Abandon Text! - Education

Education = ethics

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:53:51 -0700

Paul Lockhart's "Lament" repeatedly questions the purpose of education as well as its methods. He doesn't just grieve that true mathematics isn't being taught, but rather that it is not recognized as an art, something that ennobles the spirit and gives joy, something loved for its own sake and not any sort of utility that it brings. He wants math to be lumped in with the liberal arts – literature, music, painting, etc. – things that the education establishment teaches without regard to vocational preparation. This sort of thinking runs counter to the "3 R" crowd just who want their kids to get jobs and balance their checkbooks.

Anyone who would divide education into "the useful" and "the beautiful" is bound to run into trouble, because they are not separate. The useful is beautiful – ask any engineer, businessman, homemaker or child who set about to solve a practical problem and found an elegant solution. The beautiful is also useful – if nothing else, by giving pleasure to its consumers and creators. Any attempt to divide them invariably leads to people running to unhealthy extremes in either direction. On the one hand, you get college professors determined to magnify their greatness by emphasizing their uselessness. On the other hand, you get No Child Left Behind, in which anything that's not part of a pathetically low standard of usefulness is jettisoned. Either way, both utility and joy get destroyed.

What neither side seems to realize is that they are arguing about ethics – in the classic Greek sense of answering the question: "What is a worthwhile life?" Education is just the practical implementation of a notion of ethics. Once you've decided what a good life looks like, you try to prepare your citizens to have that sort of life. Everyone educator and politician starts by saying, "We all agree that we want what's best for the child" – without acknowledging that we have vastly different notions of what "best" really is. You can't say what's a good curriculum until you decide what kind of life you want your children to have . . . and you can't decide that without determining what life is, ultimately, all about. Is life about Work? Is life about Experience? Is life about Happiness?

Last year I went to a workshop for directors of independent schools, a crash-course for new board members. One of the duties of a board of directors is to define the mission statement of the school and to make sure all policies are serving the mission. In talking about mission statements, the facilitator explicitly made the connection to ethics: "Your mission is really about what you want your kids to be. In general, every parent and every school has the same three goals for their kids. We want them to be Successful. We want them to be Happy. And we want them to be Good. The priority you assign to each of those goals will determine the character of your school."

I thought that was a pretty good analysis. Most public schools emphasize Success as the primary goal, with Happiness a distant second and Goodness not even on the radar. Many parochial schools put their notion of Goodness at the top, and then Success, and then Happiness. Waldorf schools explicitly put Goodness (i.e. spiritual capacity) at the top of the list. Happiness probably comes next; Waldorf schools are the few I've ever seen that took Happiness seriously as an important part of human development. No one wants to say that Success comes last – it's hard to be happy without some measure of success – but it is correctly recognized as a means, and not an end in itself.

Why study mathematics?

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:52:01 -0700

I read Kenny's essay about teaching mathematics so that it becomes obvious: not just how to arrive at the correct answer, but how to genuinely recognize the answer as obviously true. He wants his students to know why communitivity of multiplication is true. I like what Kenny's doing. But it also got me thinking about a different why question . . .

I had a fantastic math teacher at the NC School of Science and Mathematics, Dr. Steve Davis. People warned me before my first class -- "Oh, he has all these stories he tells that have nothing whatsoever to do with math. Especially golf." But then I got to his class, and listened to his stories, and realized all those people were wrong. All his stories were about life, and in his world, math was all about life.

The class he taught was called "Introduction to College Mathematics" or "ICM". (I take credit for coining the popular pronunciation of the acronym: "Ick-um".) The structure of the class was something experimental and new; in fact, the school was being given grant money by Digital Equipment to develop the class, to find a genuinely useful way to incorporate computers into teaching math. The class was replacing pre-calculus, so it had to cover the same sorts of pre-calculus material but also cover a lot of other ground, too.

The first day of class, the very first thing Dr. Davis said was: "Why have you been studying math all these years?" His question was met with stunned silence. Of all the questions we ever had encountered in a math class, this was not one of them. Nobody had the least idea of what to say. After thirty seconds of silence he got impatient and slammed his fist on his lectern. "C'mon, people, WHY? Why have you been studying math? You've been doing it for the past ten years, at least. Why? And don't tell me, 'Because it's good for you.' You are not five-year-olds being told to eat their vegetables."

This, also, was new. We weren't used to teachers yelling at us to answer questions -- at least, not on the first day, and questions we had never been taught the answer to. We were smart kids -- we were not used to not knowing the right answer, and perhaps too embarrassed to admit that we didn't.

"You mean, you actually let someone force you to do something for ten years, and you never asked why you were doing it? You actually let someone waste that much of your time?" His tone was mocking.

Another thirty seconds of silence. "I'm sorry," he said, tossing his chalk into blackboard tray, "But I can't go on. I can't teach this class until you answer that question for me."

"Well, it's useful," one girl timidly offered.

"Yes. WHY is it useful? Useful for what?"

"Well, there's money."

"You mean, making money? I can tell you from personal experience, mathematicians don't make much money." (smile)

"No, doing calculations on money."

"Good. Money's important. But we could have stopped at third grade if all you needed to do was add up your loose change. Why did you keep studying math?"

"Well . . . You have to know math to do engineering and physics."

"Are you going to be an engineer?"

"Ummm . . . no."

"I suspect that most of you will not become engineers or physicists. Most of you will never use calculus in your professional lives. Why do you study mathematics?"

