from the critique of testing above. A few additional points however, for anyone not in the know, to clarify why we cling to the practice of assigning letter or percentile grades in courses of study. They are easy. Easy to use, easy to understand. That’s it really. Parents ‘get’ them without having to work too hard, for instance, to take the time and devote the attention to what their kids are learning or can do as opposed to the totem they have been assigned. Colleges and universities simply adore them - it’s tough to fathom how fundamentally they would have to rejig their systems of admission without the easy short-hand of grades (inflation be damned). Teachers, many of whom are, admittedly, already overwhelmed by largely inconsequential and always time consuming paperwork and classrooms bulging at the seams, depend on a system of plugging in random numbers into computer programs. The easy to punch in by rote and hence meaninglessly impersonal comment banks make their jobs a bit easier. None of this gives genuine feedback to students or their families. It is another chore to be crossed off a
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list. I would wager that most teachers resent completing all of this busy work that takes time away from what they ostensibly love to do. Which is teach. They probably dislike it just a bit less than the scores of students who dread days of report card distribution. Schools prepare students for jobs that no longer exist rather than lives that actually do. Since our school years are, on aggregate, a study in the balance between discipline and dissent, those of us with the power to create change might ask: why classrooms are so often intrinsically coercive environments? You know the drill: Be quiet. You’re late. You’re wrong. You didn’t follow my instructions. You show great potential but aren’t attentive in the completion of your work. You’re too social for your own good and waste opportunities for learning. And so on. Since we all know that schools were designed by and for people who wanted to prepare young people for eventual participation in a mass-production, mass-consumption society, and further, since all but the most unreasonable among us can agree not only that beyond being deeply discriminatory and polarizing for as long as it has existed (shout out to those of you in the Majority World!), this system of social organization is unhealthy, mentally dispiriting and ecologically unsustainable, we would in fact we worse than stupid not to demand something different, something better. We would be culpable - our knowledge would make us so. If we are to begin the project of revitalizing our political culture, remaking our economic systems, rethinking and reforming so many things that we have long taken for granted but have hit and surpassed their reasonable limits, then we must start by remaking our schools. Students deserve no less than to be given a fighting chance to gain the preparation that they (and we graduates too) will need to make change. Alternative models do exist - those of democratic or ‘free’ schools for instance, so we do know that things can be done differently. If schools have performed surprisingly well (though unevenly) all things considered ‘as is’ for a century and a half, then why are we so reticent to consider the hard work of remaking our schools to, however imperfectly, attempt to prepare for the lives they might live, rather than the long eliminated manufacturing jobs they almost certainly will not have? It’s no mistake that revolutionary freaks and troublemakers as diverse as the Nazis, the Bolsheviks and neo-liberals at the Fraser Institute and Chicago school (yes, despite being an economist by training, Milton Friedman’s passion and abiding interest throughout his professional life was the destruction and remaking of the school system according to his own deeply warped program) have made schools a primary target for their poorly conceived and often violent political projects. These actors have been at turns evil or (to be charitable) misguided, but they have not been stupid. They recognized early on that the key to true power, to the realization of their nefarious projects has been no different than that of the corporate advertising sector: get ‘em while they’re young. Why should it be any different for political progressives or for parents, teachers and others who care about young people? With respect to my project in Dinner Table Politics specifically, I acknowledge that the easiest and most direct route to a revolution in our culture of political values and habits of discourse is through those who have do not carry the weight of years of bad habits.
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Students are for the most part discouraged from real political engagement. Instead, they are forced into ‘voluntary’ community service. Subscribing to the adage that whatever is old can be new again, many school districts, in addition to returning to long old practice of common exit examinations, have also introduced a mandatory community service component as a graduation requirement. This isn’t an entirely bad idea in principle but, put into practice, it has become horribly muddled. This initiative speaks to an earlier age of western society, when community involvement typically meant more than lining up with other random individuals to score an early copy of Grand Theft Auto. The idea that schools would play an active part in community involvement, even activism, is exactly the sort of forward-thinking initiative schools should embrace. Across the board declines in community involvement of all sorts is doubtlessly linked to our atrophying political attention. So, good idea. However, reducing said involvement to a box that must be checked off, to convocate is, well, dumb. Why? First off, the hours logged are mandatory - this sort of basic contradiction with the idea of voluntary service is bound to stick in the craw of even the most compliant teens. Thus, each year, dozens of students in each school must scramble to complete all or most of their hours in the few remaining weeks before graduation; the whole project has been treated as an afterthought and will be forgotten quickly. Others get all their hours out of the way early, over a summer holiday say, just to be rid of the task. Few young people, in my experience, have been moved to become involved in their communities in any meaningful or lasting way; the minority who already were still will be, those who weren’t, won’t. The community service program is absurdly prone to abuse since proofs for service are neither subject to much oversight nor difficult to manufacture. For instance, kids completing menial tasks around the school where I teach is a favourite way of logging easy hours. The fact that the kids are often doing work that used to be performed by paid workers who have lost their jobs after rounds of budget cuts is infrequently noted. Nor should it surprise anyone that so many kids would resist completing these hours, whatever they get up to. Like so many random lessons that are presented in school, stripped of context, community service is not formally linked to any class or curriculum. It is reduced to yet another poorly thought out hoop through which kids must jump. Presumably, if this requirement were integrated into a civics or politics course, students could become excited about service. They might see its value and could be supported by a teacher or counsellor when selecting, organizing and reflecting upon their experiences. This would be the perfect opportunity for students to take their learning beyond the classroom. They could design and carry out (political) action projects to extend classroom learning and to further investigate areas of personal relevance. In such an environment, students would be more likely to learn something, rather than just going through the paces. But this lack of integration into required study of civics is where the powers that be tip their collective hand. I doubt that separating volunteer hours from even the most basic political context was a mistake. Not at all, the implementation has all the marks of an effort to provide an accessible pool of unpaid labour local economies can creatively
