A Suggestion for the Schools

In This Issue:

A Suggestion for the Schools

By JOHN WELLS, former teacher of English and history
(October 31, 2000)

When I started teaching, back in 1965, we didn't have many faculty meetings during the course of the year. Individual academic departments met fairly frequently, mainly to discuss students in difficulty or the mechanics of teaching our discipline, but, as a rule, full faculty meetings were called only at the ends of grading periods. And those meetings were usually brief: basically they were an opportunity for departments to share trends in learning they saw developing, or experiments in methodology they were making -- and always, it seemed, concerns about student dress codes, smoking, and destruction of school property. Kids never change.

When I quit teaching in 1995, we were having weekly faculty meetings, generally lasting for more than two hours. More than half the people attending those meetings never stepped foot inside a classroom. And the agenda was different. We were talking about teaching self-esteem, about safe sex, about values, about college admissions requirements, about child abuse, about drugs, and, always, about respect, which is, apparently, not at all the same thing as esteem. Any changes to the curriculum we discussed were invariably for the purpose of addressing one of these issues.

I taught English and history. I never expected to get rich teaching, and I didn't. I went into it because I loved my subjects, and I wanted to show others how much of self-fulfillment and pleasure and understanding they provided. I actually thought the discipline of learning pretty directly addressed matters of self-esteem and sound values and decent habits without having to ring in any special experts in those areas. Increasingly, I found myself in a minority. So I left the profession.

Now, this isn't an article about me. The above was just by way of introduction. I'm not even arguing (though, upon any other occasion, I will) that all these non-teaching functionaries that have been added to school rosters perform no viable function. My point is that these people are a symptom of the real problem undermining the schools today. I think their very presence proves that, frankly, the country really doesn't know what it wants its schools to do, or, rather, that it wants its schools to do everything and, consequently, prevents them from accomplishing much of anything.

Consider the various missions assigned to the schools today.

To provide a sound academic foundation. This goal entails not only the mastery of the basic mechanical skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also the development of a way of thinking that constantly broadens its scope by seeking out new ideas and subjecting them to continuous analysis and interpretation. Reaching this goal requires a steady application of effort, often of a quiet and solitary sort. It demands experimentation and, frequently, results in temporary failure. It is an academic end, or, as the dictionary defines the term, purely impractical in content, at least with regard to meeting all the ordinary, daily demands of life. It is also, I think, the only means to a sense of fulfillment in life.
To provide a means of earning a living. This seems to mean acquiring a skill that others are willing to pay one to perform. It's called vocational training, and the emphasis is upon hands-on practice. Academic studies are important only as they have a significant effect upon the proficiency with which the vocational task is performed. Thought is focused upon the possibilities of applications and developments of that task. Learning from this training should provide one with a good job and a materially comfortable existence.
To provide a nurturing and ennobling experience. This is where the sex, drugs, and rock and roll comes in, and I find myself as unable to treat this goal of education any more seriously than its proponents evidently seem to. The idea is, I think, that, given the choice between pleasure and pain, one will always choose the pleasure, and thus it becomes the task of the school to teach that what is universally regarded as good gives pleasure (and where the pleasure is not thereby instantaneous, it is to be made to seem so) and the bad, pain (though the pain, even where presumably instructional, must never be actually experienced by innocent and vulnerable children). It all comes down to lots of videos and graphic little pamphlets and high grades for minimal commitment under the spurious notion that the truth as taught in school will never be effectively counteracted by the contradictory truths they hear during the eighteen hours of the day that they are out of school. And, of course, as a mission, it rather prohibits the effort necessary to master either academic or vocational skills.

I generalize and I oversimplify, I know. But these do seem to be the three loudest demands made upon the schools today. And, to a certain extent, they are mutually exclusive. Attempting to serve all three simultaneously has to result in three-fold failure. We don't learn to read because we're likely to make money out of it, and any protracted effort has to know its frustrations and disappointments. We're not all happy all of the time.

Somebody has to do some thinking about the schools. (And I don't believe we can expect it from our government: the proposals for education reform offered by the current crop of candidates don't even address the task the schools are expected to perform. They talk about more money for a system without a clear mandate, vouchers to increase accountability for undefined responsibilities, and national testing to measure contradictory ends. You're not hearing any universal panacea here.)

It's a problem for the local communities to decide. It has to be an active, on-going effort. Communities must define specifically and realistically what they want their schools to do, and then make certain that the curriculum consistently and directly builds to that end.

I'd say that would be a sensible first step, anyway.