And so it went, in a Socratic dialog, for the whole 45 minute class. I don't remember everything that was said, but I remember where we wound up: mathematics was a tool for modeling the world. It was "the queen and servant of the sciences" (quoting E.T. Bell), the most generalized way we understand the universe, and also the most universally applicable way of making predictions about how something will behave. That set us up for the material we would cover for the rest of the year: geometric probability, the graphing of functions, an understanding of limits, interpolation and fitting of functions to data . . . all of which naturally led us into calculus. More importantly, though, was the way that lecture made me feel about mathematics. What previously had seemed abstract, cold and useless now felt immediate, powerful, and alive. I felt like someone was showing me the secrets of the universe.

I also must confess: he was correct. I became a molecular biologist, but I never used calculus again. What I did do was a lot of algebra and a lot of fitting curves to data . . . the very skills we developed in that class.

I think of all this, after reading Kenny's essay, because Dr. D was trying to give us the other "why". We had spent years learning how to manipulate symbols, and never fully appreciated the value of the tool that we had. Every "word problem" that had been given to us was bizarrely arbitrary: we never knew, exactly, why it was important to know how many apples Johnny had. It was just more symbols, pushed around for no reason. Dr. Davis gave us the reason. No, better yet: he made us find the reason.

Privacy Rights and Children

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:38:00 -0700

Kenny wrote an excellent defense of the rights of minors in his essay "Of Strip-Searches and Students," in which he commented on the recent Supreme Court case of Safford Unified School District v. Reading. 13-year-old Savana Reading was strip-searched by school administrators on suspicion that she was carrying ibuprofen. (Yes, you read that right -- an OTC drug available in every household in the country is contraband in a government-run school.) The High Court found (thank God) that Savana's 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were violated. But Kenny is looking for a larger legal precedent. He wonders: why shouldn't minors enjoy the same legal rights as adults, when it comes to respecting their basic human dignity?

Read Kenny's essay if you haven't already. Then come back here, because I want to propose another angle from which one could construct a theory of the legal privacy rights of minors.

^ ^ ^

It's hard to talk about the legal rights of minors without also talking about the legal rights of parents. In general, the law provides parents with absolute power and authority over their children. Children do require a lot of governing, relatively speaking, and our culture trusts that the parents are the ones most likely to have the child's best interests at heart when using that authority. A parent's powers are pretty broad – they can search, seize, and physically restrain the freedom of their children as they see fit. Most people see that arrangement as appropriate; so long as the children are not physically endangered and adequately provided for, parents should have that right to exercise those powers. (As a matter of good parenting, I think parents are well advised to restrain their use of those powers. You should, in general, treat children with all the respect and autonomy you would accord to any adult, within the bounds of the child's ability to hold up their end of an adult relationship. But I still think it is appropriate that parents have the legal right to those powers.)

The only problem with that arrangement is that it gets us used to thinking of children as entities without rights. We wouldn't think it wrong to search our own children's rooms if we suspected wrongdoing, so we generalize that out to "children have no privacy rights at all." I think parents have rights that may trump the child's right to privacy (or association, or religion, or speech, or many other constitutional rights) but that doesn't mean the children don't have those rights at all.

Things get especially murky with schools, in which the teachers and administrators are acting in loco parentis – that is, they are delegated some of the powers of the parents while the children are in their care. They are permitted to control where the children go, what they are allowed to say, and can even apply certain punishments. The question is: do teachers and administrators have the same powers as parents when it comes to privacy, or not?

My feeling is no. I think the only parental powers over children that are given to other adults are those that are explicitly delegated from the parents. If a school wants the right to search a child's backpack or locker, they need the explicit consent of the parent. If a parent does not delegate those parental powers, then a child has exactly the same constitutional rights as an adult. (You may find, by the way, that adults don't have as many rights as you might think. There is no legal expectation of privacy in most workplaces, for instance – your email can be read, your desk searched, etc.)

This model isn't perfect. Savana could still be strip-searched for ibuprofen under this legal theory, had her parents signed some consent form that gave administrators the power to do so. As long as there are bad parents, there would be bad outcomes. But this, at least, would start us from the correct basis: children have the same rights as adults, unless some other parental power prevails.

Effort, Free Will, and Destiny

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:37:30 -0700

In response to Kenny's comments on the primacy of effort:

If social scientists can accurately predict whether someone will drop out of high school on the day they are born, does that necessarily mean that effort is not the primary factor in their success or failure? Maybe the social scientists have merely learned how to predict who will make the effort (e.g. people in a cultural context that values education and economic advancement) and those who will not (e.g. those who lack those forms of support). And, even if their predictions are 80% right, we could still look at the 20% who defy those predictions, and I'm fairly certain we would find greater effort as a common characteristic of those who beat the odds.
Along those same lines, consider the results of the KIPP schools (mentioned both in the New Yorker article and in Gladwell's book Outliers). 80% of the eighth graders in the KIPP program in the South Bronx scored at or above grade level in reading or math – nearly twice the New York City average. The core difference of KIPP schools: effort. Between extended school calendars and piles of homework, they make students spend 100% of their time working on academic success. The differences are dramatic. Again, nothing is a guarantee (there are still the other 20% who are not performing at grade level) but that still a huge difference.
Kenny is correct that an individual's success is vastly dependent on the context in which they are born, and that effort is insufficient without opportunity. If you pull back and consider a family's success over several generations, you will see the correlation between effort and success become much stronger. If one or more generations are willing to make the effort and sacrifices necessary to create the environment of opportunity (e.g. coming to America, working two jobs to save for kids' college, etc.) then families can readily advance from poverty to the middle class, or from the middle class to the outright wealthy. One can argue whether it is morally just that the virtues or the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children . . . but most humans would agree that it is just (to the extent anything is just in this world), and that we have a right and a responsibility to work for the advancement of our children.
All of this is tying back to our earlier (and ongoing) discussion about our moral obligations to the poor. Yes, we have vastly more than most other people in the world . . . but that's not an accident. Our wealth is the result of a particular context of opportunity, which was primarily created out of the effort, sacrifice, and risk-taking of our forebears. I think we need to pay as much attention to the virtues that created this wealth in the first place, as well as the impulse to share it with others. (More on this later.)
I agree that intelligence and willpower are strongly correlated. Notice the kind of intelligence, though. The article explicitly points out that willpower is a feat of imagination – the ability to create a mental vision of the future rewards, or to mentally erase the prospect of immediate gratification. And yet most of our schools (at least, the schools I grew up in) do very little to stimulate our capacity to imagine. Imagination and creativity were usually regarded as something extra-curricular, something beyond the pale of standard education. If you look at the report cards from the Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools, you will see that for grades one through five, "imagination" and "creativity" are never mentioned.

