Hidden Costs and High Costs, Education, part II

Yesterday I blogged about the hidden costs of Public Education and pointed out the irony that the more schools fail, the more money they want so they can continue to fail in the same spectacular way.

What is that way? I think that in addition to the the hidden costs of public education, costs to taxpayers and to parents, there are other high costs as well. This might be acceptable if we truly educated all children, building a nation of literate, informed citizens with a healthy sense of informed curiosity enabling them to be informed, responsible participants in a representative republic-  but we do not do that.   In fact, one of the high costs of the way we approach education turns out to be... education.   That's what I mean by failing in some spectacular way.

One reason why one of the highs cost of public education turns out to be education itself is this the lovely sounding idea of 'standards, 'and not merely standards, but also  usually new and improved standards, rigorous standards, challenging standards- and it all sounds so good. Who could be against standards? That would be ridiculous, right?

Maybe we should define our terms here before we are so sure:

It all sounds wonderful. At least it does until sensible people realize that these standards, which are only the best of the worst of the existing state standards, have absolutely nothing to do with sound education. It will be a mistake to get bogged down in a discussion of whether these standards are better than the various state standards since the whole enterprise is just a diversion hiding what truly ails public schools. The reason is obvious to anyone who has ever listened to some of these so-called experts drone on about standards without ever making a literary reference or drawing a lesson from history or even talking about a book.

Let us imagine an author at his craft, say, Herman Melville while writing Moby Dick, or Jane Austen working on Pride and Prejudice. Now assuredly what these literary artists hoped above all else was that a century or two from their own time students in high schools would be using their great works not better to understand love or honor or revenge or nobility or happiness, but to “analyze how multiple themes or central ideas in a text interact, build on, and, in some cases, conflict with one another”; as well as to “analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).”

 The author of that essay is a college professor, and he is not impressed with what he sees.  Neither was the HG when she took an easy class with a few education majors in it, many of whom complained about the work load, and did not like to read or see why they needed to read books or know this stuff.  I am not kidding.

Neither is the author:

As a college professor I teach freshman every year, not those from the inner cities, where we admit schools are failing, but from the suburbs of our major cities as well as small towns. The students from public schools (unlike most of those who attend classical or Christian schools or are home-schooled; i.e. not bound by state-mandated standards) know virtually nothing. Public-school students know no facts or events from history. They have been impressed by no work of literature. Yet they have all taken standardized state tests. They have all taken SAT’s or ACT’s. ...
The fact is that the newly proposed national standards, like all state standards before them, are written in a specious pseudo-scientific educationese that talks around the texts of our Western and American tradition but does not resemble in any way their depth of insight into how human beings think, believe, hope, and act. And this very obfuscation occurs for a very good reason. The people who are in charge of our schools, from the assistant principals to the state superintendents, and most of the teachers in them, do not themselves know what the books mean that they are supposed to teach. A false language of “standards” is created to cover their tracks. Those who are in charge of our schools are really not learned men and women. They do not love the great stories of literature or the drama that is history; as a result, they know less about life, and certainly less about real education.

On page 55 of Charlotte Mason's Book Towards a Philosophy of Education, she described the same problem, all the way back in the early 1900s.  She wrote of the emphasis on tests over education, and tests that really didn't address knowledge, but were more like riddles:

The shallow child guesses the riddle and scores; and it is by the use of tests of this kind that we turn out young people sharp as needles but with no power of reflection, no intelligent interests, nothing but the aptness of the city gamin.

There is more at the link, good food to chew on.  So we set these standards and measure them by tests, and that sounds so good- until, as the author of the above link points out, we notice that "these so-called experts drone on about standards without ever making a literary reference or drawing a lesson from history or even talking about a book.'

I would suggest that this is because they do not see books as valuable for themselves, but rather merely as a delivery system.   Hmmm.  That reminds me of something else. I'll talk about that tomorrow, so come back and see us!

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