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manipulate. This sort of program buys into a simplistic form of dinner table politics that elected politicians no doubt bank on benefiting from, one where older adults decry that “today’s youth don’t have any respect.” The political benefits of putting a bunch of teens, popularly (and incorrectly) portrayed and understood as a bunch of surly good-fornothings to work, volunteer work at that, are obvious. But it is the intentionally apolitical nature of this compulsory volunteerism that is most disquieting. Increasingly, volunteering implies a lack of critical engagement - volunteers don’t need to understand what they’re doing, or why. And generally, they do not. They just have to show up they’re warm bodies, put to use. In the context of a public square that has seen phenomenal increases in professionalization of so many tasks that used to be done by motivated and genuinely knowledgeable volunteers (work in non-profit social agencies, registered charities and political parties provide the surest examples), this bastardized and deeply superficial form of community ‘involvement’ does little to stem disengagement. Quite the contrary, the unpalatable nature of the entire exercise fairly ensures that people will be turned off of public association for good. It shouldn’t surprise either that programs of this sort distinguish between a more basically engaged and political activism and banal volunteerism. The former is actively discouraged, the latter, blandly enforced. A political culture of disengaged, disinterested and increasingly apolitical citizens is the result. That students are intentionally depoliticized by systems of public education can also be evidenced by a variety of examples. The most basic form that this takes is good old fashioned censorship. For instance, three students at John Jay High School in Cross River, New York were suspended from school in March 2007 for publicly uttering the word ‘vagina’ in a student-run production of the Vagina Monologues. The school principal meted out discipline for flouting his censorship order to excise the word from the performance, despite its presence in the title and one of the punished performer’s observation that “it wasn’t crude and it wasn’t inappropriate and it was very real and very pure.” The administrative rationale for efforts to silence political expression: basic anatomy and sexuality were deemed incompatible with a community event open to children (though no children attended). Perish the thought that kids would investigate and talk about sexual topics and themes in a mature, reflective setting. The same spring, a student written and produced play at my own school was denied a stage at an inter-school drama competition on the grounds that its content - explorations of teen (homo-)sexuality, were unacceptable to a particular principal. Career-focused school administrators are generally loathe to tolerate any form of independent student organizing that will either interfere with a placid school atmosphere or, more to the point, will draw any potentially controversial media attention to said schools. They have personal stakes in running tight ships and keeping things safe - meaning quiet. The best and most problematic example I can cite personally, since I became involved in a marginal way (I counselled the principle student involved and sat in on meeting with school administrators and the trustee, who would herself eventually become the provincial minister of education). At a school I used to teach at, one of my senior students, Anna Manshrek-Head, was forbidden by school administrators from advertising an anti-war rally in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The rationale provided for
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this ban was irrational and inconsistent - it was amusing (and invigorating) to watch the student organizer in question refuse to back down and to make easy work of her adult opponents, exposing them publicly through the media as the fools that they were. The ban itself was initially surprising since the student had received official permission to post notices for two earlier rallies. However, in the charged political atmosphere that winter, one that extended from the White House to the UN to our own school’s hallways, the student was denied a third postering on the grounds that students who might attend the march could be injured. This was clearly ludicrous. The peace rallies were hardly the stuff of enraged anarchists - millions marched for peace throughout global capitals that cold February day with little disruption. At the Toronto site that was to be advertised, it was so brutally cold (I participated) that, for most, attendance let alone violence was debatable, not to mention antithetical to the rally’s stated purpose. To her credit, Anna pointed out, correctly, that the school administrators annually signed off on a trip for graduates to the Caribbean that was non-affiliated with the school, one where several students had been injured (and briefly jailed) following drunken theatrics on a hotel balcony. This was dismissed, as were arguments that students can be and are injured in a variety of officially sanctioned school events, sports for instance. The final and most absurd hypocrisy came when Anna disputed the school’s endorsement of military recruiters in the school, at a time when military service by Canadian troops in Iraq had not been ruled out and was, in fact, already well under way in Afghanistan. No matter that any student who signed on might, presumably, be injured were they to join the armed forces. Shortly thereafter, Anna graduated, but not before going to the media with her story. [get quote from NOW article] No doubt the school administrators we relieved that the matter was relegated to committee work around establishing a board-wide policy for posting of public notices. Of course, this diversion missed the main political story. The message was clear: military service, okay. Peaceful protest, forbidden. Above all: politics within or taken beyond the school grounds - under no circumstances. The objectivity myth is alive and well in our schools, marking countless important and engaging learning opportunities as ‘off limits.’ As in journalistic circles, the objectivity myth holds significant power in the practice of public education. Many teachers cling to, and parents and school administrators demand, that all classroom instruction will be objective in content and form. This requirement is as poorly conceived as it is hard to accomplish in practice even were one to try. It is, in a word, impossible. We would be better off to admit that there is nothing about classroom instruction that is objective. Official curriculum is not devised objectively. It is subject to choice and indeed a fair amount of debate, hence the perfunctory and cyclical revision and reinvention of school curriculum as fashions, studies and political administrations change. A longitudinal review of textbooks bears this point out easily. For instance: most standard history texts prior to the 1980s were largely the domain of DWM (dead white males). Women, immigrants, native peoples - none of these voices were typically given
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more than marginal mention. In many classes, they remain silenced, whatever comment texts offer. What is considered ‘history’ changes with time and history, after all, is just yesterday’s politics remembered. The (subjective) needs of contemporary audiences demand adapting stale lessons to the day’s priorities. Any pretence of fidelity to ‘objective’ fact or pedagogy mouthed by teachers is evidence of one of two things: an naive instructor trying their best but not thinking too hard, or a lying miscreant using the objectivity as a shield to protect their politics in the classroom - or a hammer with which to bash more progressive opponents. Furthermore, teachers, of course, rarely cover the full curriculum - to do so is nearly impossible given the constant push to cram more and different material into the same finite school terms, often with diminishing resources, a constant stream of bureaucratic interruptions and increasing numbers of students to whom teachers must tend. So, what (and how) to teach comes down to a matter of choice, for individual teachers or at least departments. Though it would likely alarm many people to discuss this openly, teachers can and frequently do take conscious decisions about what to skip and what to emphasize. Example: a former department head of mine insisted that his colleagues focus the core history course between the years 1900 and 1945; to his way of thinking, anything past the end of the Second World War was too recent to qualify as ‘history,’ whatever approved documents said (the course in question was designed to span to the Millennium). Within individual classrooms, teachers - and sometimes students exercise their limited autonomy to dwell on some topics, skimp on others. All of this is healthy, all necessary. None of it is objective. This is particularly true of overtly political courses, meaning the socials (which should once and for all drop the pretence of ‘sciences’) - economics, politics, history, society, philosophy and law. (add Stanley Fish example here) ∞ Summing up what schools actually accomplish and how they do it is, with a clear perspective, potentially dispiriting. What are the chief lessons we are taught? Apathy is a valuable defence mechanism. Serving self(ish)-interest should be not mere every individual’s goal, but their right. Mass conformity, so well hidden in the sham garb of choice and liberty is to something to which we will all aspire. Strategic blindness and a habit of not asking fairly obvious questions is strongly encouraged. Discipline is to be respected - we must play by the rules at all times, regardless of who the rules serve or even whether they are unjust. Stupidity and vacuity are virtues, celebrate them as you would hollow celebrity itself. Every person’s primary role in life is one of economic labour and consumption. You are what you work at and what you buy. Citizenship is a slogan. ‘What’s in it for me?’ is a design for life. Myths that make us stupid provide the cover for all of this nonsense. Dinner table politics inhibits the ability of most to think critically or to make change. We may not retain many of the specific lessons from our school days, but these disabling ones a great many of us haven’t just learned. They are a fundamental part of our very being.