Spiritual Education

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:47:39 -0700

If people default to giving their children whatever education system they themselves grew up with, then the trend is even more pronounced in spiritual education. We want our children to believe what we believe, and to value what we value . . . regardless of whether those values have really panned out for us. I was always puzzled by the term "faith of our fathers," as if the fact that our ancestors believed it should have any significance for what I believe. It doesn't make logical sense, but it does make psychological sense. Our parents are the template from which we build our model of the world and our model of human relationships. If it was good enough for Mom and Dad, and good enough for me, then by God it's gonna be good enough for Junior.

I think we are susceptible to the same errors the Spanish parents are making about their kids education, in the spiritual realm. We take the kids to church, figuring that we want to give them some kind of baseline experience for spiritual life, but in fact our models for what makes a good spiritual education are completely lacking. Maybe they get what we got – catechism, a sense of reverence and community, a bunch of stories that are both wondrous and confusing – but is that what they really need? It might be the spiritual equivalent of the Spanish kids memorizing 18^th century poems – it might look like they're learning something, but it's not what they really need.

Unfortunately, I am perpetually perplexed when it comes to the spiritual education of my children. I do not really regret having a "churched" upbringing, and yet I spent years and years unraveling the confusion and anxiety brought on by my early church experiences. The only thing I can thank the church for is giving me an unsolvable koan to chew on throughout my adolescence: how can people say this is the most important thing in the universe, and yet live the way that they live? How can so much of this stuff intuitively feel correct, and yet logically make no sense at all? Maybe that was all an important part of my spiritual development . . . and then again, maybe it was so much noise. Do I really want to baptize my children into this confusion?

The primary reason my kids are in a Waldorf school (aside from an excellent education) is that the Waldorf teachers seemed to have a pretty good notion of how to nurture the spiritual capacities of children without getting into the thorny issues of theology. I figured that bought me a few years to continue working out this question: what can we give our children to aid their spiritual development? Right now, my answer to that question is not that different from run-of-the-mill parenting advice: keep them out of trouble, keep them basically sane and sociable, and trust they will be able to find their own way.

“It Was Good Enough for Me”

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 07:08:40 -0700

I heard a story on NPR about Spain's struggles with their education system. The story lead-in segued from Europe's overall financial crisis to the particulars of Spain's difficulty in staging an economic recovery, primarily because they lacked the skilled workforce necessary to cultivate new industries. Critics say the education system is based almost entirely on rote learning and memorization, with almost no attention paid to reading comprehension or critical thinking. That critique is supported by the fact that Spanish students score the lowest among Western European countries for reading comprehension, mathematics, and science. The teachers say most parents expect the school system to drill their students with facts, just as they were drilled when they were in school. That lopsided notion was apparent when NPR interviewed a principal, who claimed that his school didn't require rote memorization, but then immediately showed off their students' ability by asking some kids on the playground to recite an 18^th-century poem. "A very long poem," said the reporter. The principle, and another parent interviewed, thought the problem was that they just weren't doing enough study of classic Spanish literature, and that they needed to start the students earlier and work them harder.

I'm surprised and gratified that someone thought to look at how other countries were dealing with their education – I had not heard anything like this since the press noticed a study of what made Finnish students so successful. I suspect we can learn as much from a bad example as a good one. We might scoff at what seems like an obvious flaw in Spain's education system – "look, the test scores show it's not working, you're teaching the wrong thing" – but then again the reaction of American teachers and schools to critiques of their methods sound a lot like those of the Spanish teachers: "We're just not doing enough of what we're doing, we need more money, we need to start kids earlier."

I was also struck by the difference in perceptions of what a successful education should be. The average Spaniard evidently has a pretty crude notion of what it means to be educated: if an eight-year-old can recite rote knowledge, that must mean they learned something. That's what they grew up with, and by golly it's going to be good enough for their kids, too. I wonder if we have similar holes in our own cultural perception of education. I imagine that we're proudly holding up our SAT scores, while some Finnish teacher is shaking her head sadly and saying, "Yes, you taught them to read, but did you noticed you killed their joy for reading? You gave them the skills, but you never taught them how to work collaboratively in a group. How can you possibly call that education?" How ironic would it be, if we struggled to perfect our education system, and then discovered we were dead wrong about what education should be?

