I recently had a student leave my tutoring program. He had been making progress in understanding
the basic math that would be needed to take on algebra as his next course in
math. I had spent a generous amount of
time developing a process and presentation that would work for him, as well as
visiting with his math teacher to coordinate strategy. I don’t know why he quit tutoring; there
could be many reasons. But, my initial
speculations turned into a more heavily loaded train of thought about some of
the issues facing what we call “education” today.
My best speculation is that Tim (not his real name) left
because he did poorly on a test that he and I felt he was prepared for. If we think about the meaning of this
“reason” for quitting and expand it out to its larger meaning, the key fault
with present education begins to appear.
I had done my job. Tim’s teacher
was doing her job. His ‘parental units’
were doing their job (as well as they could in a confusing world – he had more loving
support than many other children). The
school was like many others that I had been in – the educational atmosphere was
apparent and the teachers seemed attentive and interested. The math course materials were a little too
brightly colored and “attention getting” to suit my tastes, but the material
was well selected, presented and the practice work well designed. So what was the problem?
In a word the problem was Tim! If we make Tim into “every student”, we begin
to get the picture. He is the product of
social learning, personal experiences and the forces behind those
experiences. Tim’s life experience up to
the age of 12 years had turned the native inquisitive sponge-like human learner
into a creature with a complex, confused and unsatisfying relationship to the
doing of learning.
I cannot speculate on the specific process by which this
particular Tim came to this condition, but I am confident it was his life
experience that has put him at odds with the doing and learning of school. He is bright, personable, honest, agreeable
to making an effort… and disconnected
from the mental state of inquisitive learning.
Again, he was not born this way; we, in the broadest sense, made him
this way.
Tim’s life experience has made learning of, at least, tertiary
importance – even uncomfortable, rather than desirably challenging. Here is a metaphorical situation that I think
is actually not overstatement: imagine a
physical training program with great equipment, competent instructors, good
facilities, a general social acceptance that children should be in the
training. But… because of an unrelated
socially sanctioned process many, if not most, of the children have joint
injuries that prevent them from manifesting the human potential both possible
and expected from the high quality training available. And further, the joint injuries have become
so commonplace that they are not realized as an impediment – the argument is
made that many do succeed and so should all; there must be something wrong with
the training. Add to the mix that the
conditions that produce the joint injuries are generally not realized as
injuring and also have become important to the perceived economic wellbeing of
the society as a whole. And so,
improvements in the training must be made without reference to or an
understanding of the systemic injuries, except in the very most dramatic cases.
If we saw such a situation with this kind of clarity, it
would be obvious that (1) training, and its expected results, would have to
take into account the injuries; (2) the children would need to be treated in a
way that fully supported their capacities, reduced the injuring conditions and
remediated the injuries; and (3), most importantly, clearly and scientifically
identified, the conditions that produced the injuries in the first place would
have to be prevented.
If this is to be more than a queasy-making story, there
must be real identifiable injuries being delivered systematically to our
children; what are those injuries? I
think there are several direct sources of injury, but that they all originate
from two primary foci: materialism and economic inequity. And I present the hypothesis that education
in this nation will not perform its largest and most desirable social function
until, or unless, we return to a balance of material, intellectual and
actualization goals across the population, and until there is economic equity
in which all people are compensated for their contribution to society and not
on the basis of the economic power to extort and steal from the labor of the
community. That, my friends, is the size
of the issue.
* * *
Children are not disposed to hopelessness. But, just take a look at the distance between
the lives lived by 90% of the population and the images presented everyday and
in every way of how life is “supposed” to be lived. Pick a movie, TV show, print ad display; they
all present a way of life that comes to be the norm of expectation. And that way of life costs, in America today,
more than 100 thousand dollars a year for a small family, possibly much more
depending on where one lives.
About 15% to 20% of the population lives within striking
distance of that goal. Many of the
children in those families can imagine crossing the divide between where they
are growing up and the media based standard; their parents can give them some
or most of the economic tools to move toward those goals; and some will get
there whether it is ultimately the best thing for them or not.
The children of 70% of the population (the vast majority of
the total and almost every child in public school) cannot imagine in realistic
terms how to bridge that divide. They
have never been in a million dollar house or a $10,000 a month New York
apartment. They know no one who has an
income of $250,000 a year or what kinds of activities have to be done to have such
an income (unless it is the often illegal local entrepreneurial activities that
support selected parts of the media standard image).
