The Teachable Remnant: Failing Our Few Eager Students
A teacher can spot them easily in a crowded classroom, even surrounded as they are by the indifferent and the inept: the teachable students. They are the ones who nod at the salient points in the lecture, their eyes brightening with fellow feeling. Not unlike the “remnant” of evangelical theology — the sincere believers who keep the true faith alive while others turn to false gods — the teachable students still believe in ideas, still seek after truth. Most teachers look for them as for a life preserver, their hearts lifting at the first glimpse.
Though too often neglected by a system emphasizing social rather than mental improvement and in which the dullest members dictate the pace and emphasis for all, teachable students are still, almost miraculously, a presence in our schools and universities, worthy of our attention and highest demands.
They are so diverse that no composite picture can be drawn, but a few of their characteristics may be identified. Most crucially, they are not only gifted with innate intelligence but have escaped the attitude of entitlement — the self-regard tinged with grievance — that characterizes many of their peers. Their orientation towards the world prepares them for learning.
They come from different backgrounds and stations. Some have religious parents who placed emphasis from an early age on mastering sacred texts and practicing spiritual disciplines. Others are from immigrant families, taught by example and edict to work hard and to take advantage of North America’s opportunities for advancement. Some have parents who excelled in a particular field and thus encouraged and aided their child to develop in that direction. Almost always their families cared in some manner for learning and culture over the popular and worldly fare on offer outside the home. Sometimes, though, nothing explains the students’ readiness to learn except something in themselves.
One of the greatest gifts that families can give their children — or that the children can seize for themselves — is the discovery of an outside object, a source of curiosity and wonder that transcends the immediate and superficial preoccupations of the day. Often the interest involves wide and intense reading, whether of mythology, history, science, or biography: accounts of struggle and quest, of exotic worlds real or imagined, of noble deeds present and past. These shape the imagination and focus desire. In addition to strengthening memory, concentration, and verbal comprehension — essential attributes of good learners — such reading also enables a forgetting of the self, an ability to find in ideas a source of satisfaction great enough to prevent the sterile self-absorption described by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism. Forgetting themselves, students find an inexhaustible interest.
To their absorbing passion, teachable students add self-discipline: the ability to persevere, to work hard at unrewarding tasks or unfulfilling subjects, and to find satisfaction in learning even when keen interest is not immediately sparked. They understand that mastery of a skill or body of knowledge requires patient practice, that it is a slow process, and that some or even much of it is boring and wearying. The pleasure of achievement is understood to be something struggled towards, not instantly experienced. Teachable students have learned the thrill of deferred gratification, of (even monotonous) work towards an end. And they are not defeated by failure.
Occasionally, teachable students prefer to work independently of teachers and assignments. Far more often, they are hungry for instruction, hanging on to every word of their best teachers, taking notes with eager fervor.
What is to be done for such students? A few of the very brightest, the ones with IQs off the chart, will thrive in nearly any situation. Driven by their peculiar internal necessities, they will find the sources and opportunities they require. It is the regularly gifted, the ordinarily keen and capable, who can be stymied or aided by their schooling, and it is these who are most harmed by our present system, which is forced by its therapeutic mandate to cater to the mediocre and the strugglers. Few, if any, resources (or even sympathy, in some cases) are left over for those who would most benefit from greater support and rigor.
It is essential, first of all, that good students be rewarded through a fair and uninflated grading system. When nearly everyone receives B and A grades, the best students cannot know when they have hit the mark, cannot know what it means to aim high. A few well-meaning teachers give higher grades to underachievers out of misplaced social conscience, revealing a bias, perhaps an unconscious one, against the intellectually able. But a society that cannot acknowledge merit cannot attain justice.
Teachable students must first of all be protected from the general mob of students. The mob consists of those who don’t care and want to drag down everyone to their level. They will attack and intimidate the teachable ones. Also they will destroy everything around them. They’ll tag everything around them with special emphasis on books. Its not the taggers that are the worst. Its the ones who come in with a hidden razor blade and they use it on the books utterly destroying them. They can destroy as many as six books per day each costing in excess of $35. During a year they can wipe out your entire classroom’s books. Yet the school system mandates that each student has a book. That school system will not charge the students for the books. Individual books are assigned to students, many are never returned and the student is not really held accountable. Worse yet is to issue a student a brand new book, and have it returned brand new untouched. The system works via numbers of students present, not on what they learn. As long as the head count is good, the administrators are happy. Nobody cares if the students learn anything.