Educate the willing mind

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:17:41 -0700

Kenny brought up a few good points on improving education in his comments yesterday, so let me follow up on that:

College does not equal vocational preparation. I was ranting in yesterday's post about how most undergraduate degrees do very little to prepare you for the actual jobs they purport to prepare you for. But don't think for a moment that I think college should just be a vocational apprenticeship to prepare you for a job and nothing more. I really do believe in the value of a liberal education, where you study lots of different things, broaden your mind, and get enough exposure to different disciplines that you figure out what you want to do with your life. Nor should high school be specialized, either; at that level, you're still just learning basic skills like reading critically, solving problems, and understanding why electoral colleges are a bad idea. I just think we need to explicitly split out the phases of development: stop pretending that college is supposed to give you specific skills for a specific job. I would probably recommend students have a year or two (or three or four if they really want to) of liberal studies, and then go to vocational school that focuses exclusively on providing skills that are actually used in a particular job. Those vocational schools would be set up primarily to provide hands-on experience doing the real job; classroom studies would be less than half of the curriculum.
Only market forces can elevate good teachers to the level they deserve. Everyone agrees that we need to reward good teachers and get rid of the bad ones. I don't think a government-run bureaucracy is the best way to do that. We've spent the last eight years doing exhaustive testing of students, but all we've improved is our ability to prevaricate about the meaning of the results. I don't think measuring teacher performance – or student performance, for that matter – needs to be all that complicated. Students know pretty quickly whether a teacher is any good or not, and parents can make that assessment as well. If parents are given the choice of what schools their children will attend, I imagine they will, by and large, make good choices. The best schools and teachers will rise to the top if people are allowed to vote with their feet. Ideally, I think the way to do that is with vouchers that can be spent in public or private schools. But if you're worried about money getting drained out of the public school system, then just make it a closed system of 100% charter schools, with each school competing with each other for students. I've yet to hear anyone make a persuasive case as to why that wouldn't work, especially for poor students who currently have almost no choice in schools.
We should redefine education as an ongoing process. For centuries, we seem to have thought of education as something we do to the young. We teach 'em what they need to know, and then we're done with 'em. That model doesn't seem to hold up so well in a modern economy. Rather than trying to jam in all the necessary education at one go, I think we would do better to let people out into the world sooner, and let them discover for themselves what they want and need to learn. Robert Pirsig suggested something like this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; you can't teach people the answers before they've come to ask the right questions. So, give people time to ask the questions. Let them explore in college, and then come back later to get the specific vocational training they need. Once everyone starts thinking of education as something they want to get, because it will enable them to do specific things they want to do, the whole enterprise will get a lot easier.

Dueling Hypotheses on Education

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:37:56 -0700

As a book about the roots of success, you can be sure Malcolm Gladwell Outliers would have something to say about education. He concludes that the well-documented "achievement gap" between the most affluent and the poorest students can be almost entirely attributed to summer vacations. Standardized test scores of Baltimore public school students at the beginning and the end of the school year suggest that poorer students keep up with their richer peers during the school year, but fall behind during the summers. Presumably the richer students have more intellectually stimulating summers – parents that talk with them, books to read, special summer camps and programs – while the poorer students just watch TV for three months. Gladwell gives an enormous shout-out to the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, whose fundamental philosophy is to fill up the students' lives with non-stop academics – class from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm, and homework until 10:30 pm or 11:00 pm every night, and class on Saturdays and through most of the summer as well.

I don't doubt that the KIPP schools work . . . depending, of course, on your definition of "work." Gladwell's analysis is far too pat, too "presto," to be the whole truth of the matter. Yes, the Asians have a reputation for being good at math, and perhaps the only reason they are is because of the sheer volume of work they do. Then again, they also have a reputation for being uptight hacks with high teen suicide rates. They might have the high IQ scores, but they might have sacrificed some creativity in the process of their non-stop "cultivation." Gladwell himself pointed out in earlier chapters that high IQ did not necessarily correlate with creativity, or practical intelligence, or social savvy. It surprises me, then, that Gladwell immediately accepts that work is the magic ingredient in the KIPP schools. Aren't there other explanations that could work equally well here? Lots of questions come to mind:

Maybe KIPP students do so well because they don't have time to get into any trouble that would derail an academic career. Teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, incarceration, and early entry into the workforce often sidetrack poor teens from finishing school; KIPP ensures that won't happen, by just keeping them so darn busy. Not to mention keeping them away from TV, which is the ultimate brain-suck.
Even if extra academic time is the key to success, don't you think there might be a threshold – a point beyond which more study won't help? Gladwell clearly sees there is a threshold for requisite talent . . . so why not a threshold for study time?
Gladwell's theory could be tested against lots of data, other than the little he provides. There are lots of schools in the U.S. that have already converted to a year-round schedule instead of large summer break (not because of the academic arguments that Gladwell cites, but the economic incentives to make more efficient use of the school facilities, rather than letting a huge physical plant lie dormant for a fourth of the year.) Surely we could look at their test scores and see if the achievement gap has disappeared. The absence of such data, or even the mention of the possibility, strikes me as somewhat suspicious.
In passing, Gladwell mentioned lots of little details about the daily life at a KIPP school – that the students wear uniforms, that they held to high standards for decorum and appearance, that they are constantly surrounded with the expectation that they will go to college, that the teachers tell them to get more sleep, that the students only social life is with other KIPP kids who reinforce all the same values. Gladwell himself mentioned that the coaching and support the middle-class parents are giving their children could be a key differentiator in their success in life . . . and it sounds like KIPP is providing exactly that. So why doesn't he latch onto that as the magic ingredient, instead of fixating on the sheer amount of work?
Just because KIPP's form of intervention "worked" for kids in ultra-poor contexts, does not necessarily mean it is an ideal form of education for all students. KIPP has gotten a lot of kids who would otherwise be trapped in poverty to go to college and get ahead in the world – great! But does that mean that we should do this for every young student? Gladwell should hope not . . . because that would sabotage the wonderful story he told of young Bill Gates sneaking out at night to program at a nearby college. Bill Gates would never have gotten his 10,000 hours of programming in, had he been going to a school with a KIPP philosophy.
An even more subtle distinction: just because you get students to excel at something does not mean they enjoy it. I can't locate the reference right now, but my wife told me the Wall Street Journal had pointed out that while Asian students were consistently scoring highest on math, they were also consistently the least likely to enjoy the subject. At some level, most people would agree that worldly success is not the only goal of education. We also hope that it will enrich our children's lives, that they will be happier, wiser, more free. If we make every student in the U.S. a perfectly competent academic, who absolutely detests everything he's learned . . . have we really succeeded? The KIPP students will gladly accept that bargain to get out of the ghetto, but that doesn't mean we've found the perfect educational model, either.
While Gladwell is singing the praises of organized sports and classes and lessons that the middle class are soaking their children in, a lot of research is now questioning the wisdom of scripting out our children's lives. Free, self-directed play, (the kind Gladwell dismisses as a happy but useless phenomena of the lower classes) is in fact found to directly correlate with the development of executive function and self-regulation. Gladwell asserted that persistence was at the root of mathematical ability; it turns out the best way kids develop that kind of persistence is by playing with themselves and other kids, with no direction at all. How does that fit in with KIPP's model?

