(Summary: Education has two basic components: Content and Form. All
the rest is tinsel and trivia. Indeed, it often seems that irrelevant
debates keep us from focusing on the obvious formula for success: teach
important stuff; teach it well.)
A poem, a movie, a book, anything creative, you can analyze
in terms of its content and its form. What is said; and how it is said.
I recently had the thought that education can be analyzed the
same way. We can examine WHAT is taught; and HOW it is taught. Doesn’t
that cover everything?
Our educational doldrums are quickly understood when we note that our
Education Establishment has an almost perfect track record dismissing
content, while simultaneously making sure that whatever little remains
is poorly taught. In summary: less content further diminished by bad
form.
Then we instantly see a very simple truth. Do you wish to improve
public schools? It’s easy. You simply reintroduce content. And you
reintroduce serious teaching methods. It’s elementary, my dear Watson.
Attend to form and content, and all will be healed.
All of this needs saying because so much of the education debate
spins and gyrates around big confusing issues that are not central. We
have a forest fire but people insist on discussing the lousy weather.
That’s not a luxury we have at this time. We must concentrate on putting
out the fire.
First, let’s consider content. More than 100 years ago John
Dewey scorned what he called “mere learning.” Ever since that time,
elite educators have found one pretext after another for removing
content from the schools. The kids don’t need this content; our kids can’t handle that content.
For years, Relevance was the favorite sophistry: content was
dismissed because it wasn’t about a child’s own life. Then came
Multiculturalism and content was dismissed because it was about a
child’s life. When those excuses got tiresome, the educators turned to
Self-Esteem, using the argument that academic demands made some children
feel bad about themselves, and that must be avoided at all costs.
Point, is, our educators are equal-opportunity sophists. When it comes
to deleting content, there’s always a clever gimmick at hand.
The elder statesman with regard to content is E. D. Hirsch. He’s
written a book called "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To
Know." Anybody who’s serious (for example, Bill Gates) about improving
the schools could say: “Mr. Hirsch, could you please prepare a basic
curriculum for us. We’ll call it the American Curriculum and it will be a
starting point for all school systems. You’ve been writing about these
things for so many years, I’m sure you can put something together from
files on your computer.”
(Hirsch, by the way, provided us with an anecdote that tells you
everything you can stand to know about the assault on content in this
country’s schools. He was explaining his ideas at a school in California
when one of the administrators questioned him about what a child should
learn in the first grade. “I think they should know the names of the
oceans,” he said. A perfect answer, I would think. But this silly
educator objected: “I can’t imagine why our children would need to know
that.” And there you have the whole dumb diorama. No matter what little
scrap of information you might think a child should know, the people in
charge of the schools would say, genuinely puzzled, “Why would a child
need to know that?” And finally you’re reduced to saying, “Well, surely it’s all right to teach them their names...Isn’t it??”)
Now let’s turn to Form or Structure. How do you arrange the
parts and pieces of a sales pitch, a presentation, a symphony, a
fireworks display, or a course?
Clearly, there must be optimal ways to present information to
an audience. I call this the ergonomic dimension. That’s the Greek word
for efficiency.
When the subject is instructional methods, the elder statesman there
is Siegfried Englishman, one of our great educators. He has made the
brilliant point that if kids are not learning it’s not their fault and
it’s probably not the teacher’s fault. It is the school’s fault or the
system’s fault, because the school has adopted bad methods.
Typically, public schools embrace an array of foolish methods, such
as Constructivism, Cooperative Learning, Discovery Method, etc. What
they all have in common is they don’t work as promised. Englishman points
out the obvious: if kids aren’t learning, keep firing administrators
until you find people with enough sense to use methods that do work.
Meanwhile, don’t abuse the kids and don’t send notes to the parents
abusing them. The real problem is that the school has not chosen
well-designed instructional materials.
QED: If we combine what Hirsch has been teaching for 40 years
and what Englishman has been teaching for 40 years, presto, there is our
answer: proper Content married to proper Form.
Not to mention, I trust any sentence from these two guys before I’d
believe any book coming out of Teachers College. The Education
Establishment seems to be staffed by hacks recycling the same old bad
ideas. It’s not reasonable to expect that they would now say anything
useful. So let’s do what Hirsch and Englishman suggest.
By the way, if you put the content back in, and you organize it in an
intelligent way, what will you end up with? Would it be something
exotic, something from the remote future? No, it will be exactly what
all good schools through the ages have done, and what the real-world
schools do now. I’m thinking about driving school, bartender school,
flying school, cooking school, any school that is actually trying to
teach a body of information to its students. Which is precisely the part
that our public schools seem determined to ignore.
The Education Establishment used to brag about doing a bad job with
this bizarre claim: “We don’t teach history. We teach children.” That
was the problem. The common name for this approach is dumbing-down.
Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Web Site:-http://www.gyapti.com
Blog:- http://gyapti.blogspot.com
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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