I don’t know what school your kids go to, but when I was in public school, they always warned us that destroying, defacing or losing school property would result in a bill for the damages, and failure to pay that bill, library fines, or cafeteria debts would result in not receiving one’s report card.
Your rebuttal would be amusing if the truth were not so tragic.
It’s not that I don’t believe you. I DO.
But that was THEN. This is NOW.
It’s deteriorated that much in five years?
No, not really. More like 40 years. What you are seeing is the difference between urban/non-urban school districts. Even in charter schools here in Philly, many schools do not let the kids leave school with books. They do have enough for every student, but they are also well aware that kids are not responsible, or even aware, enough to take books away from school and return them (Especially over the 9 month school year).
And anyway, with so many students being so apathetic to their own education or future, who cares if they fail to get a report card? And how many parents/guardians (That itself sickens me) have the coin to pay the fines at the end of the day?
You’re living a myth, Buster. As someone who taught high school in Texas during a sabbatical, I can absolutely confirm that everything in the comment you derided is true, as is the content in the article.
What’s worse, teachers are told they can only fail a specific percentage of students in any given class, even if the students deserve to fail. Not being willing to play that game, I did not get an invitation to remain at that high school the next (despite the fact I never intended to extend the sabbatical beyond one year). Furthermore, our students were not given a textbook; we had classroom sets that students picked up at the beginning of each class. In that scenario, it’s exceeding difficult to keep track of who the book cutters/taggers/rippers were, even if a teacher is active in the classroom. While too many textbooks were destroyed by entitlement-mentality students, the bigger problem was getting the textbooks to be used; homework assignments were rarely completed. Hence, fewer and fewer teachers made the effort to create homework assignments.
The game being played by public school principals and administrators is getting kids to class by 3rd period, because federal attendance data is based on 3rd period rolls. (That’s the gravy train game.) Significantly more effort is made by truancy officers to get kids to school in the AM, with little effort to keep them there after the fact (at least at the school where I taught).
Finally, much of the decline in public schools is based on the fallacy that all students want/need to attend college. I can’t count the number of times I heard egghead colleagues spout this nonsense when the overwhelming practical evidence was to the contrary. We do public school students an appalling disservice by not allowing them to opt for a trades-based education (the most popular classes at my high school were the welding classes) similar to what is employed in much of Asia and Europe. Tradesmen make a very good living. I know many who don’t have college degrees and are independently wealthy.
On point! It’s even worse.
As a former teacher I can attest that the racial politics were off the charts. I had APs make changes to my grades based on the color of the skin of the students. Black student who did not participate in class and received a failing grade were given a “C” or “B”.
Black students who were reprimanded for fighting or disruption of class, and were excused from class, were routinely sent back to class with no consequences. I had one principal who pretty much told me that black students do not “fight” so do not write them up. The implication was that I would be called on the carpet. Then there was always the NAACP lurking around. I had parents threaten my job if I did not either increase their son/daughter’s grade or make their class behavior comments disappear.
Poppakap,
Mrs. J., daughter of a Rosie the riveter, taught welding at my son’s high school. This was a high school that kissed the a..es of the 5% “gifted. The remaining were thrown to the wolves.
This school did not protect anyone from predators. It didn’t matter if the predator and predatee were of the same race or ethnicity or they were different. Any guidance counselor who tried to help a hurt student learned this displeased the management, because their action “admitted” there was a problem.
Racial grievances were extolled and the non-minority students were “indoctrinated” that their (assumed) racism damaged others.
Mrs. J’s welding class was a haven. Students’ ethnicity, skin color, whatever, was not relevant. Her students adored her. Mrs. J. had almost no budget and she and her relatives had yard sales to raise money for welding materials. One time an arrogant high school administrator marched into the class and scolded her in front of her students and she bent her head down on the desk and wept. The students came up one my one and comforted her. This was a lesson in how a closed system breeds totalitarian behavior.