I'm not saying that Gladwell is wrong, exactly. But he's a long, long way from having proven his case.

Death by Specialization

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:47:53 -0700

Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers is supposed to question the fundamental assumptions we have about success. So, naturally, I started to ask myself, "What unquestioned assumptions is Gladwell making about success?" Maybe there are still some stones to turn over.

One assumption implicit in the book is the primacy of specialization. Success is defined as "doing really, really well at one particular thing." That is the subject of his book: the outliers are the people who are extraordinarily good at one thing, be it programming, law, music, or athletics. And, of course, the path to success boils down to finding your niche, and then working really, really hard in that niche.

If being really good at one particular thing is your goal, then Gladwell's advice is perfectly valid. In a modern society and modern economy, specialization is a very successful strategy. The abundance of our economy is based on division of labor – everyone gets really good at one thing, and then we all share the benefits of each other's specialization. We reserve the highest economic and social rewards for the super-specialists – the people who are the very best in their particular fields. So, isn't it sensible to equate "success" with "high achievement in a particular field"?

Sure . . . if the conditions of our society and economy remain the same. A generally healthy, stable economy can support a whole lot of specialization. But what happens if things become unstable, if the economy and the society fall apart? Most of us find apocalyptic scenarios to be disturbing, because we know that our chances of survival in that world are slim. If the electric grid fails, if social order falls apart, then people like me who have become really good at programming computers will probably be really dead. Then the new champions of the world will be subsistence farmers, survivalists, outdoorsmen and hunters. Specialization (except for a very few skills) will be a hindrance, and generalization – the ability to do whatever needs to be done -- will have renewed valued.

You don't have to foresee a collapse in society for such considerations to still be worthy of consideration. I recently read a financial column in the New Yorker that discussed some recent failures in the world's food economy. Shifts in the global economy had suddenly left many countries with not enough food, and facing starvation. The reason for the failures was that the World Bank and various governments had focused on making the food economy more efficient, to raise everyone's standard of living, but in so doing had made it less reliable. Because the food economy was more interdependent and specialized, disruptions in the system could suddenly leave millions of people starving, because countries had done away with their inefficient national food reserves. It was grim reminder that achieving peak performance when things are going well could result in disaster when things don't go well.

Also consider the opposite scenario – what if things go amazingly well? The "new economy" brought in by revolutions in communication and computer technology is opening up huge, undreamt-of opportunities. It also promises to make things very, very different, in ways we can't possibly anticipate. Our education systems generally assumed that the economy would be relatively stable, and that you could study to work in a single field, and then work in that field your entire life. That was the world our parents grew up in. But younger generations are facing a very different world, one in which no one keeps the same job more than a few years, and in which nearly everyone changes entire careers several times. Rather than gearing up students for specialization, education is facing the opposite problem: how do we make students adaptable enough to adjust to changing times? If you look at the mission statements of schools these days, you will see phrases like "life-long learning", "creativity", "problem-solving", "flexibility", "team-oriented." We already sense that the future might not belong to the specialized, but rather to the adaptable.

I see another peril in super-specialization, which is harder to define. While we admire people who passionately pursue excellence in a single endeavor, there is also something slightly . . . dehumanizing about it. I recently read a Wall Street Journal article about a growing number of families pushing their children into particular sports ("Under Pressure", October 4, 2008). "I just want them to be great at something," says a father who tracked his sons into being champion golfers at 6 years of age. When specialization is the result of self-directed passion, it is an expression of freedom. But when kids are forced to specialize, and sacrifice everything for the field of their parents' choosing, it feels like slavery. Loss of self-determination is too high a price to pay for greatness.

Social Inclusion

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:40:35 -0700

I had written earlier about my concerns about teasing and bullying in my own children, as a prelude to discussing a lecture I heard by Kim John Payne, a prominent authority on handling bullying in schools.

