Clay Burell's Bookmarks tagged education →  View Popular

In trying to rebuild our capability to capture and develop knowledge and wisdom, we have to back away from some of our sacred constructs. Here are four of my own observations:

1. School is not a useful model for learning. But learning to ride a bike or a foreign language is. Schools are only good for teaching people how to be students, and maybe teachers.

2. Books, magazines, and movies are not a sufficiently useful model for capturing wisdom. Would you learn leadership or innovation that way?

3. Professional (or other highly structured) sports are not a useful ideal for play. But pick-up games are. Professional sports are a better model for work.

4. Computer games are not a useful ideal for play, any more than white bread and candy are good models for food.

I will be delving into these in more detail in the weeks to come.

while in fundamentalist America only a deranged few carry out what the many would like to do, among the Taliban the many carry out what the deranged few order them to do.

Of all the values shared by the two groups, for example, the most profound is their loathing for education. Yet here's where the difference between them manifests itself most clearly. The Taliban deal with their hatred in a straightforward, primitive manner: they blow up schools, and murder young girls who attend them. The Republican base is subtler, more complex. They starve the educational system by refusing to pay taxes. They ban books from libraries that might get children thinking. They get on school boards to ensure that children learn only obedience and are never exposed to anything that might engender creativity, imagination or original thought. They pressure textbook publishers not to print facts they don't like. In some parts of the U.S. they've been as successful as the Taliban in fostering ignorance and blind conformity with much less expenditure of energy.

The afterschool world at Cold Spring had hitherto consisted of basketball, karate, dance, and other physical fitness activities. In this context, a sectarian religious group that seeks to recruit the very young stuck out like a barstool in a bunny cage. And so, I confess, I became just a little paranoid. Was a group of parents plotting to turn our public school into a religious school? A rumor that a teacher had volunteered her classroom for the group particularly disturbed me. Was she part of the plot?

I had already discovered that at least some other parents shared my concerns. But the stories I heard back only made things worse. I learned that some kids had exchanged nasty, religious-themed emails, and that others had not been invited to certain birthday parties because they belonged to the “wrong” faith.

Other people drink tea or go jogging; I like to deal with my obsessions through research. In my research, I discovered that Good News Clubs are sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), a worldwide organization founded in Warrenton, Missouri, more than 70 years ago. The declared mission of the CEF is to produce conversion experiences in very young children, and thus to equip them to “witness” for other children. “I was told that a child at five, if properly instructed, can as truly believe as anyone,” said Mr. J. Irvin Overholtzer, who founded CEF in 1937. “I saw that if there was any truth in this statement, there was a door of opportunity lying open before us.” As of 2008, according to CEF Vice President of U.S.A. Ministries Moises Esteves, there were approximately 3,410 Good News Clubs in public K-6 schools around the country.

The CEF labels the Good News Club program as “Bible Study,” but the term “study” in this context is a euphemism for indoctrination in and practice of a particular religion. Once class begins, there is no pretense of analyzing the bible as a literary, cultural, or historical document. The program moves directly to the CEF’s stated purpose, which is “to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, disciple them in the Word of God, and establish them in a Bible-believing church for Christian living.”

Often, instructors arrive on campus before the bell rings. When young children exit their regular classrooms, they find the instructor outside the door bearing treats and trailing balloons. In Valencia, California, a parent of a kindergartener reported that the Good News Club actually started 15 minutes prior to the end of her child’s school day. The instructor, she said, would enter the classroom as kindergarten was winding down and perform a roll call — effectively segregating the children by religious affiliation.

The club’s best promoters, as the CEF well understands, are the children themselves. Participating students are instructed to invite their classmates to join the group, and prizes are often given to those who succeed. The group’s focus, indeed, is concentrated on the “un-churched” children more than it is on those already in the fold. “If every public elementary school student in the United Sates could join a Good News Club,” the CEF Web site states, “we could revolutionize our culture in one generation!”