The US education model isn’t in free fall, it is a failed system for 1/2 to 2/3rds of the students. This article points out successful models elsewhere, such as Germany where as many as 90% of the students take intense training in metallurgy, chemistry, machining, master carpentry, etc.
We have 50 states. Let’s ax the federal DOE, divide the money amont the states, and see what happens. The road we are on will only march our students over the cliff.
This is all true enough as far as it goes, but the teachable, intellectually curious students must also often be protected from mediocre, mind-numbing teachers who look only for biddable students who accept what their told.
Very often, the most intellectually curious and talented students, especially boys, are relatively unruly and ask difficult, often inconvenient questions.
These are very often the students who can be challenged successfully by inspired teachers, and who go on to accomplish great things.
These kids need to be challenged at home if they are not being challenged at school, and when they are stuck with a mind-numbing teacher, they need to be taught to challenge the teacher respectfully. They can learn how to manage their intellectual curiosity this way, and learn how to navigate a world full of people who don’t know and don’t care to know.
With all due respect mom, the problem generally isn’t mind-numbing teachers. It’s mind-numbing parents with little interest in learning themselves who spend more time derided the public school system than encouraging their children to listen, work hard, and excel. Furthermore, I was always taught that you only get out of a lecture what you put into it. The biggest problems most teachers have in public schools is lack of student participation, especially in core subjects like science, math, and history where lectures are often necessary.
When I taught, I was told multiple times by parents that as soon as their child left the house, the responsibility for said child’s behavior was no longer theirs.
The author points to the saving remnant of curious students, but there is a broader social problem that keeps these exceptional learners a minority. The whole question of curiosity is ringed round with anxiety and doubt, owing to prohibitions that infest popular and even parts of high culture, namely fear of the femme fatale or the Jew, both of whom are held to be overly cerebral and heartless in their searches for truth. I wrote about that here: http://clarespark.com/2012/05/24/curiosity-and-the-femme-fatalejew/. I once investigated the terror-gothic style in art and life (a response to the Enlightenment) and find this style still operating today. It should be more widely identified as destructive to everything we hold dear about progress.
To Ms. Spark, Must every post you make here at PJ media be a self-serving promotion to get people to read your blog!?
While you may find Ms. Sparks’ comments crass, I’m grateful for her input since it’s timely, relevant, and scholarly. Were it not, I’d be more inclined to agree with you.
It’s not her comments that irk me. Its the constant “Read my blog!” “Read my blog!” “”Pleae ! Please! Read my blog” stuff.
Nothing new about this. I was in school, private schools no less, in the 1980′s. By the time I was in 5th grade the “talented and gifted” programs were ended because the poor students complained about them. Academic awards that meant anything went shortly after that. As it was, courses were geared toward the worst students which meant even the average students were bored to death. Then there was the whole “beat up smart kid for make feel dumb” attitude.
Some of the teachers were OK, as another poster mentioned, but others weren’t. Many lavished more attention on the slow and/or disruptive students while the rest were ready to move on to new things. Just one example was the misery of the timed math test. Every. Single. Day. For. Years. Timed maths tests going over the basics that could be learned at that age in a day or two. But because the bad students couldn’t get it, all of us suffered. Also there was the point that many of the bad students were very socially adept and they could easily sway or just distract the teachers so they could get them off topic, disrupt the class and otherwise get away with causing trouble.
A point about the achievement of low-achieving students follows. It is not uncommon for principals in low-achieving schools to pressure teachers to hand out passing grades- and in sotto voce, “deserved or not.” The reaction of many low-achieving students to such gifts is to say, “If I can pass with so little effort, why should I work harder?”
While principals may not like it if a teacher hands out a bunch of Fs, those Fs in most cases will motivate students to work harder.
The first thing that needs to be done, is to demand that students behave. If not, send them to special schools where they’ll be babysat and kept away from students who want to learn. The disrupters should be the exception, not the rule.
Second, we need to find some way to get the unions out of the schools. If not, get the kids out of union schools. Unions are interested in only one thing: getting better pay and benefits for their members; the kids are only the means.
Third, we need to get the federal government out of schools at all levels. It has no constitutional role–period. It has only led to decline in educational levels.