Payne turned out to be, above all else, and excellent story-teller. He had made a concerted study of coming-of-age rituals in various indigenous societies, and had come out of the experience inspired to bring a more enlightened understanding of childhood development, and especially managing conflict, to modern Western culture. He told several stories about those experiences, most of which were both funny and interesting. I don't think I'll do him just repeating them, though you could probably hear many of the stories in the books and CDs on his website. But I can at least give the high points of his talk, and the take-home message:

Payne found that all coming-of-age rituals throughout the world shared the same fundamental structure:

Seclusion. The child is isolated in some way from his family and his peers.
Endurance. The child has to endure through physical, mental, and emotional trials.
Liminality. The child arrives at a state of maximum tension, marked by intense confusion and the inversion of the normal order of things.
Change. The child undergoes a transformation, leaving behind childhood and moving into their identity as an adult.
Belonging. The new adult, no longer a child, is accepted into the community, with new adult responsibilities and privileges.

The process is shaped like an hour-glass, with the person "squeezed" through an intense experience in the middle (the "liminal" stage) and ultimately released again into greater freedom and autonomy. [My first thought, in seeing this map of coming-of-age rituals, was: "That's exactly the structure of all spiritual experience."]

Payne correlated this structure of coming-of-age rituals with what happens with bullying in the schools. The bullied student goes through a process of isolation and endurance, resulting in extreme disorientation, but ultimately (if things go well) changes and emerges into a new form of belonging to the community. It's not a perfect fit, as analogies go, and Payne didn't push it too far, though he did seem to have some conclusions about what it means for bullying:

The process of social growth inevitably involves struggle and conflict. He accused Western culture of having a "harmony addiction" – we feel a strong need for everyone to "get along" and for no one to have conflicts . . . which ultimately sabotages real growth. The goal of a society is not to eliminate conflict, but to properly manage conflict. As Payne says: "peace is not the absence of conflict but the beginning of it."
Because the process will involve struggle and conflict, our role as parents and community members is not necessarily to intervene, and especially not to blame, but mostly to be aware and present and manage the process. Or, as Payne put it, it's "an accompanied journey." He thinks any reaction to bullying should be moderate and common-sensical: "We're gonna talk about this, but we're not going to get weird about it." He put a lot of emphasis on seeing bullying as a process that involves both the bully and the bullied, and that it is not useful to make it a question of blame or victimhood. If parents avoid trying to assign blame, they are able to constructively communicate about issues and collectively arrive at good solutions, with everyone's input and collaboration: "It's nobody's fault, but everyone's responsibility."

The other big take-home message (and I'm not sure if this directly ties into the whole coming-of-age theme or not) was that bullying always starts small, primarily with verbal put-downs. Put-downs have become a staple form of entertainment in our society; for instance, every 18-minute episode of Friends was found to contain over 50 put-downs. Kids follow the example that parents and popular culture set; we are essentially teaching them that verbally abusing others is fun and acceptable. Eventually, put-downs become a compulsive, addictive behavior: criticism creates a temporary feeling of camaraderie, superiority, and power, but later leads to a sense of isolation, shame, guilt, and emptiness. Payne's first recommendation for schools is to teach students, teachers, and parents to become aware of gratuitous criticism in their own communication, and to challenge every occurrence of it. There is nothing profoundly new about such advice: Buddhism includes "right speech" in its prescriptions for moral behavior, and nearly everyone's mother said (if not practiced) "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." And yet, I know most people (adults and children alike) would find Payne's "blame, shame, and put-down diet" to be extremely challenging. If we're not complaining or criticizing someone or something, then what do we have to talk about?

A Modest Proposal for Certifying Teachers

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 04:09:15 -0700

[I sent this letter to the Wall Street Journal Letters to the Editor for publication.]

In response to your March 22 editorial "Certifying Parents":

So the California courts think that every parent who home schools their children should have government certification, to ensure the quality of education their children receive. Ok, fine. I can understand wanting to control standards for education. Just do one more thing: pay those home-schooling parents the $8,000 per child that is currently going to the public school system from which they are opting out. I think many home schooling parents would gladly undergo whatever certification testing is required, in order to recoup their substantial tax investment in the public schools.

Whenever the public tries to hold the public school teachers accountable to the results of the school, the teachers unions immediately complain about having insufficient resources to do the job, and the unfunded mandates imposed by No Child Left Behind. Well, if the teachers don't like unfunded mandates for themselves, they shouldn't seek to impose them on home schoolers, either. You want professional-grade teachers for every child? Pay for it. Otherwise, leave the home schoolers alone.

The Playâ€™s the Thing

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:31:18 -0700

NPR ran a story a couple days ago that gives me hope for our educational system: "Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills" [Alix Spiegel, February 21, 2009.]

The basic thesis of the story: it was only relatively recently, with the advent of year-round toy advertisements on television, that children's play in our culture became focused on the toy, rather than on play. Before then, play was fundamentally an activity, a free-wheeling imaginative make-believe in which children narrated stories, individually and collectively. But the focus on toys, with ever-more-articulated detail and pre-scripted stories, restricted the imaginative sphere of the child. Add to that the increasing focus on child safety, and the trend to put kids into adult-managed activities: Little Leagues, karate classes, gymnastics, summer camps, etc. (To quote the satirical newspaper The Onion: "Child-Safety Experts Call for the Restrictions on Childhood Imagination.") In the end, children had much, much less room for imaginative play.

Which, it turns out, was a disastrous mistake. Imaginative play turns out to have a strong role in the development of "executive function," a constellation of cognitive abilities that includes, most significantly, "self-regulation" -- the ability to control emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline. And executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ.

