This is so tough. Family issues, work, pregnancy, gangs, drugs. How can school begin to compete? Especially if the essentialist impulse assumes the students will sit like machines having their heads filled with knowledge, however irrelevant or tedious.

Schools are at a huge competitive disadvantage, competing to provide these children with a future. Treating their interests, desires, and common sense with disdain is hardy a winning strategy. What they need (and we need) is to redefine the curriculum for relevance and stimulation. This is not to say the ‘fundamentals’ get left out. Rather, the fundamentals need to be taught in a context that holds the attention of the students.

A school principal, retired after 30 years, told my wife today that one of the very few things that Abraham Lincoln would recognize in our society today is the structure and philosophy of the school curriculum. This is sad at many levels. We have learned so much and the body of knowledge has changed so much since then. We have changed the relationship between society and the individual since then. We are attempting to educate a much large portion of our society now. Most importantly, the competition for the attention of the students is so much more fierce and sophisticated.

The world has changed. The successful curriculum will respect the needs of the learners.

I agree that axiology is a crucial element of education. I was inclined to argue that morals, values, character and ethics are more significantly needed in secondary schools. But, it occurred to me, if it isn’t taught in elementary school, many high school students will be beyond its reach by the time they encounter it. So, yes, it is an essential part of what teachers teach.

Having said that, for me epistemology is primary. With apologies to Yeats who said, “Education is not the filling of the pail, but the lighting of the fire” (“Famous Quotes”, 1998-2010), I think filling the pail is bulk of what teachers do. To do that, to fill the children with knowledge, they need to know “the way learners come to know the ideas they learn” (Kauchak & Eggen, 2005, page 208). Once they have a clear vision of that, teachers can work on “lighting the fire” of inspiration.

References

Famous quotes by William Butler Yeats . (1998-2010). Retrieved January 26, 2010, from http://www.famous-quotes.com/author.php?aid=7889
Kauchak, P. & Eggen, P. (2005). Introduction to teaching: Becoming a professional (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

One thing I’ve found is that when I am doing stations, the first one is the least effective. By the fourth one, I have it wired; what to say, how to explain it. This makes it hard on the students in the first station, of course. If I were the teacher I could stack the first station with the kids who need the least help. Or, God forbid, rehearse it (but where would i find the test subjects). Or just accept that as the way things go.

I do recognize what an advantage long time teachers have, having seen and done pretty much everything multiple times. The challenge there seems to be not getting jaded or burning out.

Of course his answer to that might be “Ok, but I’m not interested in earth science”. A further complication is the length and intensity of the course may be a lot if it’s purpose is just to expose students to the subject.

The philosophical progressive, liberal arts premise is that everything is connected to everything else and to be truly knowledgeable and therefore wise a broad body of knowledge is essential. What I don’t know is whether I believe such breadth of knowledge is a luxury or a necessity. (That’s the debate from my other post about making all education about ‘profession’). I also don’t know if a progressive education requires a solid essentialist foundation.

On the one hand, it’s easy to say “Our schools are failing to teach many children to read and write. Let’s put all our resources into that so that they have a basic chance to survive.” That’s certainly a ‘science’ of teaching argument. You have to know inorganic chemistry to learn organic chemistry, or whatever.

On the other hand, the ‘art’ of teaching might argue that the most important thing is for a child to find a spark that lights his or her imagination. Once the imagination is lit, they’ll learn what they need including all the essentials. If the imagination isn’t lit, every day is just like pushing the kids across a carpet face down like a vacuum cleaner.

And that’s the scary part of that second argument. The essentialist instinct has a strong tendency to suck all the fun out of learning. It doesn’t have to of course, but the whole ‘drilling and testing standards’ thing has a mechanical air to it that lends itself to forgetting the flesh and blood. If firing the imagination is key, the harder the system tries to force core learning, the fewer children will retain their inborn love of learning.

I don’t know whether firing Childrens’ imaginations is essential to learning but I have a strong sense that it is a very positive effect on kids of any resource level. I can’t imagine anybody making this argument in a political forum but maybe somebody should be advocating brining the joy and wonder back to education.

You said you aren’t that excited about earth science yourself. Maybe the best way to help that kid is to find something in the subject that does excite you and share it with him. I’d be curious if it helps.

If we follow the essentialist instinct to its extreme, there may be substantially less need for teachers. Let’s say the powers that be can define a set of standards for required knowledge and make those standards concrete (i.e. no “well rounded individuals” verbiage and even concepts like ‘problem solving’ are expressed in operational terms). If that is the case and if adhering to those standards is deemed sufficient, than much of what is today done by teachers can be drilled by well designed computer programs. Spelling, vocabulary, math and other objective subjects could be easily computerized. Writing, lab science and some parts of foreign language would be more difficult. But there is a big chunk of day to day teaching that -could- be automated, if society was so inclined.

There are even some areas where computerized training is superior to (or anyway a useful addition to) real world training. Training soldiers, police, first responders and medical personnel on simulators makes a lot of sense due to the costly nature of real world mistakes. However, training grown professionals serves a very different societal function than primary or secondary school. On the other hand, I’ve written elsewhere here about the possible need for more drastic approaches towards changing a system that seems to be failing in major areas in major ways. Perhaps this possibility of widespread computerized intervention will be a good catalyst for change and result in superior integration of humanist and essentialist goals.

That’s a darned good question your student asked: “When are we going to use this?”

There is a conceit implicit in philosophical progressivism that a “well rounded education” is a foundation of a ‘full’ or ‘rich’ life. Like most philosophical progressive beliefs, this one seems buried quite deep in our structures and our educational goals. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story many years ago the name of which I can’t remember which has as its premise that all of a future society’s educational efforts were directed at discovering the ideal job for each individual and training them for that profession. There is something in our national belief system which is intensely uncomfortable with such a process. Perhaps it’s the “All men are created equal” thing. But ‘all people are equal’ means in this usage that no one is ‘better’ or more ‘worthwhile’ than another, not that we are all the same. There is an belief in our society, implicit or sometimes explicit, that life has a starting line and what we are entitled to is an ‘equal start’. But the ‘race’ described seems to be towards a particular, narrow definition of success, the “American Dream”: to become wealthy and successful. These three, usually unspoken, assumptions keep us stuck in our educational philosophy, a philosophy that is leaving quite a few kids behind.

Sorry for being long winded, I’m thinking as I’m writing to some extent. The point that I’m working towards is that it is possible to imagine an entirely different school system, one built on Asimov’s vision of finding the truth of each child and preparing them individually to be successful in their livelihood and their life. This cuts against several strong cultural biases, but those biases are ones that could stand some scrutiny. In Japan, for example, it is believe that every employee from the janitor to the CEO is equally valuable, they just have different jobs. There are some cultures that place spiritual ‘success’ as the highest goal and view material success as in impediment to spiritual achievement. It’s really not such a long journey, but as a culture we’d have to become ok with the idea that fulfillment is a higher and more realistic goal that preparation for a race that, by definition, only a few can win.

Back to your student’s question, I agree with you, needing to know it to graduate is a weak and alienating answer. Our students deserve a better answer. I think it’s assumed in the elite circles where these things are decided that ‘in the long run’ the value of such education will be clear. But two things are true. One, it does no good to hold this as a pedagogical goal if by having it as a goal we drive many children from the system before they get to ‘the long run’. Two, it is far from clear that many of the things we teach will be useful to many of the students. It may be that the ‘long run’ assumption is wrong.

I have a vision of thousands of kids standing in front of the Board of Education holding signs saying “Teach us something useful!” That’d get the conversation started!