Fourth, we need to control immigration, both legal and illegal. We can’t teach kids if half the classrooms are full of kids who don’t like America, American Values and speak English. And taxpayers should not be taxed to educate children of people who aren’t legal. Sorry, but get George to fund them, as in George Soros since he likes the open border.
Public schools in this country have two missions: Education and babysitting. Those missions frequently come into conflict, and when they do…babysitting takes precedence. The kids know that low-grade misbehavior or non-perfomance won’t have any real consequences, so they sink to the bottom. We need to be able to throw the little darlings out sometimes…or at least have a completely different type of school where they can be sent if the blue plastic chair model isn’t working out…
The emergence of an authoritarian or totalitarian oligarchy is to be expected in the face of widespread mis-education and ignorance among the people.
“The People’s State of Marx … will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and finally the application of capital to production by the only banker — the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many heads “overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!” Michael Bakunin
“Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [Socialist Principles of Oceania], and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity… The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird… In the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.” George Orwell – 1984
p. 87 of George Orwell’s “1984″
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
“The pleasure of achievement is understood to be something struggled towards, not instantly experienced. Teachable students have learned the thrill of deferred gratification, of (even monotonous) work towards an end. And they are not defeated by failure.”
You’re describing a conservative. This is the very essence of the true American spirit, the ideals that built this nation into a world power. Sadly, many of these ideas are being crushed today by laziness and liberalism. What is especially destructive is this notion that everybody is a “winner” and that everybody is “entitled” to succeed, whether they work hard or not. Obama and his minions have added to this with their warped socialistic views on “social justice” and the “redistribution of wealth.” Hopefully, things will change when we throw Obama and his crew out of office in November. Then maybe we can get back to the tough conservative values that made this nation what it is today, the most powerful country on the planet.
…..and this is why I refuse to send my kids to a public school, even though the ones in my area are considered above average.
A friend of mine has a boy my boy’s age (5), but he acts like my daughter (2). He can’t do what the other little kids do in kindergarten, but he still got promoted so that his self-esteem wouldn’t be destroyed. He’s far from the only one like that.
So, in a couple years…..when he still can’t get what the teacher is saying, he’s going to disrupt the class. Probably over and over again. The other little kids who DO want to learn won’t get the chance, because putting him in a class for special education is now considered “cruel”.
Don’t get me started on the constant calls to gut advanced and gifted classes, either.
Diana Moon Glampers is alive and well, and running the public schools.
Sympathy with the unfortunate is a component of a normal human personality, as is identity with, aspiration towards, and reward of success, and as is punishment of willful divergence from norms. Human societies will not prevail without application of the above.
“We” seem completely unable to cope with the fact that application of the above involves the use of blunt instruments and there will NEVER be an accurate separation of the sheep from the goats in our herds.
The cost of not applying the blunt social instruments we have is failure of society, and application of Nature’s bluntest of instruments.
Interesting times are on the way.
I was lucky to have been educated in very good (military base) schools for basic education and to have parents who provided educational enrichment like good books, trips to interesting places, and lively debates at the dinner table. We did the same for our offspring and I see the same being practiced on our next grand-generation. It really does get back to the family to make sure kids are encouraged to learn.
A friend retired recently from teaching middle school military kids in Okinawa. She said these were the best students she ever taught. This surprised me, since my public schools are rampant with disruption. I asked if her students disrupted her classes. She said no, but that some students tried to. Question: what did she do to prevent disruption?.
Each class had a PC wired into the military base communication system. If several students were misbehaving, and failed to stop, she walked over to the keyboard and typed one message and entered the e-mail addresses of the students’ parents and the parents’ officers. Then she’d look at the students and ask them if they wanted her to send the e-mail.
End of problem. Semper fi.
