methinks

The Great Divide

We say that all men are created equal. But whatever equality God granted men, he did not offer it to students. This is hardly an insight; anyone who has spent any time getting any education can tell you that there are good students and bad students, or as cautious teachers like to say, there are more experienced students and less experienced students. What you might not realize, however, is that this division - the Great Divide, I like to call it - has the potential to be the most detrimental factor in a class and, more seriously, for an entire education system.

On the class level, a teacher must decide where to set the bar. How many pages can a student read per day? How much can they remember? This task becomes easier with experience, but the fundamental ethical issue always remains. Who do you leave behind, and who do you hold back? If you teach to the top of the class, the bottom has no chance. If you teach to the bottom, you are wasting the top's time. You might say, "Teach to the middle. That'd be just right." And I'd agree it is the best compromise for the whole class and would strongly recommend it for fundamental skills like elementary school. But what if you're teaching AP Calculus? Honestly, who is ever going to use calculus later in their life except the top of the class? Shouldn't the teacher cater to them? Or what if you teach American Culture to fifty students in poor, Guizhou, China? I don't know.

This problem doesn't stop at the class level. The educational model we use in America, i.e. mandatory 'education for all' funded primarily though property taxes, dates back to our Puritan roots. And while it might be the perfect system for educating the village children in the four Rs - reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion - it starts to break down in a modern society of millions. You see, in America we think that everyone deserves the chance at a well-rounded high school education. I agree. I think that's ideal. The problem is that we expect everyone to emerge from that system educated. And when they don't, we put more efforts into crafting minimum skills tests and teaching the students how to pass them and less effort into further challenging the students who already have these basic skills.

When money is wasted, everyone points a finger. There are those who argue that it is the nation's worst schools which are bringing down the average. That is just insecure schools trying to stir up enough dust to cover their own faults. There are those who'd blame parental apathy. Are parents today so much different than generations gone by? That seems like insecure parents applying their efforts in the wrong direction. Of course, everyone wants to blame the government for lack of funds in general. Sure, we could do a lot of things with more money, but maybe the problem isn't how much we are given, but where we are asked to spend it.

I am not a real educator. I have no degrees in the field and have only a year and a half's experience and that all in China. But it seems to me that are several underlying conflicts that have caused all the stir.

First, it seems that a greater percentage of the population stays in school for all 13 years. With the bulk of our mindless manual labor jobs moving overseas, what other options does one have but to stay in school. The lure of the steel mill is all but gone. I mean, how many films set circa 1950 have the scene with "Pops" tussling his sons butch-waxed flat top while beaming, "Timmy Ray here is the first Berndale to graduate high school." I think this effect could be skewing the statistics. It's not that high school aged students are scoring lower, just that the lowest scorers are now taking the test. (I have no number to back this; just a theory.)

Second, we are asking schools to simultaneously hold two bars. One the one hand, ever since the Cold War schools have been charged with cranking out the next generation of nuclear physicist. Rote memorization of Latin vocabulary was tossed out the window and the holy grail of critical reasoning was ushered in as the educational panacea of the next millennium. On the other hand, schools must now ensure that the bottom of the class can graduate with whatever has been determined to be 'basic skills'. If you're from a school of means, that's not really a problem. You offer AP and Honor classes for the top, Average for the middle, and Remedial for the bottom. Everyone wins. But what if you can only afford one? You're not going to meet the needs of someone. And that takes us to the marrow of the problem.

As an educational system - a philosophy of education - we are not meeting the needs of our students. It's not that basic reading, writing and math are beyond the students' levels, or that the teachers are not qualified or that schools are too crowded. The problem is that the context in which these skills are presented is useless to these students. High school is preparation for college. The rest of the world (in my limited experience) is very open about this. Chinese students spend their entire senior year of high school preparing for their college entrance exam (if they even make it to high school). Germany has stratified their secondary education system into three levels: college prep, trade school and everyone else. But in America we put on airs and try to convince ourselves that a full four years of high school is necessary for our sophisticated daily life. Reading is essential, true, but is reading The Scarlet Letter (freshman English at my high school)? Math is essential, but is the ability to calculate the number of possible combinations of n digits going to help you solve a unit cost problem (freshman algebra...and by the way, the grocery store gives you the unit cost now, so that whole argument is out the window)? But no matter what the curriculum, English and Math only make up 2 of a possible 6 or 7 classes. What about the 'non-essential' skills? Why do we trap students who'd rather be elsewhere, learning other things, doing other things, within this seemingly irrelevant context? How does a teacer know where to set the bar, when some students won't even jump?

Now is when a good essay should answer some of the questions it has asked. Yeah...I guess this isn't really a good essay. I should read more and write less.

Happy New Year!

Posted by dacriss at January 1, 2004 09:04 AM | TrackBack