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The ‘So What?:’ The Political Implications of a Mythologized School System Fundamentally, schools’ greatest problem is one of power, their own power. Despite a generation of funding neglect and repeated, often intense neo-liberal assaults, public schools persevere and indeed, school teachers (though not their unions) continue to enjoy substantial public respect. Systems of public schools retain significant power and even greater political potential. The immense authority schools enjoy emanates from two interrelated sources. The first is their internally derived institutional fortitude - schools are the great survivors of the public institutions. They have survived if not always thrived through a period of unprecedented cultural, technological and social flux over the past century or so. Consider the forced adaptations and even threats to continued existence with which other prominent institutions have been forced to contend. God was declared dead and church attendance had, until recently, been in steady decline (and actually, still is - and is accelerating - outside of the most disturbingly creative sects). Nationalism was thought to be a spent force only to re-emerge from the Cold War with renewed fury. Once powerful ideologies - fascism and communism have been reduced to status as also-rans. History, once naively thought to have met its end in the seemingly inevitable triumph of liberal Western states that enjoy the material fruits of democratic freedom and capitalist supremacy, is now very up for grabs. The bloom has come off the rose of the patently absurd neo-liberal economic promise. So many seemingly dominant belief systems and the myths that fortified them have been swept away like so much dust. Technological structures, despite their unceasing capacity for inspiring wonder, have, to now, enjoyed a consistently short shelf life. In little more than eight decades, the masses have achieved literacy, thrown over the classics and daily papers for radio, radio for television, television for the web-connected home computer. Most recently, the computer has moved out of the home and has become ubiquitous. Fully loaded and connected phones, ipods and other mobile manifestations have for many (particularly the affluent and young) transcended designation as useful tools and are now seen instead as indispensable extensions of self. Perhaps, despite all this change, we have come full circle: even non-Luddite critics worry that despite the ease and access afforded by modern communications technology, we are devolving into cultural, political and even basic illiteracy. Even our principle and arguably most powerful social institution - the family - has not borne the rough currents of change well at all. The future form, and more to the point, function of the family is much doubted and decried in the current climate of divorce, lengthening workdays and latchkey kids. Compared alongside these examples, schools have held their own quite well. Even through periods of recurrent curricular upset and political neglect, schools have maintained their central purpose and social standing. If anything, both have been expanded. Today, schools try (or are forced to try) to be everything to everyone. They are centres not only of instruction but of surrogate parents, entertainers, social workers and, increasingly, providers of meals and other basics for those living in states of financial or psychological neglect. We have foolishly come to
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expect that schools can and will do it all - solve any problem, win any war (cite harpers). Though many teachers have rightly bemoaned the difficulty of meeting bloated expectations, they have perhaps been too harried to note another by-product of these demands: Those who work in the school system enjoy expanded latitude for action and indeed power to wield. Education, has always been recognized for its political potency (it is no mistake that tyrants and elected leaders alike have spent so much effort remaking schools in their own image). If anything, even greater political power resides in today’s ‘be-everything’ schools. This latent and widely ignored potential is within the grasp of teachers possessing sufficient bravery and self-awareness to employ it. The second source of power that schools enjoy as an institution is the great deal of respect they are afforded, generally by the general public and formally by their formally elected leaders, in stump speech rhetoric if not financial support. Polls consistently place public school teachers at or near to top of esteemed and trusted professions - alongside judges and police officers and ahead of journalists, lawyers and politicians by an immense (and growing) gap. Teachers have clout. They are respected by all but the most overweening parents. Parents nights - ‘meet the creature’ if you will - are attended with equal parts attention and dread until at least high school (though in today’s world of unhealthy parental expectations and micro-management, many now proceed far beyond the previously respected puberty cut-off for custodial intervention and advocacy). Trice or thrice yearly report cards carry increasingly heavy weight - to say nothing of the deeply problematic bragging rights or shame they grant in conversation with one’s childrearing peers. Parents care about schools - choosing them, fund-raising for them, cheering their sports, attending concert nights, class outings and supervising playgrounds. By the end of every summer vacation, even the most naively remiss care-giver is well reminded of the hard work that teachers and the many supporting staff at our schools do for the other ten months of the year. For these and many more reasons, schools are not merely respected; I think it is fair to say that they are quietly revered. ∞ Taken in the abstract, the ability to survive and potent public respect are sources of great strength. Anyone who cares about maintaining systems of public education will take neither for granted. However, in the context of a system that is moribund, this power is also a reason for much concern. In a system as prone to bureaucracy, inflexibility, coercion, rife with dated practices, organized to meet archaic social and economic goals and wedded to deeply dysfunctional modes of operation and evaluation - and schools suffer all of these tendencies and frequently surrender to them - power for its own sake is not a good thing. This power is not only self-sustaining. It blocks our ability to be reflective about what schools are and what they do as opposed to what they should or might do. Schools’ power deflects efforts to create change and impairs their ability to evolve reflexively. Since all power is political - and politics in its simplest terms is merely the study of the mediation of power in all its forms - and schools are powerful, schools are deeply political institutions. The fact that they and their many inhabitants
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masquerade as apolitical inhabitants of an at all times objective sphere of existence does not change this fact one iota. Due to their inflexibility and narrowly conceived vision - typically the walls of a given classroom - schools and educators of all stripes resist even the simplest and most clearly required reforms and close ranks with abandon to ward off all but the most superficial change. Note that despite their many disputes, school administrations and teachers’ unions can almost always agree when faced with this common foe. And because we - educators, parents and those not affiliated with schools alike - are all products of the school system, love it or hate it, we are loathe to think differently about schools, to question their purpose or efficacy or to push for change, even when it is clearly needed. To do so would mean questioning the fundamental value of our own education. This is most true of a critical mass of teachers, a group with a most conservative approach to and limited imagination about the work that schools do. After all, almost all teachers enjoyed scholastic success from the youngest ages, mastered the game as adolescents and enjoy the ease of mindless routine in a setting they know so well as adult professionals. Schools have survived intact through repeated convulsions of change because of their real and perceived imperviousness to said change - they are the old standby. We can count on schools to be as they were when we were kids because, well, they’ve always been there, for all intents and purposes, exactly as is. The power rooted in resistance to change that schools enjoy all but ensures that they will be inherently conservative institutions. Thus, they - and their staunchest supporters - embrace the status quo with near religious fervour, despite evidence that in a culture of growing and often celebrated stupidity, schools are either no longer successfully completing their primary task - public education - or else are insufficiently equipped to act as a last defence against the hydraheaded beast of consumer-tainment that never takes a day off from its apparent quest to lobotomize the public consciousness. The cumulative effect of all of this blindness and complacency makes public schools, if you will excuse the metaphor, much like the long extinct dinosaurs: awe-inspiringly powerful and enduring - yet completely unprepared for the ultimate catastrophic event that will end their long reign. The great lizards’ strength was insufficient to survive, not the initial blast mind you, but the changed living situation that proceeded from it. The dinosaurs were too slow, too dim-witted to adapt to the powerful forces that changed a world whose unchanging fact they would no doubt have taken for granted had they possessed introspective capacity. This is the exact situation schools find themselves in today. The blast hasn’t come yet. It may not for some time, or ever. But the world has changed, and schools have demonstrated a stubborn resistance to even acknowledge let alone adapt to new realities. Token resistance is, in this case, futile. If we value public education, then the time has come for schools to change fundamentally. The degree of change must be profound and elements of change must be broad. If schools are going to have even a hope of preparing young people for the many political challenges they will face in the coming years, to say nothing of the endemic and debilitating effects of dinner table politics and all of the stupidity-induced myth-making that has distracted so many for so long, then they must change, and that right soon. Schools must change to save themselves. Schools