The question at this point after decades of increasing failure of US schools is how to meet each child’s learning needs. Education psychology has always pointed out that the classroom model is flawed. The ideal has always been 1-on-1 tutors. Fortunately, technology today is blazing a trail, best exemplified by the Khan Academy, used by millions of students around the world. It is often the source for homeschooled children, and technology assures they are learning. It is also free to students. Government monopoly on the public school system has guaranteed that it is now totally politicized, and like all monopolies, failing its core mission. The homeschooled children I know are years ahead of their peers in public schools, and now are facing the need for college at ages as low as 13. People are so accustomed to thinking it is government’s job to educate their children, they don’t realize they are using a horse and buggy when autos are affordable by everyone.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be about low-achieving vs. high-achieving kids. My two (16 and 14) go to a charter school in central Mass, where everyone, regardless of natural ability, gets pushed to do their best. To me, it’s all about the culture of the place–high expectations for everyone.
Janice-
I wrote a piece this morning about how charter agreements are being used to bind schools and districts to make the “80% of students who would not thrive in a traditional subject disciplines and knowledge environment” the whole focus. The parents and taxpayers do not appreciate the language being used and the term of the charter is supposed to prevent meddling when the outrages begin over making emotions and socializing and group projects the entire focus.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/what-happens-when-a-charter-pillages-minds-and-wallets/
Ed Week has already done a special story touting this charter as a national gamechanger. That would mean it got the official Gates Foundation backing. In the post I mention a union official from 1988. It was Albert Shanker of the AFT because the unions also love the idea of being able to dictate classroom behavior to members who still want to push the knowledge of the Ages or other academic content.
Yes but the Gates Foundation will pull their funding if this model is not successful. They have done so at least twice already. Arne Duncan doesn’t trouble himself with pesky results. He recently advised that ALL US public schools adopt a model that has proven to be less successful than then other traditional public schools in the same areas. When a reporter brought up this fact, his response was they’ve only been doing it for 5 years. That isn’t enough time to determine its effectiveness. We shouldn’t wait for success before expanding the program.
Which program are you talking about? The “new” Geometry?
You Are Not Special Commencement Speech from Wellesley High School
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lfxYhtf8o4&feature=player_embedded
I find this entire article offensive, in that it does not address President Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ act. That act alone has caused grievous harm to the educational system.
The brighter students as well as the less bright all got shafted, since the emphasis for educators became matching the curriculum to the test questions.
I also think that the so-called ‘entitled’ students may well be people who wish they were somewhere else, and don’t feel at all entitled to be there, merely put upon.
Do you have personal experience with No Child Left Behind? For those states and districts that did not bully exemptions for themselves, I’ve found the standards to have been raised and the expansion of gifted and talented programs increased.
Greetings:
I went to a small Catholic high school in the Bronx from 1961 to 1965. The school was architecturally separated into a boys” department and a girls’ department. Our freshman class was divided in three 30-student sections. All in the ‘A’ section were expected to go to college; some from the ‘B’ section, and none from the ‘C’ section. {No, not that kind of C-section]
Likewise, the curriculum was more rigorous for the A students than the Bs; and more rigorous for the Bs than the Cs. [You are welcome to complete the transitivity of curriculum, if you so desire]
How these techniques were expunged from teaching is beyond my ability to explain. Catholic school discipline plus studies that challenged the ability levels of the students seemed very much to result in educated people.
On another tack, I noticed the use of the “teachable” word. When I first came across the “teachable moment” construct, it seemed very much to refer to a situation where the student interest in being taught had been piqued. Nowadays, its use seems to have shifted the “locus of control” to where the instructor wants to act on the student, a much different situation to my mind.
Charles Murray eloquently addresses these issues in Real Education: Four Simple Steps for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.
Also highly recommended: Finnish Lessons, What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg. Finland reformed and reinvented its educational system in the midst of the economic crisis when Finland lost its Soviet export markets in the early 1990s. Unlike reforms in the US, the Finnish reforms improved their schools, and Finnish students are now at the top of international rankings. The Finnish approach is very different from what has been done in the US in recent decades, and involves decentralizing and empowering local schools. Romney has promised to return control of education to the states–state and local education people must not miss this coming opportunity to reorient American schools in a better way.
Finally, students with IQs off the charts do not always do well on their own. Statistics show that many of them are severely damaged by our current schools which do not recognize who they are or address their needs, and they may never reach their potential. Think of it this way. An average student has an IQ of 100. A highly gifted student with an IQ of say 140 is as different from that average student as the handicapped student who scores 60 on the IQ scale.