The “joint injury” is that no realistic highly valued goals
are societally presented to our children that compete with the volume and
constancy of the media presentation – everyone is to be materially rich at the
media-based standard or they are some degree of a failure in life. Children feel this disconnection in parental
anxiety, the daily comparison of their living place with the images that enter
it, in the magnified comparisons with those around them who gain some singular
symbol of the media goal and in a dozen other ways. The result is confusion, fantasy, sense of
family and personal failure and the hopelessness of impossibility. These are often deep feelings, like the lay
of the land rather than the rush of river through it.
Since the nature of language is that one word must follow
another, there is plenty of room for misunderstanding the above; let me try to
address certain potential misreadings of my intentions. I am not saying that everyone should be rich
as a solution – that is an obvious perpetuation of the injury and the
fantasy. Neither am I saying that
everyone should be poor; that would solve only a portion of the problem while
creating others. I am saying that the
present economic inequity is injuring the vast majority of our children and
significantly reducing their capacity to perform well in the educational
system. This is largely because they
have internalized a sense of hopeless disconnection between the media-standard
goals, the realistic options presented by society and finally the life goals
that are good for mind and body. The
expectations of the education system seem to be supporting that disconnection:
the people in education are just as much a part of the societal belief system
as anyone else and have the same anxieties at not meeting media defined
standards of material success.
The great difference between the performance of American
elementary school children and middle and high school young people is a clear
measure of injury. The native condition
of a human child is as an information-input sponge; supported in that condition
and given the opportunity to manifest their interests in ways valued and found
useful by those immediately around them and eventually by society at large, the
growing child will become an inquisitive independent adult. Certainly not everyone will be interested in
the same things, and some more interested generally in everything, all in the
expected form of a normal distribution.
This is not the picture that we see today. Elementary school children strike a generally
normal distribution of interests and enthusiasm which then drops off
precipitously as they begin to leave the society of childhood and enter into
the nascent adult world. This is not
only measured in educational research, but is one of the clearest processes
seen by those who have taught at all these levels. Children bring their whole lives to school;
from kindergarten to graduate school.
They bring their psychical injuries just as much as they bring their
physical ones.
* * *
Let me present you with another hypothetical situation: you
are a business person with a product or service to sell and you wish to get
rich (really rich) selling it. You
therefore want (1) to control what people know about your product so that they
desire it, (2) limit potential clientele’s interest in or capacity to supply an
equivalent of your product on their own, (3) make your product socially
acceptable, socially desirable and even prestigious. You don’t want people to easily ignore,
replace, critically evaluate or otherwise demean your product.
Since in a world of millions of products and services, very
few enjoy that status of being truly essential or universally desirable, while
almost all of them are pretty easily ignored, replaced, subject to critique and
many fully demeanable, you have a problem.
If you also own and run the factory that makes your product or employ
the people who supply the service, you have the additional problem of workers
who can require that they have safe conditions, reasonable hours, living wage
appropriate to their contribution and some authority in how the business, to
which they devote significant amounts of their time and effort, is run. All of which produce serious challenges to
your getting really rich rather than just making enough to warrant keeping the
business going.
What would be the most desirable construction of the
population of people likely to consume your product? Pick one: self-directed, educated, materially
satisfied, critical thinkers or socially driven, uncritical, needy people who
believe what they are told on TV.
Remember, this choice is for your business and not for the good of
society. I can tell you from my years in
business that most business people are not hypocritical with this choice: they
want the people who buy their product and lots of them; and it is just too bad
that, for most products and services, the self-directed, educated, critical
thinkers are not the most sought after clientele. A similar thing can be said for employees:
educated enough to do the work, but not so well informed or socially free to
demand a fully equitable share of the profit. (Though most business folks will
admit to wanting pliant clients and employees, explanations of why that
condition is really good for them can be most inventive.)
In an economically driven society it is this business
process that inordinately influences government and the social order, and it is
this resolute, even arrogant, state of business need that begins to set the
standards of education as it develops more and more social influence with
advertising, product placement and general media content, both entertainment
and news. But….
It is not business’ intention to dumb-down the population
and to ruin the lives of mis-educated multitudes. Business leaders would reject such an
assertion, as they should. They only
want to get rich from their efforts, just as everyone should. And so, round and round it goes and where it
stops only those who have thought it through knows.
Oh yes, and I wish Tim the best.
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