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must change to give all of us a chance to better ourselves. Repeating the myth that either the purpose or effect of schools as currently conceived is to provide an education for today’s (let alone tomorrow’s!) world will not make us wiser, more learned or adequately prepared in reality. Politics is ever-present, whether suppressed or not. Political honesty, coupled with altruistic political commitments might save us yet, if we can resist the tendency to silence politics in the classroom and instead engage in so many facile practices that we know in our hearts and minds are ineffective if not outright harmful. Formally inviting politics into the classroom holds a vital key to reinvigorating instruction, affecting real learning and creating space to openly and critically reflect on schools’ purpose and to envision how we might achieve it. ∞ I submit we must change schools radically to deal with these dangerous failures of blindness and imagination. Schools mustn’t merely be reformed. The ‘system,’ such as it is, desperately needs to be blown up. Whatever might rush in to fill the vacuum created by such an act of wilful and creative destruction, it could hardly be worse than the many abominations that unflinchingly call themselves ‘education’ in our classrooms today, provided this vacuum is mediated by a caring and concerned public (and I dare say such a politically potent act would shake them awake). The task must, above all, not be left to ‘experts’ or, worse, the profit-driven private sector. I am confident that the innate conservatism shot into the general public – at school of course – will lead most to automatically poo-poo this suggestion as polemical rhetoric or unrealistic idealism. I respectfully disagree. I think that the time for radical action is drawing close; witness the increased stridency of the nascent environmental movement. Today, we live in a world and at a time when things are just about unbalanced enough that people are willing to seriously consider radical actions to promote social justice. The seeds of this movement and its best potential are to be found in a meaningful education of the general public. My contention in Dinner Table Politics is that this amorphous movement will necessarily be underwritten by a climate of renewed political engagement, accessible everyday political talk and citizen engagement by non-professionally political people. It should go without saying perhaps that this project requires active support in the classroom, from pre-school through to graduate studies in the halls of academe (themselves desperately in need of a core-shaking reorganization). Though obviously generalizing is largely problematic and distilling complex problems down to simplified solutions isn’t much better, I’m going to do both here and I hope you’ll indulge me. Our schools can be made more relevant, effective and vital (in terms of both institutional health and social dividends) through one broadly understood and realized reform. The details can be hashed out, debated democratically with all the attendant mess that this entails, later, and by more and better people than me. The solution to so many of the ills of business as usual in schools (and I use the term business advisedly in a climate where parents are now frequently referred by the bizarre label ‘stake-holders’ and their kids are ‘clients’ in so many schools!) is to abandon the dinner table politics that schools must reject politics. A reflective, responsive and decidedly
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progressive politics is the best hope schools have for saving themselves, improving our political engagement and changing the world. But these are big ideas, big dreams. Thus, I will make a complimentary claim for political classrooms that is more concrete and easy to imagine: the great masses of students (and former students) who previously disliked school or have seen it, often correctly, as boring if not completely irrelevant, will enjoy school and volunteer to learn without need for coercion through grades, detention or fears of social stigma. Evaluating whether individual classrooms work could fairly be accomplished by determining real levels of student engagement. That is, classrooms with engaged, active, moving and thinking students are working classrooms, regardless of what the curricular particulars happen to be. Students with inert, prone, distracted or sleeping-with-their-eyes-open kids are classrooms in a state of dysfunction. One classroom is just a microcosm of the larger system. Classrooms move to schools and schools to boards of education to the system writ large. Public spaces that are avowedly political are effective and meaningful places for human interaction, reflection and, wait for it, learning. Students learn more, better and more genuinely in politically engaged classrooms. A public education infrastructure that is radically re-imagined, reorganized and recomposed has a fighting chance of preparing students to sweep away the dinner table politics to which they will invariably be exposed. They are perhaps not our last but certainly our best hope for solving the myriad of lifeand-death political problems we all face, locally, nationally and globally - today and in the future. ∞ When we consider the failure of our schools to either model democratic politics (schools’ hierarchical structures provide a working sample of more or less benevolent dictatorship from age five) or to deal honestly and opening with the inherently political nature of all education, it is no wonder that so many young people write politics off as boring. They have been taught and socialized from the earliest years into adulthood to treat politics as bad manners. Those political subjects that aren’t cast as boring are off limits; our schools dare not explore them, at least in overtly and honestly political ways. After more than a decade of training, most people have learned the lesson: politics is something that others, your betters, do. It is confusing. It isn’t to be trusted or even thought about too hard. Just voting like uninformed but obedient sheep at election time will suffice, indeed, anything more is discouraged as actively subversive. Nonetheless, think tank agitators like those at Canada’s Fraser Institute sharpen their potent political axes with which they continue to hack away, hoping to strike the fatal blow against (publicly funded) education. They do so under the bogus cloak of objective ratings and testing regimes, citing economic imperatives and whipping up parental fears. These malcontents don’t care about education, only the propagation of their peculiar fiction about utopia via ‘liberation’ from the slavery to all aspects of a taxpayer-funded safety net. Yet these mean spirited provocateurs are among the first to annually decry the civic illiteracy of students, ignoring both their own culpability and the obvious deficiency of a population whose ‘education’ consists of mastery of civic and
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historical trivia rather than deeper understandings that gird more comprehensive political involvement. The mainstream media, for the most part toadying or too lazy to question the nonsense of their press releases, all too happily reproduce and amplify the myths about education these self-interested troublemakers. Their audiences, typically far removed from the realities of the school life and adolescence and often with reference to nostalgic fictions about their own earlier experiences, make snap judgements about not only the perceived dysfunctions that afflict schools, but the most advisable cures. The discussion is muddied before it is even properly begun. The political implications of all of this tomfoolery should be as clear as they are dire. Impairing schools, attacking them politically, distracting their inhabitants (teachers as well as students), starving them of funding - all of these should be fairly obvious power plays. People who care about public education and democratic engagement merely need to follow the myths to their ultimate sources to see who is attacking these most important of public resources and why. Insofar as politics in the classroom goes, people must reject the myth that politics and schools don’t mix. Any truly effective education will by definition and necessity be inherently political, in form as well as content. Moreover, people shouldn’t be side-tracked by loud voices calling for the teaching of civics as a cure-all for all that ails our politics and our schools. Simple-minded efforts to convince people that things would just improve if young people had a better grasp of the names and definitions of ‘civic literacy’ should also be rejected out of hand. These efforts have enjoyed a renaissance of late, gaining much media attention in the form of annual clucking that young people are politically illiterate as well as apathetic (as if their parents aren’t). In Canada, these efforts are led by the Dominion Institute, a mainstream think tank whose chief operating purpose, so far as I can tell, is berating the Canadian people for their abysmal lack of recall on the isolated trivia answers to all manner of basic Canadian history and trivia (You can’t name the prime minister who believed he could commune with his dead mother and dog? Shame on you! You are unfit for responsible citizenship). Perhaps these efforts to improve Canadians’ appreciation for politics and society are well meant, but simply suffer from unfortunate superficiality. They reduce politics to an irrelevant game of names and dates. Also, the understandably low scores people rate on these pedantic quizzes reinforce the myth that people are stupid (not that they aren’t, but if and when they are, it is for reasons more fundamental than an inability to score well on multiple choice tests). All of this serves as a distraction from the real problems that face schools and infect our politics. Understandably, civics education ironically stripped of politics leaves many students asking the question: ‘so what?’ The answers to this question are not encouraging. Attempts to create political vacuums in our schools is no mistake. For those with the power to insist on this character for schools, it is a sinister and cynical attempt to undermine the effectiveness of schools. For the many dinner table politicians who ape their talking points, politics in school is merely one more grievance to complain about over dinner. Yet, to my mind, all of this effort to misdirect schools is less motivated by a lust for power and more by an all-abiding fear. Conservative politicians, reactionary