What makes this story particularly interesting for me is that it is a sweeping endorsement of Waldorf Education pedagogy. Waldorf distinguishes itself with a strong de-emphasis on early reading, instead making the ideal environment for imaginative play for younger children. In the Waldorf preschools and kindergartens, you will not find a single alphabet block. Instead you will find the raw material for imaginative play: play stands, colorful silk scarves, polished stones, pieces of wood, and extremely rudimentary dolls. You will also see lots of handwork and practical arts: knitting, felting, drawing, painting, cooking, and gardening. These are basic exercises for self-regulation.

The NPR story also helps justify Waldorf's strong prohibitions against exposure to media and commercial messages. Waldorf teachers urge parents to limit, and preferably eliminate, all TV, radio, and computer time for young children. School dress codes forbid brand logos, television characters, and all forms of writing. Now we know why: television targeting young audiences is deliberately, consciously trying to co-opt imaginative play for the sake of selling products.

Think of all the modern complaints about the rise in "attention-deficit disorder", and discipline issues in school. Is it any wonder that they can't sit still and pay attention, if we never gave them the chance to practice those abilities?

I find it exciting and promising that the mainstream culture is starting to realize what Waldorf teachers knew all along: children do not need to be little Einsteins. They need to be little children. They need to play.

Waldorf One-Liners

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:59:58 -0700

For marketing and fundraising purposes, the Emerson Waldorf School was looking for some short verbiage about why we send our kids to a Waldorf school. I had already written some lengthier posts about why I don't send my kids to public schools and why we chose Waldorf education. But my deathless prose won't fit in a call-out box on a brochure, so we need something a little tighter. Here are some attempts:

"No other school,Â public or private, has impressed me as much as a Waldorf school for its wisdom. I've seen other schools with tremendous faculty, and talented students, and beautiful facilities, and engaging curricula, but none of them ever manifested such a complete understanding of how to nurture the development of a complete human being."
"We're at Emerson Waldorf because of the teachers. I love my kids' teachers. Let me say that again, because I'm not sure you really got it -- I love my kids' teachers. They are some of the wisest, deepest, kindest, most dedicated and hard-working human beings on the planet. That's who I want teaching my children."
"Sure, I want my kids to be smart and well-educated. And withÂ a broad, classical curriculum, I know they will get that at Emerson Waldorf. But I don't just want that for my kids. I also want them to be really, really good people. I want my son to be a mensch -- a decent, upright, mature, responsible,Â reliable, kind person. And that's the specific, explicitÂ goal of Waldorf education: to make good people, in every sense of the word."Â

Why Waldorf? (Part II)

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 03:09:45 -0700

I was convinced thatÂ we needed to find an alternative education option for our kids. What were our options?

We could home-school. I found that option appealing on a number of levels. I was interested in education and enjoyed teaching. I knew that my kids would never have to be bored, listening to the same lecture on parallelograms they had heard the year before. I knew that my kids would have a teacher who knew his subject matter and actually cared about it, and about them. I didn't have to be that good to be a whole lot better than most public school teachers, so what did I have to lose?
We could go to an ordinary private school. My wife was the product of private schooling, and she had her own reservations about it. She felt perfectly well-prepared academically, but the curriculum was heavily lop-sided to the intellectual, and the culture of exclusive cliques of snobbish rich kids was almost as bad as the movies make it out to be.
We could go to a Waldorf school.Â We had no direct exposure to Waldorf education, until our good friend Kenny Felder spoke glowinglyÂ about it andÂ how happy their kids were at Emerson Waldorf. PhilosophicallyÂ we had taken a lot of child-development wisdom from Joseph Chilton Pearce, whom I had the good fortune to meet with several times through the SKS, and Joe Pearce was a big fan of Waldorf education. So it was definitely worth checking out.

I went on a campus tour of the Emerson Waldorf School a few months before my first son was born. It was a beautiful day, and the wooded campus seemed especially picturesque with the sun filtering through the trees and the ground still damp from recent rain. Just walking to the meeting room, I thought, "What a wonderful place to come to every day." And that effect continued inside, too, in the Eurythmy room where the tour was gathering. What was it, exactly? The wood trim, the big windows, the color of the walls? The place felt extremely . . . comfortable. No, comforting -- something about it actively embraced you. I am not, temperamentally, a touchy-feely kind of guy, but my reaction to this place almost made me believe there was such a thing as an "inner child," because I had a spontaneous longing and sense of regret, something like, "I wish I'd grown up here." And all that before they even started talking.

And the talking only took me further in. They explained some of the nature of Waldorf schools, how every little detail is consciously created to meet the child at their level. I heard several teachers speak, and I was struck by how well they could articulate their philosophy of education. Though I didn't understand it completely, it was clear they had spine, a consistent approach to doing things that felt rigorous and well-defined. And yet they were also totally grounded in their own experience. When Ameli Fairman-Evans, the kindergarten teacher, spoke about the early education program and the skills the children are acquiring there, she said, with heartfelt tenderness, "You know, sharing is really hard." The way she said it convinced me that she herself was there, in the same world the children occupied, and all this pedagogical theory was both the result and the cause of a deep understanding of the child. German has two words for understanding: wissen for intellectual knowing about something, and kennen for personally experiencing something. Clearly these teachers had both.

After the orientation we walked outside again, touring the campus, looking at some of the classrooms and workshops and gardens where the children studied, worked, played. As we walked I spoke with Ingeborg Boesch, one of the teachers. I asked her, "So, you mentioned that stories play a big role in the teaching in the early grades . . . "

"Yes."

"Do all Waldorf teachers use the same stories, or do the teachers choose the stories themselves?"

"Oh, we all choose our own stories."

