Dear NBC:
When I last left you, I was discussing the plight of rural schools, which in my personal opinion do not receive the same consideration that urban schools receive in the national media landscape.
Just think about it—when a school district, like Saint Louis City Public Schools, fails, the state moves in, the government responds, the news covers it. The charter schools are ready to jump in and fill the gaps, and maybe, if you’re lucky, someone, somewhere, is willing to dump a large donation into the kitty.
If a rural school district fails, they lose accreditation, close their doors, and the students get shipped to another town—sometimes another county. The waters remain calm; it barely makes a ripple.
Just consider this part of my Deweyan duty—increasing the dialogue on part of the education problem that is of significant concern to me.
Back to Dewey for a moment (and I really hope that I am not jumping around in such a manner that makes me seem like a crazy lady). In his book, The School and Society, he addresses the second step in solving our education problems (remember—the first step is to start a national dialogue, and you are succeeding in this by addressing education this week), and that second step directly relates to the first: in our open dialogue we must make some decisions as a whole. The decisions we must make together are that we must decide what it is that our society does for its schools, and what our schools do for society. In other words, what do our schools do to prepare students to live in our society, and what does society do to foster that preparation? Or, what should it be doing?
In recent years we have addressed issues like this in a rather haphazard manner. First it was A Nation at Risk. Recently it has been No Child Left Behind. One of the directly related problems is that these types of mandates only address one (or sometimes, a few) issue(s) currently involved in a problem—a problem that rivals all other problems in a highly developed civilization in its complexity.
So, naturally, you are trying to come at this problem from multiple perspectives, and this is commendable! You are talking about teachers and districts, budgets and civic responsibility, standardized tests and innovative curricula.
Again, I commend you on this endeavor. It’s not easy to cover so much and maintain the unifying thread. But we are still not talking about what we, as a society, expect our schools to do, and what we, as a society are willing to do to make those schools successful.
Dewey had a pretty smart idea for this too. I like it so much, that I am going to tell it to you. He thought that we all could natter on indefinitely about teacher accountability, budget cuts and schools closings, the private versus public school debate, tests and measurable results, and nothing would really come of it.
Let me say that again. We won’t fix our problems, even if we have highly paid, highly engaged, highly trained teachers, with the latest classroom technology and the most beautiful school buildings, the perfect tests or the perfect curriculum.
The one thing we need, the thing we desperately have to have, are engaged students.
Think of it this way: if students have the greatest and smartest teachers, if students have their own school computer and the healthiest meals in the lunchroom, and they don’t feel invested in their own education, they are still not going to succeed.
This is why I am upset that philanthropists think they are going to fix problems by buying computers, smart boards, bricks, or paint.
So, in my mind, the crux of the conversation taking place should be focused on how we engage students! How do we convince our students (from kindergarten to graduate school) do become active participants in their education instead of passive recipients?
Dewey had some ideas on that as well. Imagine that. They were actually quite simple, and I am still amazed that we don’t take the five minutes out of our day every day to mention it to our children.
Many of the things Dewey had to say about student engagement and investment play directly into the experiential education movement. Now his ideas were a bit different than other experiential educators (like Montessori) in that his curriculum was not child-centered or driven, and it wasn’t completely problem-oriented/driven (like the Harvard model that is currently picking up speed). He had one simple thing in mind that he thought would change the entire picture:
Children need to find out why they are learning what they are learning. It can be as simple as a teacher helping a child to realize why it is so important to learn to read, or a parent telling a student, yes, in fact, I have used that kind of math in adult life.
Education is a tool. We learn how to read and do math so that we can apply these tools to problems we may face later in life. We learn about history and science so that we do not have to reinvent the wheel for every human born. We learn about our world and our geography, so that we can connect with others—one of the ultimate human desires.
These tools-- and there are so many wonderful tools out there to learn—help a child face the needs that will arise in their adult life. We should not expect every child to excel in every subject, however. Since we all have innate talents and innate weaknesses, some of the other things we should learn in school are about ourselves and our peers.
We should learn about what interests us, and what we are good at. This way, we can actualize our potential, and contribute back to our society.
We should learn how to work with others, whose strengths and weaknesses will be different from ours.
If we understand, from a very young age, that we are learning these things to benefit ourselves (beyond getting into a good college or escaping the crushing scrutiny of small town life) and, ultimately, all of humanity, well, Dewey believed that children would be more engaged in their own educational process.
And if you coupled this with a society that invested itself in fostering education more than any other endeavor, our children would be unstoppable.
Really, who wouldn’t want to help another actualize their full potential? Our—and by our, I mean all of humanity-- greatest asset is our minds, and we leave so many of our youth’s minds virtually untapped.
My one hope in education is to help someone realize why we even have education in the first place. I think that if I do this, even if it just for my children alone, I will have succeeded. I have doubts that you will be able to address this in your coverage (because, frankly, there are so many hours in the day), but wowzers, imagine what it would be like if this idea was shared with millions…
Or, we could wait for Superman.
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