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religious leaders, corporate elites, media boneheads - all of these people recognize (consciously or not) the immense power and potential held in schools. They fear schools’ ability to shake the status quo. They fear the power of teacher’s, a group whose general liberalism is bemoaned by non-progressives everywhere. Do you doubt the existence and extent of these fears? Consider the effect that schools (and indeed the popular banking lesson that was An Inconvenient Truth) have had in pushing a green political agenda. Most parents will acknowledge that their kids, like many of their teachers and schools, way ahead of the curve on the political problem of our economic and environmental unsustainability. This very political agenda, much resisted by vested interests who benefit from the status quo, has gained traction in no small part because of the effect that schools and politically empowered students have had on the much larger political agendas. They have even impacted positively on the profoundly cynical tone that used to overwhelmingly afflict typical political talk about environmentalism. This fact is very encouraging. The ‘Now What?:’ A Lesson Plan For Schools that Reject the Myths that Make Us Stupid A number of my suggestions for improving schools should be implicit in the previous two sections. Whether they focus on the content or form of instruction, the physical infrastructure of schools, the philosophy that lays the groundwork for education, my advice boils down to this: we have, in fact, designed schools that mirror the ‘real world’ beyond classroom doors and if we are dissatisfied with what we see there ‘out there,’ then any comprehensive political project to affect change will have to start within schools themselves. In my view, schools are a largely realistic representation of socio-economic realities that wait beyond the classroom. There are winners and losers. Some enjoy every advantage, support and a substantial head start. Then there are the multitude who must fight and claw for every minor victory they will enjoy, and more often through every failure to be suffered, since the game is begun (and continues) so inequitably that they had only a long-shot chance of success to begin with. To hide these unseemly realities, schools echo perfectly our potent myths of meritocracy, hard work and playing by the rules. Whether or not those rules are just and who chiefly benefits from them are other questions, and few dare to consider them aloud. These myths amplify the ugly mythology of bootstrapism and ignore any argument or evidence to the contrary that everyone has a shot if they just dig in and ‘get ‘er done.’ They are perhaps our school system’s most potent educational legacy, the lesson that everyone learns. For most, school is a baker’s dozen worth of years spent habituating one’s self to the rigours and realities of capitalism and so much more. They are a starter’s course for treating all matters as zero sum, partisan gamesmanship - an excellent taste of politics as usual in terms of what we expect from politicians and government. With their regimented framework, their intensive paperwork, the bells, checklists and constant but numbingly irrelevant evaluation, schools nicely mimic the endemic insecurity and boredom that so many people will experience in future jobs. On that note, schools’ overwhelmingly focus
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on future employment (and implicitly, valuation of earning potential and ability to consume) to students’ detriment. Economic priorities are privileged over countless valuable more valuable pursuits: personal psychological and emotional development, curiosity (intellectual, artistic and otherwise), a larger sense of social purpose and deeper, communal efficacy, problem solving and critical thinking skills, media literacy skills (a functioning bullshit detector) local and global awareness (as opposed to knowledge as atomized, context-free trivia tidbits), capacity and willingness to be creative, reflective or unselfishly empathetic. This is just a highlighted handful. In a strictly political sense, what schools decidedly do not prepare young people for is a future as thinking, deliberating citizens. Schools do not, as a whole, instil a love, respect or, frankly, even a passing acquaintance with the necessity of democratic involvement. Based on typical school experience, actual experience in democratic situations is likely to be nil. The result is a population filled with round after round of graduates who are often unable to resist the myths that make them stupid. Given this criminal misappropriation of such much of collective social capital, it is worth asking how our priorities were diverted to the degree that economic interests so completely overshadowed people’s fundamental commitment and responsibility to engage politically in democratic commons. Then again, if you follow my historical line of thinking, its not that schools have come off track; they were designed and executed from the beginning in ways that were never on track, at least so far as democratic purpose is concerned. I can almost hear the complaints now, even from people who resented much of their own school experiences: ‘but schools do so much!’ Fair enough. Given their inherent design flaws and many constraints, schools have, impressively, not done an entirely bad job. Ask a dropout or citizen of the unprivileged Majority World for whom school is an unaffordable luxury: even deeply flawed education is better than no formal education at all. Or is it? Mass literacy is most often held up as the holy grail of public education’s achievement. It is tough to argue against the benefits of literacy. We should pause however. Even the most obvious silver linings can obscure a cloud. Literacy, considered in the context of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ can be very dangerous indeed. Doubt this? Then consider that literacy was the essential ingredient that allowed the Great Powers to wage the First World War. Without an audience that was broadly literate and faithful to the daily press - something that did not exist on a mass scale prior to the introduction of compulsory schooling - governments surely could not have as efficiently drummed up sufficient xenophobic nationalism required to gain either consent for and compliance with the insane destruction that followed. Millions of soldiers would not have enlisted (or died senselessly). Few truly educated people, as opposed to the merely literate, would have excitedly greeted war. More than technology, imperialism or the vagaries of European foreign policy, we have public schools and the uncritical literacy they imparted to thank for the unprecedented century of violence that followed. Whatever their achievements in other respects, in terms of mass political education, public schooling rates a failing grade. Sagging voter turnouts are just the tip of the iceberg. Glorifications of celebrity and reality TV, hyper-consumption, mass apathy, a
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dearth of interest in let alone discussion of so many interesting, important political issues, bland acceptance of the political ‘product’ with which we are presented by the political press and formal elected establishment - all of these are marks of political idiocy. Schools inability to adapt, to remain relevant in a quickly changing society is at least partially responsible for this unpalatable reality. Again, school reflects society at large: the crucial lessons of democratic citizenship it presents are consistently platitudinous, superficial and entirely inadequate. We have come to a tipping point, if you will excuse the overused phrase, where this is not only no longer acceptable. It should never have been in the first place of course but the threats to human society and natural ecology are greater than in the past. Doing something fundamental, no more window dressing-type changes, is crucial. All the signs are there. Our political culture is broken, nearly dead - bled from a thousand cuts. Drastic action will be required to shake people out of their comfortably debilitating apathy. Addressing dinner table politics means that we must do more than address the root causes of various mythologies - media, economic, political in terms of formal structures, elites and representatives. To truly succeed, this change must be populist as well as progressive. Schools are the best available vehicle for such populism. People must (and can) be empowered to address political deficiencies within the course of their everyday lives. To do this, they require a political skill-set that empowers them sufficiently to both reject and combat the myriad myths that whirl around them everywhere, almost begging them to tread the soft path toward blissful ignorance. Public