Though hardly less exercised about
our current political situation than most of my compatriots, I rarely deal with
explicitly political issues in these essays.
Most of us feel awash, if not drowning, in political commentary. I have no special insight or authority in
political issues. Furthermore, most of
my political ideas, which are often uncongenial to my family and friends, are
unlikely to be of interest to a general audience. But I sometimes make an exception regarding
issues at the intersection of politics and education. Do note in the first place that
“intersections” are all the rage, and since I have spent most of what is now a
long lifetime pursuing education as a profession as well as a private
aspiration, here is an intersection I can perhaps occupy with some
plausibility.
I begin with a possible factoid for
which I have no solid source. There are international statistics concerning
student performance, presented in charts organized by nation states. In terms of demonstrated ability in
mathematics, American high school students apparently are tied with Italian
students in twenty-eighth place. If, however, you ask American high school
students what country is tops in math education, a majority will answer “the
United States.” There is the man who
knows he knows not. Teach him. There is the man who knows not, and knows not
he knows not. Pity him.
Within the last month we all got
some very bad news. Since it had nothing
explicitly to do with disgraceful behavior by elected officials, the
dysfunctionality of our legislative institutions, murder, mayhem, terrorism, or
cultural vulgarity, this bad news was not prominently featured in our national
press. The bad news was that despite untold
millions of dollars thrown at our public education facilities, and despite the
substantial implementation of the so-called “Common Core” approach in our high
schools, the actual test scores for English and math have on a national level
either remained flat or actually fallen during the past decade. The idea of the Common Core itself—which I
champion at least with “two cheers” enthusiasm—has now been roundly rejected by
the educational “experts” both left and right.
This is not really a left or right
thing, however. To force it to be yet
another episode in the culture wars, or another aspect of racial politics, is
actually to trivialize it. The world is
changing around us very rapidly. The
principal tasks of our public education system are two. The first --not necessarily in order of
importance—is to educate our young people to the point that they are capable of
meaningful participation in our democratic political system. The second is to prepare them for productive
work that the real world is willing to purchase with adequate compensation to
allow them to enjoy decent lives. That
we have been failing pretty abysmally at the first task should be at least
hinted at by our current political regimes.
If a few phony ads on Facebook are enough to constitute “serious foreign
interference in an American election,” the fragility of our democracy may
already be approaching the fatal stage.
As for the contemporary workplace, it has changed dramatically from that
of my young manhood, and unrecognizably from that of my parents. High school Wood Shop and Home Ec are simply
not going to cut it these days
The big gripe about the Common Core
is that it is all about testing, which encourages “teaching to the test.” I am no lover of academic tests. And I suspect I have at least a soupçon of authority in the matter, as I
have constructed and, God knows, had to evaluate, a very great many of them
over the years. There are often much
better motivations for teaching and for learning than test preparation. But the idea that tests, even bad ones, don’t
actually reveal valuable educational data is pure poppycock. For some years I was a member of the ETS
committee that made up the Advanced Placement exam in English. And while I acknowledge the sometimes risible
extent to which our efforts were influenced by various “multicultural”
enthusiasms, I never read a completed exam that left me in substantial doubt,
within a menu of reasonably fine gradations, of the capacities of a student to
do “advanced” work in English language and literature.
We can either honor that
information or reject it on some other (probably political) grounds. I have to say this for Bill DiBlasio,
loathsome politician though he be. He is
capable of unsettling honesty. When
faced with the fact that black and hispanic students are grotesquely
underrepresented among the admittees to the small number of elite high schools
in New York City, his very straightforward solution is to get rid of the entrance exam.
That appears to be doable.
Supplying minority students with a quality primary school education that
might prepare them for the exam on a competitive basis with their less
pigmented colleagues is apparently not doable.
The crucial subjects in which
American students are so conspicuously wanting on the international stage are
the same subjects tested by the elite New York Schools: Math and English. Math must stand for all the STEM fields,
which are of ever-increasing importance in the “new” economy. “English” must stand for all the arts of the
old trivium—arts of
literacy--reading, writing, and speaking well.
Though the STEM fields must claim a special priority, the skills of
literacy remain indispensable for competent citizenship, not to mention a
seriously fulfilling life. I cannot
presume to give advice about the math exam, but I can suggest a question that I
think should be on the English test. And
if candidates know in advance that it will be there, so much the better. The question arises in my mind for a
somewhat curious reason; it was stimulated by comments I have heard or read in
some of the currently abundant and polemical discussion concerning the pronouns
appropriate to use of transgendered persons.
Advocated neologisms such as zee,
shay, shim, they (singular) and zer
are not without their cultural interest, and will perhaps offer the materials
for a subsequent essay. For the moment
it is the concept of the pronoun itself that captures my attention. So my hypothetical exam question is this: “What are the parts of speech in the English
language? Very briefly define their
syntactical functions.” One might
suppose that asking an English-speaker that question is rather like inquiring
whether an artist knows the primary colors, or whether a musician is familiar
with Guido’s scale. That is, the
question asks for elementary, indeed foundational linguistic information. But you might be surprised. According to one report, published in the
middle of the Iraqi war, only sixteen percent of American high school students,
when presented with a world map, could find Iraq on it.