Schools routinely exclude from their programs entire categories of activity — dancing, martial arts, whatever — for a variety of compelling reasons. In the wake of Milford, however, the one category that cannot be excluded for fear of litigation is religion. In other words, if your school lets in a lacrosse group, it will see itself as practically bound to let in the Good News Club; but if it lets in the club, there is nothing to stop it from excluding lacrosse.

The CEF has been able to achieve this enviable result thanks to the support it receives from a team of aggressive lawyers. CEF is represented by the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a powerful legal arm of the Evangelical movement. The ADF organization is extraordinarily active, interceding in the moral hot-button issues favored by the religious right. In the first three months of 2009, ADF was involved in more than 30 legal actions pertaining to its opposition to same-sex marriage and reproductive freedoms, its support for Christian groups and prayer in the schools, and other causes linked with a right-wing religious agenda.

While doing the work of a mechanic provides intellectual challenges and the intrinsic satisfactions of completing problems from start to finish, Crawford knows that working in the trades is seen as déclassé and too limiting for a college graduate. And then he goes on to show how stupid that viewpoint is.

That being said, forcing treatment on a child who doesn't want it is its own kind of ethical dilemma. "There are some kids for whom it becomes in their mind a vicious assault every time they're treated," says Diekema. "At a certain age and height and weight, it starts to seem inappropriate to hold them down on a regular basis to do what needs to be done." Daniel Hauser has reportedly vowed to punch, kick or scratch anyone who attempts to treat him. Even if medical support staff members are successful at physically restraining Hauser so that they can administer the chemotherapy, the psychological toll may impede his progress. With longer-term treatments—fighting cancer can take years—it's harder to successfully apply aggressive therapies if the patient is unwilling, especially because a certain mental toughness is required.

At 13, Daniel is far from the age where he could be making his own medical decisions, though judges are likely to weigh the value of a child's input on a case-by-case basis, rather than using an arbitrary age cutoff. It's remarkable how quickly terminal cancer can mature a 12-year-old. (Legal adulthood is 18, and certain decision-making authority can be granted at 16, but the line is blurry when it comes to children's medical care.) 

• Tell stories. Venus Flytrap, a character from the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, once taught a student gang member about atoms, electrons, and protons by saying that an atom was one big neighborhood, and the protons and neutrons had their own smaller neighborhoods and never mixed. Just like rival gangs. The story worked, and understanding sparked in the students eyes.

The real causes of the current economic mess



I think one of the reasons we see so many such comments is captured a bit in the first two quotes. Neither Miller nor the President could bring himself to actually blame the schools for today’s economic catastrophe, but they laid on them some of the responsibility for any recovery. There is a long history of trying to link test scores to a nation’s economic health. That notion needs to become extinct



Let’s take a moment to reflect on the causes of the current mess. Banks used very little capital of their own to buy extremely risky real estate assets, granting subprime mortgages and mortgages on overpriced houses, often without even making credit checks. Then they used virtually unfathomable instruments such as credit default swaps to insure against loss. But insurance companies that insured those risks, like AIG didn’t have the capital to pay off the swaps when the banks’ bets went bad. The situation has produced a slight reworking of the opening rhetorical flourishes of that landmark document, "A Nation At Risk:"

We feel compelled to report to the American people that the business and financial foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—companies that extolled themselves as models of excellent practices have deceived the American people with sloppy, undisciplined, and greedy practices that are driving Americans out of their homes, threatening their retirements, and dashing their hopes of a financially secure future. Indeed, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre corporate financial performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

Almost 10 years ago, when the first Soviet Sputnik went into orbit, the schools were blamed for America’s lag in space. Last week, in the Senate, the schools were blamed for the ghetto riots.



In each case, the politicians’ motives were suspect. Their reflex reaction, when faced with a national crisis, is to assign guilt to persons with the least power to hit back. The schools, which are nonpolitical but dependent on political purse strings, fill the bill of emergency whipping boy.