education is our best hope for providing these skills. As I mentioned at the outset, this brief overview of schools is by its very nature (and embeddedness in a the more comprehensive project that is Dinner Table Politics) too general to be considered a program. The point is that schools practice what we want them to preach. To this point, that has meant a celebration of our society’s broad capitalist underpinnings. What we must do, is shift the focus: schools need to preach democracy (in every sense - formal politics and interpersonal equity to note just two extremes) as their primary purpose and unifying narrative. Moreover, they must practice what they preach. ∞ Schools are up to the challenge I think, despite the roadblocks of inertia and institutional resistance that they face. They have to be. If you doubt this, consider that they have extended a dominant model for our kids instruction at least a full century beyond having much relation to the post-industrial society they inhabit. Bolstered by myths that make us stupid, the way we commonly think about education distracts most people from schools’ lack of meaningful purpose and recurrent and growing evidence that their work is of little lasting consequence or is at least woefully insufficient. If we can cast off this automatic and bred in the bone fidelity to the status quo - and this revolution of the mind will truly be the tough task - change can and will happen. As for the particulars of education’s “Now What?,” I hope you will be generous enough to not challenge my lack of total specificity as a cop out. That’s the point - change can’t come from me alone any more than it can or should come from any single person or
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even group of people. It must be drawn up, debated, discussed, changed, toyed with and tried again, over and over by all people concerned with public education. The time and energy our kids will spend in school and the financial and other resources we will collectively devote to them demand it. That being noted, I cannot resist offering a top ten to-do list of the first “Now What?” steps that I would suggest: Invest in schools in a manner proportionate to their social value. Buildings are key expressions of communal priority. In the middle ages, vast sums were spent building sprawling palaces and soaring cathedrals. Today, we build bank and office towers whose height and might scream hubris. Schools meanwhile, often atrophy and decay. No wonder they are so often defaced by their caged inhabitants; kids recognize intuitively that they have been incarcerated in shabby a work setting that no adult in, for instance the business world, would tolerate for a cool minute. Schools should be palaces. We should stop endless time consuming debates about the minutiae of school budgets which typically devolve into a sort of stealing from Peter to pay Paul anyway. Given the obscene amounts of money our society spends on militarization or say, litigation, we should spend more on schools by a magnitude that would, at first, seem ludicrous. Yet if we measure what we actually value against what we say we value, then spending on every aspect of public education should explode. Unless, that is, we value commerce or lawsuits over our kids and their future. On a related note, Schools should be an integral part of city planning, ideally, acting as community focal points or ‘hubs’ that would offer all manner of public services. One justification for expanded investment in the physical infrastructure of schools is using them more wisely. Today, most schools are vacant after after 5pm. In my own district, much of the community activity that used to animate schools after hours has been silenced by the imposition of a paid permit system to use any part of the school. This dumb decision was taken in the wake of draconian budget cuts motivated by a neo-liberal program to ‘create a crisis’ in the school system. It worked. Previously, many schools had been centres of community activity. Now, they lay vacant for the most part. This is not only a squandering of communal resources. It has done much to restrict organizations that provide the glue for vibrant communities. Though the decision to demobilize schools might at first appear to be a mere budgetary side-effect, it could arguably be understood as an intentional effort to stunt community activism. The cadre of politicians who caused this mess and the corporate interests they represent have been the chief beneficiaries of reduced community involvement that usually underwrites democratic vigour. However, simply eliminating the permits doesn’t go far enough. Ideally, schools should be more deeply integrated into the communities in which they exist. Hubs could rightly include all manner of public services: health centres, (publicly funded) day cares, seniors residences, space for activist groups, arts organizations and so on. Students would benefit from greater interaction with the very old, young and everyone in between. Schools could gain greater vitality from being more seamlessly integrated into the
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commons. In this sense, they could anchor communities. They would be one-stop centres for engagement, always open, open to everyone. Talk about democratic! Families should be allowed significantly expanded school choice and schools should be given incentives to innovate and meet locally determined priorities. On the surface, this would seem to play into the anti-public school agenda that has been pursued by believers in the religion of privatization. However, in a context where the local high school is as likely to look and sound like a prison (security cameras, ‘lock down’ procedures (“we have an inmate loose on cellblock nine, lock your doors!”), announcements over a loud speaker from the warden) as a place of learning, you can hardly blame families from considering other options. Obviously, choice should not be used, as it has been to date, to allow the haves to collect in pockets of privilege while others suffer the consequences of official neglect. In a context of all schools enjoying a wealth of resources to do their work, a survival-of-the-fittest approach to enrolment would be less likely. Instead, schools would be encouraged to be more responsive to local needs and priorities. Refusing to innovate or specialize would really no longer be an option. People in working in schools would exercise creativity because they would have no other choice. This would be closer to an incentive to create great art than the savagery of the market. Students and their families could opt into or out of schools that meet their particular needs, aptitudes and interests. A one-size-fits-all approach may be good for selling ball caps, but as a method of educational organization, it leaves much to be desired. In the school board where I teach, a number of these programs already exist: schools for elite athletes, a school for gay youth, numerous different takes on recovery programs for kids spit out by the mainstream system, programs for the arts, social justice, and a variety of disciplinary academies. Tellingly however, much of the last year has been spent arguing about the contentious decision to establish a so-called ‘Black focused’ school, that is, one that publicly funds an Afri-centric curriculum. Much of the arguing incidentally has been in the media. Many people heretofore uninterested in public education have raised the temperature of this deeply political intention, raising the spectre of segregation where none exists (the schools will be open to staff and students regardless of race). All the Sturm and Drang generated ignores an obvious fact: the myth of ‘one system for all students’ is demonstrably false. Many if not most schools are already heavily segregated, from each other and as often within one building (and above and beyond any speciality alternative programs). The fallacy of this myth is easy to demonstrate, even leaving aside the obvious Eurocentric fact in all but token curricula (let’s leave it aside because this whole debate is a sideline for dinner table politicians who like to argue in circles about representation in curriculum in ignorance of historical power structures). My own school is a case in point: roughly a fifth of kids inhabit a celebrated academic program, another fifth attend a program for kids who have heavy training and performance commitments in athletics and the arts. The remainder of the school is a ‘mainstream’ program, for all intents and purposes, a regular high school organized on the model we all know so well. Cross-