There is nothing wrong with tracking kids into classrooms according to their ability and their interests. I grew up in a district that tracked a set of us into advanced placement classes. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had the equivalent of college freshman level chemistry and English comp and lit, I was taking Calculus and Physics and I was doing it in the company of other kids of my ability who were also aggressively pursuing college. Some of us were even given the option of enrolling in entry level college courses at the local private small college for credit instead of being forced to fill the time with a superfluous class.
At the other end of the spectrum, my high school also had classes that partnered with community businesses and taught industrial arts style courses. One classes’ project was to build an entire small house from the ground up in preparation for the construction trades. Other kids worked off campus learning business skills. These were the kids that had no need or desire for college prep but a very real need for real-world job skills.
Nowadays, we all must be in one classroom, learning how to go to college. Some of us don’t learn enough one way or the other.
Part of the problem can also be attributed to the parents. They are either too apathetic, too unwilling, or just don’t know how to fight for their children. Without monetary incentives to the schools to provide for students who actually wish to learn, the only way those students can get any satisfaction is if their parents are committed to unrelentingly fighting the school system.
A quote from the movie Heathers is indicative of the one of the traps into which parents fall.
Veronica Sawyer: My parents wanted to move me into high school out of the sixth grade, but we decided to chuck the idea because I’d have trouble making friends, blah, blah, blah. Now blah, blah, blah is all I ever do. I use my grand IQ to decide what color lip gloss to wear in the morning and how to hit three keggers before curfew…
Once you start taking counsel of your fears, the battle is lost.
And you know what else? If you skip grades and don’t make a big deal about it, the other students don’t notice that you’re actually younger and not just shorter (within reason, of course, as the typical 12-year-old will never pass for 18).
I disagree; skipping grades or starting school early can be socially disasterous for a number of bright kids; I know because I was one of them. And for many, including me, it ends up being academically disasterous as well, as the stresses of being the youngest, smallest, and shyest kid in every class eventually take their toll. I don’t know what the solution is when private schools or homeschooling are out of a parents’ reach, but skipping grades is not a good solution for many kids.
Good article, but I think the author sells the situation a little short. The issue is not an ‘either/or’ scenario. It’s both.
To be educated one must have *both* hard factual knowledge; as well as the ability to think critically about things. The ability to have ‘the dots’ and the ability to ‘connect the dots’.
The real travesty today in the classroom — from elementary school through Masters classes — is that people are being taught (instructed) strictly in how to pass the exams, and are not being educated in how to draw salient conclusions from a wide body of information. They’re getting certified but not educated. As a result, they can respond to a simple stimulus, but have no idea how to think and consider.
Amassing data points is great; adding value to it and you get information; add more value and you will get wisdom.
Yes, students are often shown how to “get the right answer” while never taught how to understand the problem. The result – students become ignorant answer grabbers instead of educated problem solvers.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson
Excellent comment. Critical thinking allows the building of the matrix that interconnects the facts we learn. If one reads Bernays, they can find a blue print for social control through the manufacturing of consent. This requires a populace incapable of critical thinking. Chant “war is peace” often enough, and the uncritical mind accepts it as fact. Charlotte Iserbyt covers this territory well in “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”.
While I have appreciated this and previous articles written by Ms. Fiamengo, I must take issue with this thought: “A few of the very brightest, the ones with IQs off the chart, will thrive in nearly any situation. Driven by their peculiar internal necessities, they will find the sources and opportunities they require.”
Educators of highly gifted children will tell you that this is absolutely not true. Many of those children will instead develop behaviors that will be misinterpreted as ADHD, or diagnosed with depression. Small children do not know HOW to find the “sources and opportunities they need”- sometimes they can’t even find them with strong parental advocates! I have a mathematically gifted child whose mood rose and fell with the capacity of the teacher to provide the kind of education he needed, and finally in 6th grade, we pulled him out of a private school and homeschooled him until high school. He’s now excelling in a math & science university. In some ways, however, he has never recovered from the labels he was given and the teasing he received.