"So . . . what do you look for, in a story that you might use for teaching?"

"Truth."

I literally stopped dead in my tracks, and Frau Boesch had to turn around to continue talking. "Of course I don't mean literal truth, I mean that certain archetypes are contained --"

"No, no!" I said, holding my hands up, a wondrous grin on my face. "You don't have to explain. I understand completely."

And I did. The fact that someone could say that . . . that there were still teachers in the world who understood Truth, and who knew that their job was to lead students to their own experience of it . . . I was blown away. I think that was the exact moment I knew my kids would go to a Waldorf school.

Of course there were other influencing factors on that tour. For all of the feel-good vibe, the curriculum was both vigorous and broad. Two languages, music, drawing, handwork-- all on top of the reading, math, and science you would expect of any school. Looking at the beautiful objects in the woodshop, I'm sure I wasn't the only parent quietly thinking, "Damn, I couldn't make anything like that." A lot of us grew up thinking that we weren't the kind of person who could build something, or sing, or play music, or grow a plant, or draw . . . and Waldorf clearly believes that no such person exists. Implicit in its broad curriculum is an unspoken empowering message: you can do this. Nor do the teachers confuse nurturing with mollycoddling. One mother, nervously fingering a rasp in the handwork shop, said, "You make them wear gloves when they're using these tools, right?" Mr. Hagerman, the grandfatherly shop teacher, replied, "Of course not. They couldn't feel the wood if they did. We teach them how to use the tools safely, and absolutely no horseplay is allowed in the shop. But they need to learn to respect the tools; that also is part of the lesson."

So what did I think about my options now? Looking back, I laugh at my absolute hubris for thinking that I was the best person to education my children. I probably would have done better than the public schools, but looking at the Waldorf curriculum I realized how vast my ignorance was, how much I would have missed. Nor have I encountered any other school, public or private, that impressed me with its wisdom. I've seen other schools with tremendous faculty, and talented students, and beautiful facilities, and engaging curricula, but none of them ever manifested such a complete understanding of how to nurture the development of a complete human being. Â

Why Waldorf? (Part I)

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 02:32:16 -0700

This past week I joined the steering committee for the Emerson Waldorf School's annual fund. Since testimonials are one of the best ways to sell, I thought I'd share my own Waldorf story, since it has some spiritual significance.

Personally, I did very well in public school . . . if all you're looking at is the report card. I got great grades, stayed out of trouble, and went on to college without a hitch. I would be one of those students the public schools would be proud to claim as their own. The only problem was . . . well, everything else, everything besides the grades. I spent vast amounts of time in the earlier grades being hopelessly bored -- "Oh, jeez, not another geometry unit again? How many times are we going to have exactly the same lesson about parallelograms?" I managed to get along with other kids but never really had friends. I was high-strung, geeky, unsocialized, and generally unhappy, though I was too proud to admit it.

The public schools gave me a number of disappointing teachers along the way, and I have my mother to thank for watching carefully and knocking down anyone and anything that got in my way. One year I had a mentally unstable teacher who routinely lost assignments, accused people of not turning them in, and read passages of the historical novel sheÂ was writing to her third-graders, including scenes of colonial settlers being hung in their own homes by British soldiers. My mom volunteered to be an assistant in the classroom, and managed to shelter us from most of the damage. Another year my teacher only got us halfway through the reading text we were supposed to cover. The school administration shrugged its collective shoulders and planned to just let us repeat the text next year. My mom arranged for me to finish the text in the summertime. Because I stuttered in the earlier years, I had been tracked into the lowest reading level. My mom intervened again and arranged to demonstrate my reading comprehension was actually several grade levels above, and I moved from the lowest reading group to the highest. At that point the school was ready to just promote me a couple grade levels, but my mom (who herself had been unhappy when promoted past her age level) prevented it, knowing I was having a hard time fitting in as it was. When the local teacher's union threatened a nasty strike, my mom organized parents to monitor the picket lines for trouble.

So, by the time I finished school I had an largely negative impression of the public school system.Â Well, actually that's being generous -- I thought they sucked.Â Once I realized that I was smarter than the teachers, that I could read better than they could, and cared more about learning than they did,Â my teacher's-pet eagerness to please turned into silent contempt.Â There were some notable exceptions, though. I had a fantastic experience in a gifted program that took students out of the regular schools once a week and brought us together to do fun stuff -- build rockets, dig for artifacts, study mythology, conduct toga parties in Latin. It was a much-needed dose of oxygen to my intellectual life, a reassurance that school could be wonderful, even if it often wasn't. When we returned to the regular school to get our homework assignments, the teachers were often full of spite, angry that they were not deemed fit to teach the best and brightest, angry at anything that disrupted their educational reign. Later on, I went to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a public boarding school that took students for their last two years of high school. I had the same experience of elation: "oh my God, this is what school is supposed to be like." And I encountered the same spite from the regular school; teachers and guidance counselors told me it was a mistake, that I could get just as good an education at Brevard High.

So, even when public schools were exceptional, they were literally an exception --Â a special program that took me away from the usual schooling. Like most Americans, I believe in the ideal of public education. I don't think we can embrace a social order that promises the American Dream of upward mobility without giving people the educational opportunity to rise to the highest level of their talents. But I also can't argue with my experience that the public education system is broken, and that anything to shake it up is a Good Thing.

When it came time to consider school options for my own kids, I wasn't sure what I would do, but I knew for certain that:

I wanted it to be a better experience than I had.
I wanted it to have a more holistic notion of education, that recognized emotional and social development as well as intellectual skills.

(to be continued . . . )