Most of those personal qualities that we hold dear—resilience and courage in the face of stress, a sense of craft in our work, a commitment to justice and caring in our social relationships, a dedication to advancing the public good in communal life—are exceedingly difficult to assess. And so, unfortunately, we are apt to measure what we can, and eventually come to value what is measured over what is left unmeasured. The shift is subtle and occurs gradually.

Across the land, students in science class diligently memorize human cell components like DNA, mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum. They learn to rigidly order the natural world, from kingdom down to species.

And — most disturbingly, say a growing number of scientists — they learn to hate science.

Advocates cite many problems with science education, such as teachers lacking a science background. But perhaps the most critical issue, they say, is standardized testing that forces students to memorize and regurgitate.

“Students don’t need to know what an endoplasmic reticulum is,” said Bruce Alberts, editor of the journal Science and former president of the National Academies of Science, who has called for a “revolution” in science education.

“Bad tests are forcing a trivialization of science education and drive most students away from science. Real science is exciting. It’s completely different from these textbooks.”

Yet change may be afoot in Texas, with some legislators calling for a re-evaluation of the influence of TAKS testing. And some science educators see opportunities to change science class from a dull exercise in memorization to inquiry-based learning.

There’s no shortage of smart people tackling the issue, like Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, who argues that children should be taught physics first in high school in order to grasp the broad outlines of the natural world.

“I’ve been working at it for a long time,” he said. “We’re not doing well. Meaningless testing is a bad thing. If we want scientific literacy, then we want teachers to teach the beauty of science, the fun in it, the humor in it, and to bring examples of modern science into the classroom.”

My own experiences have convinced me that today, the vast majority of students are unable to practice true journalism at their high school papers. For the past six summers, I have directed a program for about 20 high school journalists at Princeton University. All the students are talented writers and thoughtful intellectuals. Yet, by and large, they work for newspapers that are either explicitly censored or restrained by the looming threat of official disapproval -- newspapers that read more like school-sponsored news releases than true journalism. Many have been taught to write fluffy profiles of teachers and to celebrate the achievements of their sports teams; fewer have been encouraged to challenge, to criticize or to investigate. Perhaps the most important part of our program's curriculum is to help students unlearn the instincts they have acquired at their high school newspapers.

No high school principal would dream of telling the basketball team that it could run drills but not play games, or permit the drama club to rehearse but never to stage shows. Yet, thanks in part to Hazelwood, many high schools train their students in journalism without allowing them to truly practice it.

Indeed, it wasn't only student journalists who were hurt by Hazelwood; it also was their readers, particularly students who might have limited exposure to newspapers or magazines at home. By showing them how an investigative story or a lively opinion section can add to their understanding of the school they attend, an ambitious, uncensored student newspaper teaches principles that are essential to a free society: the importance of skepticism, criticism and empiricism; the necessity of checks on authority; the centrality of open debate to democratic culture.

These lessons may be even more necessary today than they were in 1988. In the age of Facebook and MySpace and blogs, when the line between what constitutes journalism and what doesn't has become more confusing than ever, it is especially important for high schools to teach by example the difference between rumor and reporting: to show what journalists can accomplish -- and how important a role they can play in holding leaders accountable -- when they ask hard questions and write responsibly but fearlessly.

Explaining differences in teachers' emphasis: Why do some teachers spend so much more time on evolution than others? Our data weigh heavily against one possible explanation: differences in state standards. We find that nearly 90% of cross-teacher variation is within states (Eta-square from a one-way analysis of variance by state is 0.11) as opposed to between states. As an upper limit, then, state standards cannot account for more than 11% of the variance [21].

However, our data lend support to two potential explanations: teachers' personal beliefs about evolution and the number of college-level science classes.

Teacher qualifications: The No Child Left Behind Act requires that all teachers of core subjects be “highly qualified.” Definitions of “highly qualified” vary by state, but most include demonstrated competence in the teacher's teaching assignment. Our data suggest that high school teachers who completed the largest number of college-level credits in biology and life science classes and whose coursework included at least one class in evolutionary biology devote substantially more class time to evolution than teachers with fewer credit hours (Table S6). The best prepared teachers devote 60% more time to evolution than the least prepared.