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pollination between programs is the exception rather than the rule. Of course, this is partly due to differences in interest and priority. The pink (or black) elephant in the room of course is that the kids in the specialized programs are overwhelmingly white, wasps or Jews from largely privileged families (many drive nice vehicles than the teaching staff). The mainstream program is populated but a majority of non-white faces: recent immigrants and kids from have-not families that populate our socio-economic rat race. Inequalities in funding (they are what you might guess they would be) are rarely commented on openly. Nor is the fact that school choice has allowed a de facto system of ‘polite’ segregation that perpetuates some fairly impolite (an inequitable) results. Yet many critics persist in arguing against the creating of black schools. This is confusing, unless one understands that what is so offensive is not the mere segregation - this already exists as a widespread fact - but the existence of choice. Black families being locked into poorly supported local schools is A-okay. Those same families exercising options to opt out of schools that are clearly failing to meet their needs (and yes, we should acknowledge the problems that afflict the somewhat deceptively categorized ‘black community’ are more profound than can be solved by schools alone) is decidedly unpalatable. But politics and school don’t mix? Right. Provided that the necessary precondition of (radically) more support for all schools (and not on any sort of punitive No Child Left Behind scale), opening choice to all families would go a long way to fostering equity between families, schools and indeed entire communities. It would no doubt provide a shot in the arm to many schools to shake them out of their lethargic but wholly inadequate comfort with the status quo. Small is better: schools should eliminate bureaucracy, experts and standardized policies wherever they exist. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell points out studies that identify 150 as the optimum number for functional social organization. Up to this number, apparently, groups thrive. Past it, people start falling through the cracks. This is a good round number at which schools, or at the very least distinct school programs could be limited. I can attest to this since I teach in a privileged alternative school program that carries an average student population less than 120. Above average opportunities for learning are the natural result of the small class sizes and personal attention that results (critics who argue that test scores show that class sizes don’t matter ignore the obvious: standardized tests are as good a predictor of genuine learning as syrupy wedding vows are of future divorce). Moreover, I would argue that all but the most skeletal crew of bureaucrats and socalled ‘educational experts’ are supluferous to the task of classroom education. In fact, they often do more harm than good since bureaucracy limits creativity and flexibility. Non-classroom jobs (aside from our essential and disturbingly underpaid care taking and secretarial staffs) are also, all too, often a sanctuary for people employed to teacher that no longer wish to do the job or who have thrown over concern for kids with pursuit of personal career objectives. I have some simple advice for them: find another career since in my experience few of you demonstrate the ability to distinguish yourselves as either
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managers or, more ideally, visionary leaders. Schools and school programs should be self-administrated, with plenty of democratic input from students, an advisory role for parents and as little other interference as possible. On this point, I can briefly offer two more suggestions: Students should be democratically enabled within schools They should help determine curriculum, manage their own learning, play a caretaker role in terms of school organization and so on. In other words, students should be treated in practice as what they are popularly portrayed in theory: the most important aspect of, and rationale for, schools in the first place. This would go far to ending parental coddling and micro-management. It would better prepare young people to be self-sufficient individuals who are supportive of collective social action. Furthermore, Teachers should be granted greater support to do their jobs and should, with greater support, be held to higher and much different standards of competency. Ideally, if teachers are freed from meaningless paperwork, poorly-conceived and punitive evaluation (both of students and themselves) and granted money, time and resources to make learning the fantastic experience that ideally can be, then teaching should be a career destination of choice for greater numbers of skilled and capable people. Teachers should be granted periodic sabbaticals to refresh their own learning. They should work with smaller numbers of kids and have greater autonomy in organizing their work, provided they work in conjunction with students and to a much reduced degree, parents. In such an ideal environment, no banking-style education should be tolerated, nor should any teacher who dislikes what they are meant to instruct, resists mentoring (that is, giving up a significant amounts of their power within the classroom) or dislikes young people. Massive investments in supporting programs must be provided to families, allowing intervention early and often to make ‘No Child Left Behind’ a living reality rather than mean-spirited political rhetoric. Schools cannot solve every social problem, regardless of how much pressure parents and politicians exert to make this so. Bush’s absurdly named program has been exposed as a vehicle for kicking poorly supported schools while they are down. It is part of a larger Friedman-inspired agenda to privatize not only schools but every publicly-held resource. The inaccuracy of the rhetoric used to label the program has done little to publicly discredit it. Instead, these few mere words have been used as a shield to protect a (clearly) poorly educated president and his henchmen while they do their dirty work to further undermine schools. But what if schools really did operate on a model of no child left behind? One where poverty and want where fundamentally addressed, early and often within the school system? Obviously, the benefits for so many families that are typically served empty rhetoric cold, then told to pull up their bootstraps, could be life changing. The impacts on the effectiveness of education kids receive would be similarly affected. All
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this would take is boatloads of money - say less than ten per cent of the annual American military budget - and caring people who are unwilling to turn a blind eye or pretend. Public education should happen, as much as possible, in public settings. As much as possible, students should learn outside of the classroom. For all but the most rural communities, there is much cultural opportunities for student engagement. Moreover, if we want young adults to be democratically engaged, then we must help them to hone their skills and to develop their particular interests in their formative years. This would necessarily mean much more, and more regular, community involvement. Outings typically represent only token learning - they are a break from the doldrums of the classroom for students and teachers alike. This both an indictment of the ineffectiveness of classrooms and the usefulness of class trips as genuine learning opportunities. From the earliest possible ages, students should be encouraged and supported to take their learning beyond the classroom. If what they are learning has no practical application, students can not fairly be judged for questioning why they are learning it at all. In the current climate of liability-induced fear (I await the necessity of signed permission forms to allow students to use the washroom), this will be a tough be necessary sell. Parents should be utilized as a resource and involved in their children’s education. They must not be allowed to treat schools as either court or service industry. The overwhelming caring that motivates so many parents today is bracing to see in action. Less helpful is the fear drive to empty accreditation that so many aggressive parental advocates employ. These misplaced priorities should be reined in for everyone’s sake, particularly the current crop of kids who are, arguably, the most compliant and pliable generation on record (as well as for teachers, for whom pushy parents are an occupational hazard). Stories of parents pestering, even suing schools for all degree of inconsequentiality are legion. Parents pressing the case for higher grades, extensions, another chance condemns children to grim futures of helplessness and themselves to the slavery unhealthy co-dependence. That said, most teachers agree that beneficial parental involvement is the best predictor of students’ academic success and even emotional and psychological well being. The work of teachers ranks a remote second to the power of effective parenting in terms of mentoring happy and functional young adults. So, how to separate the parental wheat from the education-impairing chaff? First, parents must accept that on occasion they lack the perspective (or training - do these people question the diagnoses of their paediatricians with such regularity?) to help their kids. Schools should not have to expend so much time currying favour of unreasonable complainers, many of whom have the power to create climates of fear that impair the work of teachers who worry about censure. The answer to the problem lies in democracy. If the answer to any problem of democracy can be solved with more democracy, I would argue that problems of parental interference could be solved with more involvement. However, such involvement must be more than the usual superficial review of grades and students ‘applying’ themselves (which makes them sound strangely like wallpaper). In