To be fair, having a daughter who excels in the language arts (in which Ms. Fiamengo holds her degrees), I can see how the author might think that children can seek out their own resources. If one reads and writes beyond one’s years, it’s natural to pick up more challenging books (especially in a household with educated parents), or write a deeper analysis, or have a more meaningful discussion with one’s teacher. My daughter’s teachers have been superb in this regard, which has not necessarily spared her from depression & feeling different from her classmates, but her school years have been vastly more productive and kinder than they were for my son.
I grew up blue-collar and I can tell you that anyone who wants to learn is loathed. I would fight, and played sports, so had no trouble.
No child left behind? That is typical of the vile middle class in the US. Some are left at the gate, when they eat their first red crayon in kindergarten.
All that happens is that people pander to the trash, who will never learn because they like attention but not understanding.
A better solution would be an open system where people could get off and on to learn all they want and are able to absorb. If you don’t why be put in holding pens?
The willing able are our future, and they are few. Why waste resources on those who have no interest?
Because the fear is that if insufficient praise, attention and monetary tribute are not paid to the incapable but self-entitled, they will riot and storm the gates of the elites’ compound. That is ALL they are worried about. Your little middle class brainiac is at best seen as the buffer in between.
Many of the problems discussed here can be mitigated, but probably not eliminated, by greater use of computerized instruction and testing. This field is in its infancy, but is destined to grow. Students can progress at their own pace. They can get any point explained a variety of ways, one of which will probably “click” with them. Progress can be easily monitored. Costs per student will be less as more students participate. Some colleges and some home-schoolers are leaders in this field.
Here’s a bit of a history lesson. Here in the USA public schools with mandatory student attendance were not the ideal scenes you see in LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE. Those kids weren’t required to go to school, they did if they wanted to or their parents made them. The real history of US education really starts in New York City. To get an idea of what life was like in New York you should see the film the GANGS OF NEW YORK. That paints it as accurately as can be. Mandatory school attendance started there the reason being the gangs. The gangs, with young involved, were such a problem that the city was forced to deal with them directly. Unable to jail all the juveniles involved in such activity, the city mandated public school for all juveniles. Curiously it worked well. The hours when these juveniles were in school were hours that were crime free or crime was greatly reduced. Hence the system of public education grew all over the country. Even today if you calculate crime statistics, you will find a great correlation with times students are not in school and a higher crime rate. Maybe we should really think of public education as a mandatory jail sentence. It would be more accurate.
In many ways, what has been discussed, so far, is moot, for schooling, as we know it, will be phased out, replaced by learning, however accomplished.
Some kids will learn best at home with a self-sacrificial parent, others in tutoring centers, some in traditional classrooms … etc. What matters is that they learn.
By the way, vouchers, or something similar, are inevitable. And once the child’s education dollar is decoupled from public schools via vouchers, and passing a standardized test becomes the measure of success, then the means to that success will be determined by the child’s ability, interest and style of learning.
What schools may provide, in the future, is a cafeteria service to students who need guidance choosing an educational delivery mechanism that fits. Schools, and other private organizations, may also administrate tests that measure what the kid has learned. In this scenario, “sit time” in classrooms doesn’t matter. All that matters is that kids master a subject before moving on to the next.
I am sorry that the author linked the ‘bright students’ to religious influence. i taught classes of these students for a number of years and never found much of a connection. Rather, I found the family and their values to be of primary importance. The students had families which encouraged learning and enabled it. Their home life generally was not centered around celebrities and the huge amounts of money and goods they had. They were also encouraged to try things even if their effort failed and to take difficult subjects and to continue to pursue a subject even after the ‘class’ was completed. Many parents or family friends volunteered to help with learning activities.
I think many very bright and successful people have this same attitude.
Which is a characteristic of religious households, albeit not one exclusive to them.
english-only. no cellphones or ipods. uniforms. parental lawsuits, abolished.
gym, mandatory. essays, mandatory. oral presentations, mandatory. subsidized math and science tutors.
some of this may help the majority of students to attain at least the minimum of literacy and knowledge of how to process new learning.
we are attempting to integrate cultures that have no history of educational achievement as a priority. status, is conferred on those who “get over” on
white society by piling up material possessions, while learning as little as possible. duplicitous behavior is rewarded. cheating is rewarded.
our public school system, once the envy of the world, the unique american opportunity to rise from poverty, is slipping away.