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fact, I would argue that any parent with the time to become an irritant in the school to administrator, teacher or student, has ample time to become productively involved in their school council. Ideally, some of their more sane peers would join as well so that school councils were more than the typical handful of parents for a school serving hundreds of families. Finally, public education should set as its primary goal the political actualization of young people so that ‘life long learning’ ceases to be a Education Department platitude. This will require a fundamental rethink of the courses students take (and so quickly purge at the conclusion of each semester. Consider just a handful of subjects that are taught in schools and measure their everyday applicability to life for non-experts, contrasted directly with a subject that is either un- or at the very least under-taught: 1. Theoretical Mathematics and Science vs. Logic: Most kids hate (or more accurately fear) mathematics. No wonder. Mathematics is made impenetrable from middle school and is almost entirely divorced from real world application. When’s the last time you used something like trigonometry? Yet many people struggle with the basic arithmetic required to calculate a tip on a dinner bill. Math teachers, as a rule, blame popular aversion to their discipline on poor public relations (i.e. common word of mouth that ‘math is impossible’) rather than mass failure to move beyond drilling and practice exercises to meaningful problems that have a clear, everyday application. Useful math, that is mathematics useful for home repair or personal accounting, are relegated to a ghetto for underachievers who, aware of the stigma they carry, tend to reject this useful math out of hand. All of this follows for science as well, which should be properly understood as the study of ‘how things work’ but is, too often, reduced to rote memorization of tables, formulae and equations. I am not suggesting that higher level math and science shouldn’t be available as elective courses - of course they must be - our future scientists, doctors and engineers will need them. However, sciences and maths have been elevated to subjects of core study rather than, properly, specialist areas. As one former student who excelled at advanced math observed, “It was a waste of time...In the age of computers, maths beyond simple an applied arithmetic is needed only by specialists. Ramming it down pupils’ throats in case they may one day need it is like making us all know how to recalibrate a carburettor on the offchance that we might become racing drivers.” This favouritism harkens back to the days when our economy was largely industry-based; technical knowledge was a key component of preparation for factory labour. Those days are done and so, for all but interested intermediate and senior students, should be the forced study of these subjects. In place of these studies, students should be required to study the following: the history of scientific discovery (for instance, why is genetic evolution so strongly debated and what proofs exist or are lacking to demonstrate its action?), moral dilemmas about science (e.g. is stem cell research moral? should cloning be limited and, if so, at what point?) and natural sciences. Similarly, in place of mathematics, courses dedicated to logic and critical thinking would accomplish more than page upon page of problems. Courses in logic retain the advantage over
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theoretical math of having everyday human applicability. Critical thinking (a fall back argument for studying abstract math), in such obviously short supply in our society today, has manifold uses and is a necessary element of preparation from engagement with political ideas in the public square. It is not the sole defence against dinner table politics, but it is a key ingredient. 2. Languages vs. Media Studies: Obviously, languages are good to know. However, to learn to a useful level requires immersion, preferably in the form of travel (i.e. beyond the classroom). Offered as part of exchange programs, language study provides wonderful opportunity for discovery, particularly if linked to cultural studies (i.e. learn about Spain and Latin cultures, not just Spanish). More problematic is the focus on grammar and diction in languages - at a time when few students have mastered these basics in their native tongues. Better would be a overwhelming focus on conversational mastery of language. Literacy in foreign languages, one assumes, is a hold over from the now largely ignored study of Latin. Again, such mastery is best left to students who possess both aptitude and interest. For the rest of us, ability to navigate, read off of menus and decode basic instructions, that is, functional literacy, suffice. In place of languages, and indeed much English instruction which alternates between deconstructing all of the love out of literature and hammering form and style at the expense of creative thought, core courses in media literacy would serve students far better. It is abundantly clear that we work and live in a media-saturated environment, yet, despite their abiding familiarity, students are poorly prepared to interact with said media. Not to use them - this can be (and is) accomplished without formal instruction. But critical engagement with media is less frequent. Media studies are key to preparing students for the tomfoolery of the mass media, for deconstructing political rhetoric, for critiquing entertainment media and for appreciating the arts to name just a few uses. I struggle to name a more important and versatile course of study. 3. Computing vs. Personal Life Management: See above - any instruction in technology in public schools is bound to be years behind the level of technical mastery accomplished by all but the most dim witted or Luddite-raised kids. Given the half-life of computer programming, teaching kids about technology in schools is about as useful as making them conversant in dead languages or skilled with an abacus. That said, while so many students master the technology du jour with ease in their leisure time, a growing number of students lack basic skills in personal life management. It would seem that all manner of basic social skills (e.g. manners, conflict resolution, empathy workshops) are better obtained through family contacts. However, that isn’t the world that many kids live in today. Whether lost in the shuffle of families that have been split up, work longer hours (out of necessity or to get more, more, more stuff), or spend what meagre time they have together like drones, watching television rather than conversing, too many young people escape what one might expect would be child-rearing de rigeur. Regardless, in an environment where too many families have been forced or have too happily ceded the power to shape
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2009
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values to pop culture and the celebrity industry, schools should and indeed must step in to help young people learn how to live as functioning adults. 4. Business and Accounting vs. Ethics: In a political climate where big business calls annually for deeper and more lasting tax cuts and, in fact, bully governments for welfare on the threat of moving jobs offshore, I struggle to comprehend why public schools should willingly do preparatory work for the corporate sector. They don’t want to pay for it - then they shouldn’t get it: welcome to the free market. More to the point, no part of K-12 education should be devoted to business training. First of all, education and training aren’t the same thing. Furthermore, people active in the business sector - like all economic sectors - would be well served to have a solid liberal arts education for its own sake. Moreover, these courses of study should be excised from universities while we are at it: whatever administrators in the academy first invited corporate donors in to design curriculum should be forced to take remedial courses in the history of the university to better understand why, though not without value, business studies should by no means be located on a university campus. As to replacing business courses with mandatory courses in ethics, I imagine all but the most dull or partisan readers will intuitively understand the logic and irony of the juxtaposition (and replacement) of business with instruction and debate of ethics. How much better would our society be if business leaders and affiliated lawyers - as well as the majority of elected politicians who spring from these ranks had a more solid grounding in principled living and decision making? 5. Pedantic study of History and Civics vs. ‘World or Contemporary’ Issues: Civics as a mere study of government bodies is beyond pointless to most adolescents (actually, any normal person who isn’t a civics teacher). Worst case: it is beaten into kids as a means of inculcating them with what authorities deem to be sufficient patriotism (since the mindless daily playing of the national anthem fails to accomplish much beyond establishing the start of the school day with the bizarre atmosphere of a sleepily apathetic pro sports contest). Along with mathematics, history is one of those subjects people love to hate, or at least don’t come to properly appreciate until their later years when they’ve got sufficient life experience to want to look to the past. In both cases, when teachers resort to teaching them according to the ‘names and dates’ school, that is, devoid of context or colour, all but the most pedantic students are bound to be turned off. Despite the obvious importance of appreciating both subjects to understand the past and better guide our actions in the future, we should acknowledge that most students have simply not spent sufficient time on the planet to have a desire to look backwards. That said, history and civics are vital - they should be taught, albeit perhaps as a part of every subject rather than discrete subjects unto themselves. When history is integrated into a topic of contemporary concern, it lends students wisdom of the ages and enriches otherwise superficial appreciation of current events. So, the best way of teaching history and civics is to focus students’ attention on annual mandatory courses in contemporary studies. Both will benefit from this integration.
Not for use or publication without permission
DRAFT
For publication consideration
Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
∞ Of course, apathy and powerlessness are the lessons that our schools, in part, have taught so well that everybody believes in them. This provides a classic chicken and egg dilemma: we need to change our schools to invigorate our politics, change our politics to invigorate our schools. Where, exactly, does one begin? Ideally, people will recognize their own power to make change, individually and collectively. For most, this will mean taking a more active role in their schools and community, refusing to accept empty rhetoric, to accept the status quo and pushing a critical agenda of smart questions for those standing in the way of change. For others, it will mean focusing the political system itself. It is to this problem that I will now turn my attention. School’s out.
Not for use or publication without permission
DRAFT
For publication consideration